Behind the Scenes
The Blue Yourself history video has been a really fun, unexpected adventure, to say the least. The idea of the video wasn’t conceived by me. It was first brought up by Milky on March 18, 2021. Milky posted some screenshots of first couple paragraphs of the script. Unfortunately, that was all we ever saw from Milky in regards to the script. The WR at the time was 35.983 by me, and the hype around the first-ever 35s run was still present. I remember seeing those screenshots and thinking to myself, “Wow, people are wanting to document this.”. It was at that time I knew that the record I set was really, really good. The idea of a history video never left my mind since then. I think it’s safe to say that every speedrunners dream is to have a SummoningSalt video made about them. Or, at the very least, be included in some way or another. That dream wasn’t any different than mine. Part of that dream is what keeps me motivated to speedrun, even when times are tough.
Spring of 2021 I was unexpectedly laid off from my full time job. However, the severance package was decent enough to basically let me have the entire summer off. Which, I did. I visited family and friends, and really just ‘took a break’ from work life. It was nice while it lasted. During any downtime I had, I started to pick up the Blue Yourself category again. This is when I started to experiment with glider strats, which then lead to god glider strats. There were times were I honestly didn’t think it was possible. It felt like the 1st place CPU wasn’t far enough ahead for the blue shell to spawn (2,000 units). If I had to guess, I would say that majority of the time the CPU was at around 1,700-1,800 units away OR somehow boosted extremely far ahead. It’s not that I wouldn’t get the blue shell, it’s that I wouldn’t get any of the power items that spawned at 30 seconds. Golden mushrooms, bloopers, etc. I spent countless hours doing these attempts. These attempts could take up to a solid minute to do each. It’s too bad I couldn’t just restart the race when pressing start. Instead I had to quit the race, select a character, track, etc. It was annoying, but oddly enough I kept going. I would listen to playlists of the music that SummoningSalt uses. One that particularly stuck with me is Wavetable by Patricia Taxxon. It quickly became one of my favourites. Reminded me a lot of the people who would “pioneer” new strategies in speedruns when highlighted by SummoningSalt. I listened to this song for hours upon hours on end, all while doing blue yourself. I would keep imagining in my head of what would happen if I got the 34 second run. Soon enough, I no longer had to imagine. It actually happened.
I legitimately cannot describe the feeling of getting the 34 second run. Everything lined up perfectly. I honestly didn’t believe it at first. I’m usually really good with starting and stopping my splits. I was convinced that I stopped the splits too early or started them too late. But, when I officially retimed it, I was blown away. As stupid as this category is, it’s probably my greatest Mario Kart achievement, next to Mushroom Cup, 200cc, items. I was low-key hoping that someone, or even Milky, would be drawn again to continue the history video about it. There was silence. I didn’t mention anything about it myself because that would have been a little selfish. At the same time, I didn’t want to wait. So, I took the matters into my own hands. I sent a message to our Discord channel and asked if anyone wanted to help me create a history video to please DM me. Two people did, Akhos and SimLola. We created a Discord group on October 1st, 2021 to plan this video out.
All three of us were really excited to do this. We went through so many Discord messages, previous PBs and WRs, and just collected as much data as we could. SimLola had already started working out on a script and grabbed several screenshots to preserve any sort of data. Akhos was able to find full vods of videos which really helped too. During all this, I was trying to picture how I wanted to make the video. It would have been incredibly easy to use the same music as SummoningSalt. As much as I wanted to, I also didn’t want to. I didn’t want this seen to be a clone. I’ve watched a lot of Wirtual videos too, and even he has a ‘signature’ song that plays. I wanted to find one for myself, too. I really like synthwave-type music. I also love listening to video game remixes. So, I searched for synthwave Nintendo songs. Sure enough, someone out there was making them. That’s when I found Neon X Music. I listened to a few of his songs, and wow, I was blown away. I listened to every single song on his channel. The one that really popped out to me was the Super Mario Bros. Star Theme. I immediately pictured that as the ‘signature’ song. The one that be played during the 34 second blue yourself run. I reached out to Neon X and we emailed back and forth. He was gracious enough to let me use as many of his songs as I wanted to. He even made an extended remix of the Super Mario Bros. Star Theme song that I ended up using in the video. Neon X, if you’re ready this, thanks again. I’ve seen so many comments about the amazing music and I couldn’t agree more with those people!
I’ve done a lot of video editing in the past and used to make Call of Duty no-scope montages when I was in high school. I’ve made a few for SKL Esports, too. The hardest part is trying to visualize how you want the video to be. I found that if you have the right music, you can make the visuals of the video based off the music. When I found Neon X’s music, I immediately knew how I wanted to create the video. I already couldn’t wait to share this with our community. By October 23, 2021 I had completed a rough draft of the script and had some suggestions added in thanks to Akhos and SimLola. I passed the script off to one of my good in-real-life friends BigBootyBode (in case anyone in the Mario Kart community was wondering) for him to edit. He’s an English teacher was able to fix my awful grammar. I got the script back on Dec 5th, 2021 and needless to say, the script became 1,000% better. It was such a huge difference. I can’t thank him enough for this.
At this point I had the completed script and the music I wanted to use. It was just a matter of piecing everything together. The only problem is that the script was about 5,700 words (13 pages single-spaced). Trying to just “piece” everything together was a bit overwhelming. What I did to combat this was to just split up the script into several mini sections. I ended up splitting up the script into 62 different sections. Each section needed certain things in order to be “completed”. These things were: a voiceover, video or some sort of visual media, and some music. This made it easy to say “Sections 1 through 8 are complete and I can start putting these together in my video editing software”. I like to be organized and this helped a lot. I shared these 62 sections with Akhos and SimLola and they were able to help me retrieve some media that I needed (whether it was a video, screenshots, etc.). At first I wanted to make sure I had all the sections completed before editing the video, but found myself just doing the video bit by bit as I completed each section. Section 6 done? Video edit section 6. It actually worked pretty well. It was also my first time editing my voice. I recorded my voice and then applied some enhancement filters to get rid of the background noise and make things sound more clear. Had to look up some videos on YouTube on how to do this and overall I’m pretty happy with how things turned out. Looking back at the video now, I wish I could redo some of the voiceovers because some of them sound inconsistent from other parts of the video. Lessoned learned for next time I suppose.
Once I got a good portion of the sections done, I started to finally edit the video. By Dec. 19th, 2021 I had the first two minutes of the video completed. I cannot explain how excited I was editing this video. I wanted to share with the community so badly but I knew it’d be best to wait until I had it all finished. I did, however, share it with Akhos and SimLola just to get an outside look on how it was. Literally the first thing that Akhos said was “So first of all, your voice is sexy”. Which honestly took me back a little bit. I was super nervous about my voice and how I edited the clarity of it. SimLola also enjoyed the first two minutes as well. So I knew I was on the right track. By Dec. 21st, 2021, I had the first eight minutes of the video completed. Once again, couldn’t contain my excitement and shared it with Akhos and SimLola and they both said it was coming along really nicely. From then onwards, I didn’t share the video again until it was completed. I felt pretty bad though. SimLola had remixed a song for me to use in the video. It was a nice remix and I listened to it on repeat for a while. But I felt like it didn’t fit the overall theme of the video and unfortunately had to say no. I felt awful.
By Jan 1st, 2022, I had hit the 15 minutes mark in the video and had guesstimated it would end up being around 45 minutes long (ended up being 41 minutes, so not a bad guess). I also mentioned in our chat that I can average 2-4 minutes of the video in a day if I worked at a steady pace. I guess I would have had the video done within a couple weeks (~approx. Jan 15). Honestly, I was addicted to editing this video. By the end Jan 2nd (a day later) I had hit the 30 minutes mark in the video. And by Jan 3rd, it was complete. 41 minutes long. Never had I made a video this long. I was so proud of it. The next day I shared the entire video with Akhos and SimLola. They loved it. They provided some feedback as well which I quickly implemented in. On Jan. 6th, I had a “private viewing” with my in-real-life friends. Most of them don’t play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe so it was a good way to get an outside perspective. They also all loved it. They said it never felt like 41 minutes long because they were so invested into it. I was so happy. I made some final touches and did my last render. I think I ended up making about six renders of the video due to corrections, feedback, etc. I made the thumbnail on Jan. 11th and planned the release day of January 19, 2022. I uploaded the video on Jan 17th and made a countdown for 34 hours. It finally went live on Jan 19. Little did I know I was in for an incredible surprise.
The community loved it. Seeing people say that they enjoyed the video was the best thing I could have asked for. It’s so gratifying. It was pretty clear that I should make more of these kinds of videos. It made me happy making others happy. By Feb 6th, the video reached 10,000 views and blown every expectation I ever had. There were so many comments saying how people enjoyed it. There was also lots of feedback too which I’ve noted for my next video. One of the most common type of comments I see is how I referred to myself in 3rd person. Earlier when I talked about how every speedrunner has a dream of having a video made about them by SummoningSalt, my dream was no different. I just thought it would be satisfying to hear the name “Skilloz”, instead of me or I. I also wanted to have a neutral approach in the video. The moment I would have put in ‘me’ or ‘I’, it would have made it seem it was me vs. everyone else. That wasn’t the case. We all wanted to work together and achieve the best possible time. Plus before this video, I never had a large following. No one really knew who Skilloz was before all this. I wanted viewers to have an “oh my god” moment when they realize that I was the one who made the video. And I achieved that. The most common type of comment was this. It made me have a few good chuckles. It sort of unintentionally developed into this meme where Skilloz was an unknown person.
By Feb 7th (the next day), the video tripled in views, reaching 30,000. Looking at the analytics of the video, it was a straight up exponential curve directly upwards. It didn’t show any indication of stopping. Feb 8th was a day to remember. It was when I hit 1,000 subscribers on YouTube. I’ve never had a following like this ever. I used to make RuneScape videos on a different YouTube channel and reached around 800-900 subscribers back in 2012-ish. The video was at 50,000 views and showed no signs of stopping. I’ve hit the YouTube algorithm. By Feb 9th, I was hitting 5,000 views per hour. It was surreal to watch. More and more comments came in and I’ve read each and every single one. Then I got lucky. Again. Nintendo had their Nintendo Direct on Feb 9th and made an announcement that would liven up the Mario Kart community once again. 48 new tracks. This made people search for Mario Kart on YouTube, and because my video had just hit the YouTube algorithm, things started exploding. The end of Feb 9th, my video doubled again in views reaching 100,000 views total. By Feb 11th, it tripled in views yet again reaching 300,000 views. Feb 12th, 400,000 views. And before I knew it, it had reached half a million views oy Feb 13th, 2022. This was my highest viewed video on YouTube of all time (across all my other YouTube channels). This exceeded any expectation I ever had. The amount of comments and feedback was astounding. I’ve read (and still continue to read) every single comment. It brings a smile to my face when people say they enjoyed my video.
By this point, a lot of people had watched the video, including people I know of in real life. I had several Snapchats sent to me saying they randomly came across my video. That or my friends said that their friends randomly watched it too. It seemed way too surreal. Views kept going up and up and up. And then it happened. One million views. Feb 19th, 2022. I refreshed the video once or twice just to make sure that view count wasn’t broken, but it wasn’t. It actually happened. Not too long after, I remember watching a Twitch stream of a high-following streamer, Atrioc. He had an awesome time watching the video and made me incredibly satisfied. Everyone started @ing me in chat and he noticed I was watching. He called me out and said “You need to interview this Skilloz guy! You and him need to get together in the same room and talk to each other!”. It was hilarious. By the end of February, things started to level out and the algorithm had done its work. Over 1.5 millions views, and over 10,000 subscribers, it made me quickly realize that there was an audience for this. World record history videos for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
– Skilloz