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GeekNights Thursday - Profiles in Geek: Uncle Yo
Tonight on GeekNights, reviving our ancient Profiles in Geek format, we have Karl Custer, aka Uncle Yo (@UncleYo), to talk about himself, his geekery, puppets, and Dungeon Crawlers! He's up to some good stuff!
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Additionally, Tora-Con has consistently gotten worse. Apparently it's getting better, but I gave up on it. Its demographic skewed High School.
I was lazy, so I didn't set up any sound barriers in the studio for the three of us. Usually, that's fine: our guests are not nearly as loud as we are, all of the mics are directional, mine and Scott's are super/hyper cardiod. Plenty of gating and companding and other effects to handle everything.
Karl is loud. Karl is as loud as we are. He also happened to be sitting in my microphone's deadest zone, but with his mic facing a wall that would catch my voice in reflection from an opposite wall.
The mics were arranged to avoid any comb filtering, but that reflection was killer. I didn't notice it at-record time mostly due to the fact that it was only present when I was speaking, and my own voice overpowered it in the monitors.
In post, there was a wicked phase/reverb effect between my reflection in Karl's mic and my voice in my own mic. If his mic had been moved forward or back a few inches, it wouldn't have been nearly as bad. Perfect storm.
I killed it with a combination of :
1. Shifting Karl's mic phase to minimize my voice there
2. Heavy gating.
The gating could have been a lot better, but it was late, and I was tired. I sort of hacked it together, but if I'd spent some time on it, I could have made a highly tuned gate/expander to handle it smoothly.
You'll hear a few times where the gate fails and there's suddenly reverb for a little bit.
For a few egregious areas, I brushed it out manually.
You should totally throw your hat into the YouTube fray for tabletop games. Episode 1 would be Hansa Teutonica. Good games with bad rulebooks. The market for slickly produced tabletop YouTube content of moderate depth is... wanting.
It would take an entire weekend to produce one video of one game. As in, spending all day both Saturday and Sunday. The sheer number of lights, cameras, reconfigurations, and the like that would be required, nevermind editing, is an extreme challenge, especially without access to a large studio.
Video games we can do pretty easily. But tabletop? Even if we spent the money to own the equipment necessary, and we payed for studio time, we'd have to cut back substantially on GeekNights to make it happen. It would be a considerable expense both in time and in money.
Lighting board games without a full studio is hard
When talking in this episode about bubbles of fandom, it really brought me back to thinking about how unknown Rym & Scott are among the general audience of tabletop fandom. I regularly cite them as some of the most talented people at tearing apart a game and giving honest, intelligent opinions. The answer I always get back is "who?"
Tabletop media is fractured at best, and as I like to call it, a giant fucking mess. By my count, there are 4 people who currently make a living off of tabletop media, and all of them do it with a heavy reliance on video content. They also trade on their reputation, and charge up to a thousand dollars to film short playthrough videos of games seeking crowdfunding, which is wear the real money lies for them.
Edit: Such a use of weapons...