Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #78 - PT1 Video

Episode Date: December 13, 2013

Mark talks about the crazy tale of the making of the video for the very first Pro Tour.

I'm pulling out of my daughter's middle school parking lot. We all know what that means. Actually, at this point, I think we all do know what that means. It means I took my daughter to school, but it still means we have a drive to work. Okay, today, so I've talked about how I thought, I think podcasts are a very good medium for telling stories. And so today is a story day.

I'm going to tell the story of the first Pro Tour New York video. New York Pro Tour. Yeah, try that again. I'm going to tell the story of the first Pro Tour video from Pro Tour New York 1. Okay, so let me fill you in so you guys remember. I did a podcast on the first Pro Tour, in case you haven't listened to that. So, Scaf Elias, one of the East Coast Playtifters, a member of R&D, he was actually an executive vice president.

Scaf realized that the key to making organized play work was that you needed to have an aspirational quality. Not for everybody, but for some players, that there was something to work toward. And so he did a lot of research, and he realized what we wanted was a pro circuit, a pro tour. He spent a lot of time and energy talking to different people. I know he talked to beach volleyball and different sports that were smaller sports that were doing a competitive circuit to try to understand how they worked. Now, when I got to Wizards, I got there in the fall of 95.

They were planning to do the Pro Tour in the beginning of 96, which is actually when it happened. And before I came to Wizards, because I had worked on the puzzle and I needed knowledge of cards so that I could make puzzles that were using the latest cards, I was not allowed to play in sanctioned tournaments because I had advanced knowledge of the cards. So I started judging because I wanted to be involved

and I couldn't play, so judging seemed like a fun way to do that. So I got very involved in the judging scene in Los Angeles. So when I heard that Scaf was trying to start a pro tour, I wanted in, and I asked if I could be involved. And so he ended up making me the liaison from R&D to the pro tour. And so I was very, very involved in the making of the early Pro Tour. I worked very closely with Scaf. And so anyway, the lead up to this is, so the very first Pro Tour, if you guys didn't listen to that other podcast, happened in New York.

We were at the Puck building. And there was a blizzard. I mean, a blizzard shut down the airport. It made us delay the Pro Tour. I think in the history of the Pro Tour there's only been two delays. One was the blizzard at the very first Pro Tour

and the second was there was a flood in, I think, Valencia that caused us to delay the start of the Pro Tour. Anyway, it was the very first Pro Tour. The goal was

we were trying, the reason to have it was we wanted to create this aspirational thing but in the beginning, one of our big fears when we were making the Pro Tour is would it work? Would people care? Would people want to watch other people play Magic? And so what happened was we decided

so the guy in charge of Magic at the time, our brand manager was a guy named Rick Aarons. And Rick decided that we were going to go all in on the Pro Tour. And so he wanted to make a video for the first Pro Tour to sort of put it out there to get more people aware of what happened in the first Pro Tour. Because remember, at the time, I mean, the internet existed, but streaming video wasn't quite the thing it was now. In fact, I don't, I mean, I don't even know when YouTube started, but it wasn't, it wasn't a thing yet. Streaming video for sure wasn't a thing.

And even just video on the internet wasn't as much a thing yet. So we were going to make a videotape, old fashioned VHS videotape. So when we went to the Pro Tour, I knew that we were going to make a tape. What I believed my responsibility was at the Pro Tour, I had two responsibilities. One was, I went and shot a lot of video. I did a lot of interviews. I was in charge of sort of gathering all the interviews, which I did. I had a cameraman and a mic, and I went around and interviewed people. And also, I did commentary on the matches.

I went around and interviewed people. And also, I did commentary on the matches. The commentary was done by me, a guy named Glenn Elliott, who was in R&D for a long time. In fact, a little trivia question. For a little point in time, he was the very first VP of R&D,

or the head of R&D, just for a little tiny bit of time. And then, the last guy was named Eric. I don't remember Eric's last name. He was from Customer Service, what we now call Games Abort. And the three of us did come together. I'll get back to that later on. But anyway, so I went.

I did my interviews. I shot a bunch of stuff. Like I said, I knew we were doing a video, but I believe that my responsibility was capturing interviews. And one of the things you'll see, I mean, today isn't really about this topic, but get into a little bit, I'll have future podcasts in this. One of my roles in the early Pro Tour, so for the first eight years of the Pro Tour, barring the birth of my child, I was at every single Pro Tour. And my responsibility was,

I ran the feature matches, and I, on the final day, oversaw the video production on the final day. Now, early on, we just had live video. It wasn't yet online, but we recorded it because we knew we wanted to do stuff with it, like this video. And in the very early days, I actually was one of the commentators, but as you will see, there's reasons why we moved on and we got some other people doing commentating. So, I also, I mean, I knew the players as well as anybody knew the players. There wasn't, at this point, there had been a world championship in 94 with Zach Dolan and Patron Lestray. There had been a world championship in 94 with Zach Dolan and Patron Lestray there had been a world championship in 95 Alexander Blumke played Mark Hernandez

Blumke was from Switzerland, Mark Hernandez was from France Henry Stern and Mark Justice came in third tied for third and I knew all these people because I had interacted with them and so most of the people we invited to the first pro tour that were names came out of mostly the world championships

because that is the only high-profile thing that had happened. And I was familiar with these people, so I took it on myself. And one of the roles that I had on the Pro Tour was my background was media training. It was media, and so I spent a lot of energy on the feature matches and the video production, on the end of the public seeing what we were doing. I was very big on sort of the spectator aspect of what we were doing, and so I spent a lot of time and energy on that. Anyway, I was doing the interviews, and I did a lot of player wrangling in the early days, probably because I was well-known by the players, and I had a good rapport with everybody,

and I knew who they all were. So anyway, I get back to the office, and Rick calls me into his office. And Rick says, Okay, Mark, I've booked you two weeks of post-production time. We need to make this video. Oh, and by the way, I had to pre-print the sleeve for the video,

and so I had to put a running time. It's 90 minutes. Make sure it's 90 minutes. Legally, you've got to make sure it's 90 minutes. Okay, so let me give a little context here. So my background is in broadcast and film. I, in school, studied video production. I did editing. I mean, I had done the stuff studied video production. I studied, I did editing.

I mean, I had done, the stuff that was being asked of me, I actually had done. And that's the reason Rick came to me was I was the only person that he knew in the company that actually had trained

in doing video production. The problem was the correct way to do video production, especially, especially, especially if what you're doing

is a live event, is there's a lot of prep work that goes into that. You know, it is not, you don't just like after the fact, like throw it together. Like in order to do it, you have to do a lot of planning. And I had no idea that he wanted me to direct it. You know, I thought I was just gathering interviews. And so I'm like, okay, you really should have told me this before we did the event. Because I would have made sure we had the coverage and did what we needed.

And I would have done what a director does, is organize things and make sure that we get what we need. And ahead of time, you can figure out the different vantage points. Now, you don't know, with a live event, you don't know what you're doing until after you shoot it. But you do go in with a plan and have ideas and cover different aspects so that, you know, oh, here's the people maybe we want to follow. We'll do pre-interviews with those people. And, you know, not all of them will do well, but if we do enough interviews, one of them will do well, you know.

And so I hadn't had any planning. I hadn't quite done what I needed to do. Now, luckily, I'd done some interviews and stuff, so I'd done some of it. And the second thing is the idea of locking down your time before you begin, I mean, not a horrible thing, but, for example, the finals, for those who don't remember, my best example of the finals of the first ProTro, so it was between Michael Acanto, who was from the United States, versus Bertrand Lachrey, who was from France, and Michael Acanto was playing a white-blue control deck

with a mill strategy where Batron was playing a white-green, what they call Urnum Geddon, which revolves around having big creatures, Urnum Djinn being

the key one, I guess, and Armageddon, which destroys land. So it's also a control-ish deck where it tries to get ahead of you on the board and then wipe the board

with Armageddon so that it's like, oh, you can't cast stuff and I have an Urnum Gin and other stuff on the board. But both of them are controlled decks, so it's a very, very slow matchup. So my example is, Bill Rose was there. At the beginning of the match, Bill Rose goes out because he has some friends in New York. He goes out with his friends. He meets them at a fancy restaurant. They have a nice meal. They take their time. They have a nice meal.

They take their time. They have some dessert. They get some coffee and tea afterwards. They chat. They talk. Finally, like, oh, it's getting late. Probably should go home. Great seeing you.

He comes back to the puck building, and it's still going on. I believe the finals were six hours, I think. Which is funny, by the way. The very next Pro Tour, which was Pro Tour LA1, which Hammer Regnier won, he beat Tom Gavin, that finals was seven hours. That's the one where Mark Justice and I did the commentary from a phone booth. Anyway,

we were worried early on that all the matches would go late. Turns out that was just a quirk of the first couple Pro Tours. Anyway, I knew, for example, we had a six-hour finals. Could I easily get that in 90 minutes? I didn't know, you know. And we wanted to show other matches.

We didn't just want to show the finals. But anyway, so I was given a little bit of a nutty task. Oh, the other thing, by the way, is he gave me two weeks to do the post-production. Now, if I had done all the prep work ahead of time, if everything was carefully documented, like I walked in knowing exactly what I needed to do and knowing what I had, two weeks is plenty of time. But when I don't even know what we have, I mean, literally when I walked in the first night to do the editing, there was a cardboard box with videotapes.

Like, just filled with videotapes. Not labeled, not just, just a cardboard box with videotapes. So, oh, and on top of this, it's not as if Rick

carved out my schedule. It's not as if he went to R&D and said, okay, we need Mark to do this, so for two weeks, you know, we've got to take Mark off any projects he's on. No. I had a full slate we need Mark to do this. So for two weeks, you know, we've got to take Mark off any projects he's on.

No. I had a full slate of projects I was working on. So what happened was by day, by day, I was going into the office doing my job. And then at night, I would go downtown because the edit bays were downtown. I would drive downtown because I'm about half an hour away from work and edit. So I would spend my nights editing. So I was not getting a lot of sleep. I was literally working by day and working by night. But, but, but, I'm a team player. I was like, okay. I knew I had

the background. I'm like, if anybody could pull this off, I at least had gone to school and studied this and I'd done video editing. And, you know, I had some background. I'm like, okay, okay, I can handle this. It's a little bit of a challenge. Okay. Then I dig in to start to find out what's going on. So the first thing I do is I start to look at the tapes to see, well, what got shot? That's when I learned that literally there was my footage that I shot. There was the footage of the gameplay. Done. Nothing else got shot. I assumed that like, you know, they would have done what we call B-roll. Someone would have shot, you know, the cityscape and like some things you normally would want to have in a video. I thought someone would shoot that. But no one was organizing, so no one did. Okay. The

next problem we had was, okay, when you do audio, one of the things you do is you mic a lot of different people. So let's say, for example, there's the finals. You would mic Michael Ocanto. You would mic Patron Lestray. You would mic probably the table. You would mic the judge. The commentators would have a mic. And so what would happen is you have all these different audio feeds. Now, live at the event, somebody's mixing those feeds together,

what they call the mix feed, which is, oh, well, we want to hear the players. And as you're going live, you turn things up and down to focus on what you want to focus on. So when they had shipped it, the only thing they gave us was the mix feed. Okay. So now let me talk about the commentary. So I said earlier that the commentary was myself, Glenn, and Eric. Now, I was a developer at the time. I was a little more involved in the metagame than I am currently because I was a developer.

But Glenn didn't work on Magic. Eric didn't work on Magic. I mean, Eric worked in customer service and answered Magic questions. Both of them knew Magic. Both of them played Magic. But neither one of them was particularly up on the metagame. Also, this was a weird metagame. It was what people called Home Decapped Standard, where you had to play Standard,

but you had to have five of every play Standard, but you had to have five of every, every expansion in Standard, you had to have five cards from it in your deck or your sideboard. So, there were a few sets, Homelands being the biggest one,

where you had to kind of force it to get in. Anyway, it meant there was an environment that wasn't particularly well known. What's the kindest way I can tell, here's the kindest thing

I think I could say about our commentary that day. Um, we were horrible. We were horrible. I mean, it was bad. I was there. It was me. We were bad.

Uh, none of us had done it before. Like I said, uh, Eric and Glenn didn't even know much about the metagame. And even me, I, I, me being the most up on the metagame is not a good thing. Because that metagame has never been my thing. And so, anyway, our commentary was unusable. Unusable. But they had mixed the audio together, which meant that every single piece of audio we had had our commentary, which I believe was unusable. Okay.

Next, when you make a tape, you burn what's called a time code into it. So have you ever seen, I don't know, raw footage or watched someone editing or something? There is a, at the bottom of the screen, there is a time code. And what that is, is it shows the numbers rolling by. And the time code, see if I explained this correctly. And the time code, see if I explained this correctly. When you, there's underneath the time code, there is some stuff you're doing. The best metaphor will be, think of it as kind of a tread,

where you want something in your tape, and then there's something in the device that's reading it that allows them to kind of sync up. And the time code is supposed to lay that down. It's technically something you're supposed to do. You always do it. It allows you to make sure that your time code is working properly. That was done incorrectly. So our time code was messed up.

And why that's important is, now we had an editor in the booth. I wasn't actually physically editing. I mean, I was telling them what to do. But there physically was a guy who came with the booth that was doing it. So I had to say, okay, go to this tape. Ideally what you want is, okay, editor, go to tape 22. You're going to want to go to 4613 and lock it in from that to 4723. But our time code was messed up.

So I had to manually, with a stopwatch, figure out where things were on tapes. Anyway, it's a huge, huge problem. We had to figure out a way to lay it down. With some help from the studio, I was able to relay some stuff. But anyway, the time code was messed up. The audio was messed up. Our video was, you know, we didn't have tons of video. We mostly only had the game.

I didn't have the players talking because of the audio mix. So anyway, okay, so things were not in a great place. I mean, to recap, I had an assignment with a lot of time on a lot of things I had to do. I was not getting any events planned, so I was scrambling. Everything was kind of in a jumbled mess. And from a technical standpoint, most things that could have gone wrong went wrong. Now, was that all my problems? Oh, no. No, it was not. Okay.

So I mentioned to Rick when he assigned me this task that what he was asking was, I was biting off a lot. I mean, as I'm explaining to you, I'm like, oh, my, this is, you know, I sort of explained to him that we didn't do this properly. So Rick tried to help. So what Rick did is, so let me introduce you to a woman named Lisa Stevens. Okay, so Lisa Stevens claimed to fame for Wizards, where she was the very first employee hired by Wizards of the Coast. Peter and his other founders started the company,

and then the very first employee they hired was Lisa. Now, Lisa, I think, previously worked at White Wolf, which is also a role-playing game company. Remember that Wizards of the Coast, when it started, was a role-playing game company. Magic did not exist for several years. And Lisa was hired because she knew role-playing. Now, let me stress, Lisa is smart. She knows role-playing well. She knows what she's doing in her area of expertise.

Okay, so let me frame this all in that if you put Lisa in the area where she knows she's awesome, she's very good, she's sharp, you know. As I explain the situation, I don't want to... Lisa's an awesome person, and if you put her in her area of expertise, she shines. Okay, now, timeline. If you remember from the podcast on Wizards of the Coast, I talked about the history of Wizards of the Coast, And if you put her in her area of expertise, she shines. Okay, now, timeline. If you remember from the podcast on Wizards of the Coast, I talked about the history of Wizards of the Coast.

In December of 1995, we had what was called Black Wednesday. The company realized that we were losing money in our role-playing games. We were making lots of money with Magic. And they came to the conclusion that we needed to stop doing role-playing. It was very hard. Peter loved role-playing. It was where the company started. Now, years later, Peter would go on to buy TSR. We'd acquire Dungeon Dragons.

We'd get back role-playing. But at this period of time, we had just stopped doing role-playing. Now, Lisa Stevens had risen quickly in the company. She was a vice president. But the problem was, the things she's an expert in, we just stopped doing. And so they were trying to figure out what Lisa could do. And meanwhile, this project comes along. And so Rick's like, oh, well, Lisa's been looking for something to do.

Okay, we'll give Lisa this project. So a couple days in, I'm informed that Lisa's going to help me. Now, once again, bless her heart, the reason I was doing this was I actually had gone to school and studied video production. Lisa had never done video production. Now, Lisa is a very aggressive go-to, you know, gets the job done. She's given this assignment. She's going to do the best she can. But the problem was, was twofold. Well, threefold, I guess. First off, She's given this assignment. She's going to do the best she can. But the problem was,

was twofold. Well, threefold, I guess. First off, she's a vice president. I was a lowly developer. So, in Lisa's mind, look,

she was in charge of this project. She was a vice president. I was random guy. I mean, not random guy, but I was clearly subservient to her. She was a vice president.

I was just a developer, you know, in R&D. The only problem was that I actually had the technical know-how how to do this, and she did not. The second problem was she had nothing to do. The reason that they gave her this project was she was looking for things to do.

So she had nothing to do during the day. I had a full-time job. I was editing at night, which meant during the day, I wasn't there. And the third problem was that Lisa definitely had, for example, she had seen some band at something somewhere, really liked them, and talked to the lead guy and said to them she loved them and she wanted to use them. So, for example, early on, she informs me, we're going to use this band in the video. And I'm like, what?

Why? And she's like, we're going to start with a music video. And I'm like, well, we can't start with a music video. This is an introductory thing. We had never done a pro tour before. This is the very first pro tour. It wasn't like it was our 80th pro tour and people know pro tours. The point of this tape was to introduce people. So we couldn't start.

We had to start with an introduction. And so I convinced her to put it at the end. If you ever wondered why during the credits there's a music video, it's because she had promised this band we would use them. Oh, by the way, the thing I had wanted to do during the end was I wanted to do outtakes. And one of my favorite series of outtakes was I had done some stand-up.

I want to say stand-up. It's a technical term. Meaning when you go, when you see a documentary or something, and there's somebody standing with a microphone saying, hi, I'm here at the Puck Building for the very first Magic the Gathering Pro Tour, you know, that sort of introduces you to what's going on. So I had shot an introduction, or I tried to shoot an introduction out in front of the building, but it was, there was a blizzard.

I mean, a blizzard. And so, like, I, there's many blizzard. I mean, a blizzard. And so, like, there's many, many takes of me trying to do this. And, like, winds whipping and, like, snow is blowing in my face

and, like, I may have trouble standing still because I'm being blown over. And there's this funny sequence of me trying to do this and I was going to do a, and the outtakes

of a bunch of watching me try to do this, this was literally, I mean, it's like a comedy, like, almost like, you know, if you're watching a movie where they're try to do this this well literally I mean it's like a comedy like almost like you know if you're watching a movie where they're trying to punk a reporter so they send them out into like a a class 5 hurricane or something this is me in the blizzard

why I was outside trying to do this it was anyway okay so by day Lisa would come in and edit stuff and by night I would have to come and re-edit what she was doing I was trying to hurt her feelings. Eventually, it came to a head where one night,

I just had to explain to her, like, I was running out of time. What I had done for a while was I would let her do her stuff, and I would come at night when she would leave, I would do the re-editing. I would cut it.

And I finally just had to tell her, and I felt really bad. I made her cry, which I did not mean to do, and that I just had to explain to her we were running out of time, to tell her. And I felt really bad. I made her cry, which I did not mean to do. And that I just had to explain to her we were running out of time. And that one of the things in general, this is true of writing, it's true of video production. For some reason, because people are familiar with entertainment, meaning I've watched lots and lots of TV shows, there's

this belief that people know how to do it. And the reality is there's a lot of craft, there's a lot of structure behind the scenes. And it is not, I mean, I learned this when I started doing it. Something that seems so easy when you actually lay it out, there's a lot of rules, underlying structure that you need to do to make the audience happy. So anyway, I, oh, by the way, once I realized I needed help, I actually went and got help. There was a guy who worked at the company named Matt Murray. He was small and had a shaved head and was very tough looking.

He was pretty young. And he oversaw all the audiovisual equipment at the company at the time. And so I knew he had a little bit of background in that. And so I asked him to be my producer. And so he agreed to help me. And a funny story is, I don't know, many years later, I'm called in to, to meet a new employee. And he introduces himself and he says, or he's introduced to me and it says his name is Matt Murray. And I say, oh, that's very interesting. You're the second Matt Murray I've worked with. And he goes, no, I'm the first. And it was Matt

Murray, but he had hair, he was older, you know, it was 10 years later, 15 years later, whatever, and I didn't recognize him, and like, oh my god, it's Matt Murray. So he now works, he's in charge of online media, he now works at Wizards again. There's a number of people, by the way, who worked at Wizards left and came back. Matt's one of them. So with Matt's help, so the problem I had is I had an unusable commentary, but I know we needed commentary, because we were trying to explain things to you. I also had no audio feed of the players. I couldn't even show the players talking. So what we did is I decided that

I was going to reshoot the commentary. So there's a guy named Sean Carnes who's R&D. We called him Captain Volume. And once upon a time, I was the third loudest member of the pit, believe it or not, and it's probably hard to believe. Robert Kuchera was number two, by the way. So Sean was super vivacious.

He had run customer service for a while, but he was in R&D. And just, he had done some acting and had a real good voice. So we decided to make him the commentator. And then I got Henry Stern, who had played in the event. I needed a color commentator that really knew what was going on, that knew the metagame. I thought Henry would be good. He was close by. The budget was low, so he could stay at my apartment because we were good friends. Also, that knew the metagame. I thought Henry would be good. He was close by. The budget was low so he could stay at my apartment

because we were good friends. Also, I had an ulterior motive. I had said, I talked about this in an earlier podcast, I had wanted Henry to work for Wizards. Someone had asked me if I knew anybody I thought would be a good fit, and I said Henry. And Henry had sent in his stuff, but somehow, I don't know, it just didn't click or something, and he got stuck in the no pile.

And I knew that if I could get them to meet Henry, I could get him out of the no pile into the yes pile. And that ended up going really well. He met them, and Henry made a good impression in person. I have no idea why, whatever, why it didn't in paper. But anyway, so I got Henry up there. I got Sean. We filmed it. By the way, if you're wondering why Sean seems like he has no idea what's going on,

Sean knew magic quite well. I made him act kind of dumb so that we could do a lot of explanatory stuff. We decided when we were doing that video, early on, we were, the plan was that we were trying to do it introductory so people could learn about magic. We later learned that, well, watching magic is more for people that already know magic

and that's not the way to learn magic. I mean, one of the things, by the way, about shooting magic is it is very, very hard to show magic on screen. It is a tough thing to capture. There's a guy named Bruce who is the director for the Pro Tour and has been the director of the Pro Tour since the Pro Tour in the early days of the Pro Tour.

And Bruce and I had a good chat long ago because I was the video guy who would, I would be in the scene and we'd talk to each other while we'd do the video production. And one of the things I used to do in the early days was, it was very hard to tell what was going on that magic is not an easy game

to understand what is happening you know, that one of the things Bruce explained to me is that a lot of times it looks like nothing is going on and something important is going on and other times it looks like something important is going on and nothing is going on

and so a lot of my job when I was talking to him when I was doing video production was literally just saying to him, here's what matters. Here's what you need to show. It's okay to show faces right now. You want to show the hand right now. Telling him where to go. And it's very hard to do. So anyway, early on, back when we used to do ESPN2, I'll talk about this in some other podcasts, we were trying to make it a little more introductory, so Sean, the reason if you wonder why Sean's like,

how does that work, you know, was I was telling him to do that. So anyway, so they came in, we shot it, I thought it went pretty well, we shot it like on a Sunday, we shot it in our lobby, in the lobby of Wizards of the Coast, that's where we shot that. And I get that footage, and meanwhile, so you understand, the first, like understand the first like

the first I don't know maybe week of my two weeks was me sitting there watching videos figuring out stuff

we could use trying to lay some stuff down but like just try so the key to doing live stuff is you have to build a story now most of what we did was we were showing the gameplay

and so most of the story was about the finals but I wanted to do a lead up we did the top eight or top 16. I think there was a top 16 in PD1. I interviewed people. Oh, here's a funny little tidbit. So there's a little sequence.

I interview a bunch of people in the thing, but there's one where you see me with my microphone in hand. Some of the interviews, you just see them in the interview. You don't see me. But this is me walking the line of people waiting to get in because remember, the first Pro Tour, we invited a few people who had done well at certain events, but if you wanted to

play, you had to call on the phone. There was no PTQs. You got to call in. So people were registering, and I was interviewing them. So one of the people I interviewed was a woman whose name at the time was Elaine Ferraro, now known as Elaine Chase. And she now is the grand poobah of brand.

She's like the brand manager of Magic. You know, the main brand manager, the senior brand manager of Magic. And on the PT1 video, it's just me randomly interviewing Elaine standing in line because she played in the very first PT phone call. She lived in New York,

and so she made sure to get in, and she was there. Oh, the other thing to remember is when you're watching the video, the, what's the thing? What was I going to say? I do this sometimes, right? I have a point, and I say it.

See, this is live. There's no editing here. People always wonder, like, I always get suggestions how to edit this, and like, you don't know how low-tech I'm going. There is no editing. So I had to figure out how to tell the story. Eventually we decided it was going to be about the tournament structure

and trying to introduce people to what's going on. And then mostly we showed the finals. It was so long that we mostly just showed the finals. And we cut in and out because we made our own commentary that allowed us to... I was also able to write a script so that Henry and Sean could lead us in and out because we made our own commentary that allowed us to, I was also able to write, I was able to write a script so that Henry and Sean could lead us in and out. But what I had done is I cut the things so we knew what we wanted

and then I got our commentators to be able to lead in and lead out of segments. It was one of the things we could do by shooting later. In another podcast, I will talk about sort of the future. We spent a lot of time, I spent a lot of time doing different podcasting, figuring out how we're doing coverage and having commentators and going on ESPN2 and all sorts of stuff.

So one of these days, I will tell some stories of the video production side of things. That's definitely a chock full. But I see wizards here, so I need to rot the story out. So I had lots in my way. I had lots of obstacles, a tight time frame, bad organization. I mean, luckily, for example, I had done the interview, so I actually had documented everything. I actually was handing it off.

So at least for my stuff, I knew what was there. We managed to reshoot and get the coverage of the commentators. And I pulled some all-nighters. I stayed up. So finally, there was a showing of the video. And I was nervous, because when you get really close to something, it's hard to sort of step back and get a sense of whether it's working or not. So there was a showing at Wizards of the thing.

And I remember I was watching the whole thing with my fingers covering my eyes. And I was like, I thought I had done a decent job given all the parameters given to me. But I mean, there's a big difference between, well, this was a really hard challenge and I managed to do it in this hard challenge. I wanted it to be good. And people were very happy when we watched it.

I think people didn't know what to expect and they were happy with how it eventually came out. So I was very happy there. You've got to be... Ah. Oh, phew. Phew, phew, phew, phew. It's funny. I've been... For those who don't know, I'll get a little behind the scenes. My phone's been acting up. And so

this is the third day I've tried to do this podcast. And every day I get to work, and then it stops. And I thought it had stopped again, but it had not. So anyway, this is the third time I've told this story. For those who don't know, the way podcasts work is I do And then it stopped. And I thought it had stopped again, but it had not. So anyway, this is the third time I've told this story. For those who don't know, the way podcasts work is I do it in one take. But if it doesn't work or something doesn't happen, then I do it again.

And I don't normally do it three times. There was one podcast I had to do four times. Usually, maybe I get on the first time half the time, or maybe three-quarters of the time. And then maybe one quarter I have to do a second take. I don't often do a third take, so today's a special. But I almost, oh,

my heart was palpitating. I thought it stopped again, but it did not, so I'm very happy. Anyway, the Pro Tour 1 video is kind of a charming thing. Oh, if you've never seen it, if you go on our site,

hopefully we'll have this fixed. By the time this goes up, I'm hoping I'll have this fixed. We did, Henry Stern and I, we did a director's commentary on the PT1 video. So if you want to see the PT1 video, it's online. And if you want to see Henry and I

doing a shot-by-shot commentary on it, which was very fun, I recommend seeing it. That's online as well. It'll, now that you've heard me talk about it, maybe you'll see it, you'll learn a lot of stuff we were doing. And Henry and I had a really good time doing the commentary, and it's a blast,

so I would recommend watching that if you can. Anyway, it was a challenge, it was one of the things that when the dust settled, I was very proud, because, I was just proud that I had done it, it was a hard, hard challenge, anybody who knows video production who's listened to this, should

like a holy moly, like, everything was messed up. You know, the cardboard box of tapes that weren't documented, the messed up audio, the messed up timestamp, the commentary that was unusable. It was, you know, anyway, it was quite

the experience. But I got it done. And anyway, guys, I'm at work. So that is the story of the PT video. PT1 video and how it got made. Hopefully you enjoyed hearing a little behind the scenes. Some of the chaos. Not everything is so easy. Sometimes things are a little more chaotic and it's fun to talk about some of those

stories. Anyway, I gotta go now because it is time as we know for me to be making magic. Talk to you next time, guys.