The final episode of the Smole! Thank you to all that have been watching and see you next season!
I thought I would also post my reflections having created an entire season solely on video. The Smole Season 58 is supposed to be a movie, split up into 6 episodes on Youtube. (@thesmole). Although I had some prior experience making trailer videos, this was another ball game altogether.
In honesty, I felt that this season is really poor in quality. Everything is bad, ranging from the writing to the pacing to the acting. Life also got in the way, causing this to take 7 whole months to complete! I had to do essentially everything myself too. Let me outline my thoughts in further detail
1. Writing and Pacing
Firstly, the videos I was used to making were 2-3 minutes max. This season, each episode is at least 10 minutes long. I had no experience making long-form videos, which would be quite evident. Because of poor planning and experience, I had a struggle thinking of how to add content to each episode, especially since the typical "mission-execution" format of previous seasons would not work as well. Even more so when it's not just a translation of a typical Smole season to Youtube - it's a whole "movie", with "actors" and a supposedly coherent narrative. I also only had the free version of VSDC and am not too familiar with all its features, so the editing was very basic (you might see a lot of fades). I also forgot to add relevant pauses for emphasis or setting the mood at times, thinking that each scene should have dialogue.
2. Acting
It's the Sims, so it's not that easy to make Sims do what you want them to do as you would in real life. I had to rely on pre-existing poses and animations (which were much rarer) to figure out what I could do for the scene, and sometimes they were not that fluid. It also did not help that EA themselves left many bugs unfixed, resulting in the men smiling whenever they walked, even when it was not appropriate. Because it was a video, I had to set up every actor at the same time to make sure the rest that were on camera weren't idling around while other actors were "acting". Of course, that didn't always work out.
In addition, this season needed voices too. Simlish wasn't going to cut it. I could have had them speak Simlish the whole time and then add captions, but that would affect the viewing experience a lot. So I spent a lot of time sourcing for free realistic AI voices. Most text-to-speech readers sounded very robotic. Those that didn't were paid. Thankfully I managed to find a few, such as Bark Suno, Tortoise-TTS and Serp-AI. But the latter of which could not even be set up on my computer, so I had to give that up. And the first two had their own issues: Bark Suno was based on generative AI, which meant that the dialogue you provided would be guides rather than something they had to strictly read out, so often times the AI would go off-tangent and say random stuff. It took a lot of effort to try and get them to say the right stuff, especially for Tiago's voice as I made use of the Portuguese version to speak English, so he would often lapse into Portuguese. Tortoise-TTS was the best overall, but you were limited in the voices you had (and they all sounded quite British). Not only that, but sometimes the AI would stop reading your script halfway and skip some parts. Both of them also faced problems with emotion, resulting in dialogue that oftentimes did not fit the setting. There were also issues with differing volumes, which were not fixed even when normalising the audio in VSDC. Worst of all, sometimes the voices would change entirely despite being the same speaker! I could have spent more effort running and re-running and re-running and re-running until I got the perfect lines but I didn't have the luxury of time. This already took 7 months, and I was ready for this project to be wrapped up.
On the bright side, at least we now know that AI can't replace human voice actors in the near future!
3. Others
I thought of using the Youtube Audio Library this season to add music. There were issues with that too. Firstly, it wasn't easy finding the right music. Secondly and more importantly, editing the music was a horrible process on Youtube. You could not adjust different parts of the audio clips to have different volumes, or split them up. You couldn't even have more than one of the same clip at the same time! I was disappointed when I realised that, but I decided to just push through anyway and add music once the videos were uploaded to Youtube. I also could not find short audio clips which existed on the library when trying to edit the videos to add audio. I learned now to add the music in the source files themselves than to do it via Youtube, and that was what I did in the final episode - which also made me realise I could have added music to certain scenes to drag it out or make a point.
Storage was also an issue. Each episode comprised over a 100 clips. My computer did not have enough storage space. I had a previous subscription with a lot more storage that I temporarily added the clips to, but then it expired at the end of March, so now I had a hard deadline to work with. I could only import limited clips at a time, mainly only the relevant ones for the episode, before deleting those raw files and downloading the next batch from storage. Not a big issue, but it was tedious.
Overall, I realised how much effort goes into making a movie or even a video, and I respect those who do this even more. I don't think I'll be making a long-form video again, but it was a new experience. I hope that despite all the problems, you still enjoy it overall, but I also understand if you don't. But don't let this season ruin your impression of the Smole! There are always some seasons that are great (and some that are not-so-great).
