About The Silverknight Legacy

The goal of this blog and YouTube channel is to tell engaging and coherent Star Wars stories by presenting, as theatrically and cinematically as possible, the eight class narratives from SWTOR’s original release.

This means each main character has a complete and intentional persona from the start, one which remains consistent from scene to scene while still evolving naturally over the course of the story, considering the context of the character’s background, personality, and experience.  Dialogue options are selected with care and purpose.

SWTOR’s dialogue interface occasionally leads to scenes where the actual lines spoken by main characters only vaguely relate to the text chosen by the player from the selection wheel.  As jarring as that experience can be to a player, it is especially jarring to a viewer.  In order to tell a compelling and cohesive Star Wars story, dialogue options for each character in the Silverknight Legacy are deliberately chosen based on the actual, spoken lines.  This allows for the character to be consistent, while also opening up more interesting conversations in-game.  For example, the Silverknight Legacy’s Dark Side characters don’t always make Dark Side choices, nor do they always choose the “dark/evil/mean” dialogue choice.  The goal is to make the characters believable, relatable, interesting, and completely distinct not only from each other, but from similar presentations on YouTube from the content creators who inspired the Silverknight Legacy’s creation.

Theatrical presentation also means adding transitions between scenes and locales, editing with an eye toward pacing and narrative structure, augmenting or altering the orchestral soundtrack where needed. All in-game interface elements are off during filming, and fight scenes are included with the absolute fewest interface elements the game permits (“targeting reticle” and “target’s name” cannot be disabled it seems).  No more instantaneous transitions from “let’s fight” conversations to “the main character wins” conversations, but also no fight scenes with distracting and distinctly non-theatrical interface flashing and numbers scrolling. In-game subtitles are off, excepting the non-English lines spoken in Star Warsy languages (although YouTube’s CC is available on each video for viewing by the deaf and hard of hearing, or simply without sound as a preference).

Theatrical presentation also means careful consideration given to the costumes of the main character and all companions.  Characters don’t sleep in full battle armor, nor do they wear the same gear on the frozen wastes of Hoth they wore on the blazing sands of Tatooine.

Finally, each video includes asides at the end to display the exact gear worn by characters in the video, as well as the in-game narrative emails sent to characters at the conclusion of various quest lines.

Backstory

This project initially started 3 years ago with a much narrower scope.  The intent was only to record class stories so I could remember them and revisit them anytime I chose.  I play many characters and was losing track of their choices and personalities.  The head-canon was too vast to stay in my head.  But I had never recorded game video before, and didn’t know how.  I had minuscule experience with YouTube as a viewer, and none as a content creator.    I had no concept of video or audio editing, or of running a blog.  I have no background or education in anything creative.

But I knew I wanted to keep the stories for myself forever – I didn’t want them fading away into misty memories five, ten, twenty years down the line.  In a bizarre way, these video game characters are important to me, and their slow evaporation across time was something I felt the need to prevent. So I taught myself everything from scratch, just in my spare time and with nothing more than Google and YouTube tutorials.

The more I learned how to do this, and the more I watched what other content creators had done long before me, the more mission creep I suffered.  It wasn’t enough to just record the video of my game play, especially not when I would choose a dialogue option, watch the result, and think to myself “that’s not what my character would do/say in this scene! I need to rerecord that!” Not so easy in a game where you can’t go back to a previous save. Suddenly, I was spending most of my time in prep-work prior to “filming.” Editing also got progressively more demanding. At first it was enough just to string the recordings together, but then I felt like I needed to edit out certain bits, and then I felt like I needed to add fade transitions. And then “this,” and then “that.” Every time I learned a new skill, I felt compelled to integrate it fully into videos I’d already made, so it was back to the drawing board again. And as soon as that was done, I’d learn something new. At this point, I have over a hundred hours of videos that no one will ever see, because they’re terrible and not worth watching.

I mention all this for one main reason, and one minor reason.  The minor reason is pride at finally sharing my efforts with people, and wanting to say, in short, “behold what I have wrought!”  But the main reason I share this is because I want people to know that literally ANYONE can do this.  If you’ve been thinking about recording your gameplay for upload to YouTube, but you are daunted by the chasm of knowledge and experience separating you from your goal, just Google the most basic question you have about how to do what you want, and start there.  I didn’t know ANYTHING about this when I started other than “I want to make cool Star Wars videos,” and after a few years of patiently working on it in my spare time, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished.  If I can do it, you can too.

Tools

I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud that I obtained exclusively for this project, which gives me access to:

– Photoshop, for creating static graphics;
– After Effects, for creating animated graphics;
– Premiere Pro, for editing video and sound;
– Media Encoder, for rendering the final videos.

There are other apps one might use, but these have served me well so far.

How-to’s and tutorials for using these products are all over YouTube, and I’ve included a page with links to the YouTubers who helped me the most.  There is such variety of so-called “tuts” that you can find an explanation for anything you need to know, presented in a way you learn best.  Some tuts are top-down instructional, giving you a broad sense of how to tackle a given problem before going into details.  Others are bottom-up, going step-by-step in the weeds and gradually progressing to a total solution.  Some tuts go super slow for the most basic beginners, and others are fast-paced and informative for people at intermediate levels.  Some tuts are 2-minute videos for quick answers to common questions, and others are hours-long masterclasses.  And all free.  A PC and a subscription to Adobe CC aren’t free, but the vast knowledge of the internet is.  My PC isn’t even that great:

The newest piece of hardware was purchased in 2014 (the GPU), and the oldest is the CPU/MOBO/Memory from 2011. Even on this basic and, in hardware terms, *ancient* setup, I can record 1.0 SWTOR game footage at 60fps without (much) video lag. Bioware improved the graphics in each successive expansion, and I can’t record at 60fps in any of that content. And, it’s true, rendering things from After Effects or Premiere Pro *does* take literally all night. Like, I hit the “start” button when I go to bed, and things are about done when I wake up the next morning. It’s not an ideal setup, but the point here is that it doesn’t take much to get started. If you have been thinking about doing something like this, I encourage you to go for it. SWTOR isn’t a perfect game, but it’s unrivaled for telling Star Wars stories, and the nature of the dialogue system allows for a nearly infinite variety of characters. Your stories are unique, and if you want to share them, you can.

– Silverknight