Heyo. I was just hopin to get some feedback on my commentary and voice. I personally think I sound dreadful, but then again, nobody likes the sound of their own voice. So I was just wondering if I’m actually entertaining or remotely bearable to listen to from someone else’s point of view. I’m ok with brutal honesty.
Thanks!
I’ll fill this in more when I finish watching, but my first bit of advice is to seriously cut down on that intro. It runs for 30 seconds which is way too long for just stating whose channel I’m watching. I’d even argue that you might wanna consider cutting it entirely because it doesn’t serve much of a purpose besides delaying the actual content. Also if you’re gonna use borders, please don’t use ones with bright colors. Use ones with darker colors so they don’t distract from the video itself. (or get rid of them entirely, there’s nothing wrong with having black bars for a 4:3 video.)
Take what I say with a grain of salt, because there some stuff I honestly think needs work on.
So the first thing you open with is an explanation about some technical failure. If you’re having a recording problem or some technical issue, just leave it out of the commentary. Hardly anyone is interested in hearing about that. Remember this is you presenting a playthrough of RE2 not you presenting what was going on before this video.
I didn’t find the furnace bit funny it would have been fine if you cut that bit of commentary out and just did a quick cut or transition then saying something, “Sorry for the jump cut, my furnace came on.”
It takes almost 3 minutes after gameplay starts for you to actually say something interesting.That being when you talked about conserving ammo by not using it in the beginning. Everything else before that was mostly narrating what you’re doing like “Time to run past these zombie…okay.”, “Shoot him three times and he falls down. yup.” and parroting the shop owner’s lines.
It seems you’re struggling to talk about the game itself, because between the times you actually say something about the game and what you find interesting about it you have like bunch of uninteresting bits like mentioning you have a cold. I mean, that sucks my dude but are you gonna talk about the game? It’s not that I hate LPers shooting the shit, but like, it needs to be worthwhile to listen to otherwise why should I or anyone else listen to this at all.
Almost everything past the 10 minute mark is fine except when you picked up a file and read it out loud. Please, don’t read the text to us. I get that some folks might be listening and not watching the video. I get that some folks like to be read to for some reason. I get that’s what most popular people do, but I’m begging you don’t read. It burns a fair amount of the episode’s runtime, and for a lot of potential viewers, their patience. Instead take screenshots of the files and include them when you post your update. That way if someone wants to they can read them on their own time.
Finally, your voice is fine. Outside of the whole cold thing, as long as you’re not literally eating your mic while you speak it’ll be fine.
I would also recommend you check out some other people’s work, outside of youtube’s normal gaming environment, to maybe get some inspiration for what you can really do with LP. Someone like Supergreatfriend, who is really good at blind commentary.
fair point. i’ve been thinking about cutting the intro for a while now.
hey man. i super appreciate all the detailed feedback. now that you mention it, it all seems kind of obvious. i think this is really great advice, so thank you.
I agree with most of Combat_Lobster’s comment, but I want to add that I’m on the fence about reading on-screen text as an accessibility feature. Long silent gaps for reading text aren’t going to be interesting to blind viewers (if you can pardon the oxymoron), so I don’t tend to mind people reading the text as much as many others do.
I think you’d be better off doing videos of games you’re thoroughly familiar with and want to record for a strong reason, rather than games you don’t know much about, at least as a start. Once you find your commentary groove, it’ll be easier to apply that to less familiar games, if you want to progress in that way.