Ever since Mario Wonder released, my buddy MattLong6 had been trying to find a way to play and record a 4-person co-op session where they all try and beat the game while having tons of fun.
This video idea finally came to fruition once the schedules for his friends opened up around Thanksgiving last year. Super grateful to everyone for coming around and making this video a possibility.
The tone
Mario has always been a cozy couch game that’s been played by almost everyone on this planet, often times in co-op mode. The tone we set for this video was a nostalgic one. We wanted to re-live what it was like to sit together on one couch as children, and play Mario together.
Pre-planning
This was to be a larger-than-usual project for us, we decided it would be best to spend a lot more time in the pre-planning phase just so we’re more confident in post. We started talking different ideal scenarios for capturing the whole thing.
Cam 1 at X, cam 2 at Y, mic 1 on A, mic 2 on B, trashed. Start over again.
Cam 1 at Y, cam 2 at X, mic 2 on A, trashed. Start over again.
After a little back and forth, we sketched out the perfect setup for this video that fulfilled our creative vision.
Multi-cam setup
In order to capture all our emotions, we decided to induce 2 separate camera angles in the video. This meant I had to set up a multi-cam workflow inside Premiere Pro. In addition to the camera tracks, we also had around 3 audio tracks that needed to be kept in sync across the whole video.
This project was humbling because I had never worked with this many multi-cam sequences at the same time before, so I obviously had some mechanics to catch up to speed with.
AI enlarge image
When I was initially coming up with angles for the video, I found out that one of the camera angles was a little too high, and repositioning it downwards would reveal black gaps at the top. This was easily fixed with a little Photoshop AI magic.
Thumbnail design
Since this video is part of a series, we had to incorporate the serial number. In order to show what the video is about, a fun couch-gaming experience, we took a peak moment from the video with text to compliment.