I was out shopping for some baby formula on Tuesday when I got an email from JoshB of CDX. He was pretty surprised I had gotten Godsigma so quick and asked if I would like to do the review while the figure is still fresh as no one was getting one in the near future. Of course I said yes. First, I'm always down to review a robot, second, Josh is a real great guy in and out of CDX and I am always willing to help him out in any way I can. This is right after I had already done a quick review, a 2 part review on my channel AND a quick blog review of the figure.
OK, so that very night I spent HOURS, straight into the morning until 6am, then sleeping til 11am and continuing until about midnight when I posted it up. It was a mixture of photographing the GX-60, swapping lenses, seeing what worked best at getting the shots I needed to make it look good, shooting, reshooting, take after take after take. I mean, I wanted to finish this before too many reviews were out there...in other words, while it's still hot. So that meant working hard at completing the review. The problem is, how do I get such a big review done, pictures snapped, video recorded, edited and still have a quality review? Well, the answer is not so easy, but something had to give.
I started editing the video first since the video is the most labor intensive. I had to correct the video because it was too dark, then edit out some of my "umms" and "uhhs". Sometimes you get to one part of the video and realize you forgot to shoot something, That requires backtracking. Then it requires you to go back to what you edited and try and squeeze it in there without losing continuity. It also requires shifting all the perfectly timed sound effects to match up again, and somehow, something always goes unnoticed until you wait 6 hours to render, then you notice the mistake. So the editing program has a clever way to group sections so that they all move together...AWESOME. Except mine gets glitchy and does whatever it wants. I realized I started my review without showing the box! WTH? So by this time, Godsigma was long packed away so I pulled out some half-ass pictures I had taken previously and recorded some blind dialogue (meaning I was talking without seeing what I'm talking about) over it. So when I went to insert it at the beginning, the carefully grouped sections would not move together, if I tried to insert it into the beginning it would DELETE part of the video. Really really strange. So I stuck it as a bonus at the end of the video. Very uncool.
Sadly enough for me, when I sat down to look at the photographs, I realized I had the ISO set to auto on my camera which meant that the camera chose the highest possible ISO of 6400. If you've ever tried shooting something in low light, you will know that you get noise or "fuzzy dots" all over the picture. This is because the camera is compensating for the low light by raising the ISO, so instead of the shutter staying open longer to allow the proper light for correct exposure, it did what it was set to do which is shoot quick with low light. The result was about 40 BAD photos. So what did that mean? I could either re-shoot the figure, or work with what I have. I decided to do the latter. I had to Photoshop the noise out of the photos, sharpen them and basically make them worthy of using in this important review. So after hours of editing I ended up with "OK" pictures. Sure, many readers liked them, but I felt it could have been better. That's only the half of it.
In the end, I was able to get it up in record time while the buzz surrounding the figure is still strong. I got some good feedback but some people felt I should know more about the character if I am going to review it. I could write a whole blog explaining why I do what I do but in short, I don't watch anime, don't care much for it as an adult. There are two ways to look at a review. You are looking to get info on the toy for what it is...a toy, or you like the character so much that it brought you to look at the review. My style of review is covering the toy as a toy, not a place to get anime info. Sure, I'll include some tidbits form Wikipedia or whatever, but I'm not going to insert 10 paragraphs of how the character came to be and how in episode 32, he sort of died and was brought back by an alien witch doctor with a pegleg. There's anime reviews for that.
Then you got your hardcore fans that get offended. I've had some really pissed off Mazinger/Energer fans threaten me in different languages cause I pronounced Energer Z's name wrong. Listen I am a HUGE HUGE HUGE fan of Voltron but I would never ever get pissed off or put down someone's TOY review of a Voltron if let's say they said something like " I'm here to review this colorful robot that separates into 5 tigers or cats" "I already know they aren't tigers, but I would like to check out the toy anyway. I will admit though I can see how that can throw the feel off on the review.
In the end, the comments good and bad help to make my future reviews stronger more enjoyable to a wider variety of people. Just 'cause I don't know the protagonist's favorite sushi roll or if I call his weapon a "shooty thingy" instead of a "G-energy Juohken Beam Ray Blast Cannon" doesn't mean I don't put love into my reviews. Enjoy them for what they are, reviews about the toy and whether or not you wanna spend your hard earned money on them. And if you read this far, you need your head checked :P
So yeah, check out the written review on CDX
and the CDX video review:
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