If you watched the Alliance Tournament over the weekend you probably noticed something new - each of the 32 teams had an introductory video that gave a brief glimpse into the team, the captain and co-captain, flagship, and background of the team. Those videos were created by yours truly over the past month or so. And the video above gives a little peek behind the scenes at some early designs and one of the early videos I created as I tried to nail down the look and feel for these.
What I didn't mention in the video and needs to be said is the help I got rounding up all the information about each team and writing the summaries at the end of each video. So special shout-out to Mystical Might, Wren, Colonel Kurtz, Phantomite, and Kevin Grumman for helping pull those together. I ended up desperately seeking feedback from 3-4 teams as the deadline approached and turned to social media and in-game emails to try and get their information. Sadly a couple of teams missed the deadline and a few summaries suffered a bit from that delay. Sincere apologies for any errors or mistakes, but when you are generating so many videos under pressure the gremlins do tend to pop up. Despite my best efforts I did make one glaring mistake with the Paper Numbers video, which I corrected, but I'm not sure the corrected version made it to air.
Another oops happened at the last minute with the Barcode team and I also wanted to mention that. I got Barcode confused with another team and made a mistake with their summary as well. Sincere apologies there.
But overall the feedback has been extremely positive and I hope I get the chance to do these again next year. I learned a lot making these and those lessons would be welcome if I get to do these again. For example I wouldn't use music behind these, I had no idea they would be shown back-to-back like that (which makes sense) so I think a more sound-effect background would be more appropriate. They could also be designed to better work back-to-back and not be as jarring.
As someone much wiser than me once said, anything done for the first time unleashes a demon. And that is certainly true. But I think these added a lot to the experience of the AT and I hope viewers agree. The broadcast just keeps getting better and better every year and learning more about each team, the players involved, and what they actually do in-game is valuable.
Thanks to CCP for asking me to do these and I hope you enjoyed them.