I finally finished this episode after 3 months of working on it (not a solid 3 months)
Some people have asked why it takes so long, and what my process is, so I thought I'd do a quick list of the steps I go through for each video. If I had a proper high definition capture card and other high end gear it would take a lot less time and effort, but unfortunately I don't. So here goes;

- First I need to think of an actual idea. These ideas seem to come pretty randomly, usually whilst driving.
- Decide on the number of characters
- Write out a script
- Create characters on Halo 3
- Use the characters to act out the story in the game, which for this episode took around 15 hours (this can be incredibly tedious when your repeating the same car chase the 14th time in a row, to get the timing just right)
- Then on the TV, playback the action I just made the characters do, using various camera angles and panning techniques
- Use my camera to film the TV, capturing the action
- Then transfer the video to the PC
- Then chop down the 10's of Gigabytes of data into more useable chunks, using a video editing program (8 hours at least)
- Then begin to record the voices (I did all the voices in this episode apart from the purple alien and brown sniper guy)
- Recording these voices is surprisingly difficult and time consuming! (8 hours)
- Now comes the task of matching up the video with the audio
- Then comes one the more enjoyable tasks of adding various video effects/filters to change the feel of a piece of video
- Then I add the sound effects (because I don't have a capture card I have to manually add all of these, even every foot step!)
- Then I add the background music, clipping out the relevant parts of a piece of music and fading it in and out
- I then adjust all the volumes of the various parts of the episode, making sure for example the background music doesn't distort one of the characters voices as a result of been too loud
- I then add the titles and credits and do final little tweaks and polish to the video
- Finally I render the video with the relevant codec (MP4) and the relevant resolution and data rate

Now that was still only scratching the surface of the process of making one of these videos and it also fails to acknowledge all the mistakes you will make along the way (deleting footage, corrupting files, loosing synchronisation etc). So when you combine this with the fact that I'm in full time medical education, I hope it's a little clearer why there is such big gaps between each episode! Hopefully that was of some use to those who wanted to know a little more behind the scenes kind of stuff, and also to those who want to make their own videos of this type. Thanks.

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