So You Want to be a Speedrunner Progress- Day 5

Today was kind of a frustrating day in terms of getting stuff done.

Depending on how far you want to stretch the definition of “working on the presentation”, you can say that I looked at more public speaking resources, and got more information on how to do this right. What’s interesting is this: Just about anyone who’s anyone agrees that reading a speech word-for-word is bad–it sounds stilted and artificial, and time reading is time spent looking at the paper instead of at your audience. Where people seem to differ is whether writing out your speech beforehand (As in basically word-for-word, not just a rough outline) is a good idea. This blog, for instance, recommends it. I’m not sure I want to do that just yet, although I do plan to have an outline both in my head and on paper when I finally go to present the panel.

As for actually getting tangible stuff done with the presentation, that was the frustrating part. Suffice to say that I was attempting to edit The Super Mario Bros. run down to the relevant parts for my panel. I was foiled at every turn by the programs I had tried being uncooperative in one way (No easy way to add a title card) or another (Desyncing the audio when I trimmed a second of extraneous video, insisting on putting a watermark over the final result). I’ll have to try and address that tomorrow, but for now I’m going to watch a Double Dragon II speedrun and ask the person who did it for permission to use it in the presentation. It’s an example of an excellent speedrun that doesn’t seem all that entertaining at first glance. He mainly uses one technique over and over again…but that technique is very difficult to do once, let alone chain it together as he can do so consistently (You have a four-frame, or about 1/15 of a second, window to execute the move each time).