Intro | CosiCast Live
This past month I've started to live stream on Twitch (and simulcast on YouTube and Mixer) playing games like Audiosurf 2 (to your requests!), Sonic Generations, and more! Initially it was just a small test of the new Headset I got (the Corsair Void Pro) but it evolved into a weekly scheduled and more professional thing.
For awhile now, I've been working on stuff to improve the stream's quality to make it seem more professional. First came custom screens like "Starting Soon", "Be Right Back", and "Prepare to Raid" (for those not familiar, Twitch streams often "raid" others friendly by sending all the viewers at the end of the stream to somebody else to spread the love).
Then I moved to a custom overlay to show who followed, the current game, and any donations and custom alerts for those events as they happen.
The next step was a move inspired by bunch of streamers who make their streams more like a TV show which is to make an intro. One of the biggest who inspired me is a awesome Rock Band Drummer who streams on Twitch as TheDrummingPC. You should really check out his intro and stream just to see how awesome it is and why it inspired me.
So that's what I did! Unlike him and many others, I definitely don't have the skills to fancy custom animations like they do so I turned to what I do best and that's mashing up clips and audio in a fast paced manor. For this I wanted to go all out so I figured it would be a good post to explain what I did.
Part 1: Glitched Intro
When I started to plan this, the very first thing that popped in my mind and I 100% knew I wanted to include was the famous intro for the 1960s TV show, The Outer Limits. It's been parodied by everything from famous animations like The Simpsons to smaller web content like TWiT.tv's Podcasts.
Ideally I would want a custom narration like TWiT did (heck there's even involves streams so it might of worked better for me to use there's instead of the original) but of course I have to work with what I have and I figured using the original outro instead of trying to use my Headset (while good enough for streaming and voice chat, definitely can't use it for narration).
To add to the overall feel of the intro "taking over the stream", I added glitch effects in Adobe After Effects.
Part 2: The Countdown
Not much to say here, it's a free old-school movie countdown which I figured fit in perfectly into the whole theme of the first part. The big changes here came from adding extra dust, scratch, fuzz, and other effects to make it appear even more old.
Part 3: Casting into the stream
To go along with the theme of my channel "Casting", which I originally derived from the fact that I cast my content out to viewers and viewers receive the cast, I figured what better way to show that than to have the viewer travel down the virtual internet highway to arrive at the destination of my stream.
I could have easily used some stock Highway or "data pipes" footage but considering my normal content, I wanted to make something more exciting and fast paced. First considerations were "How do I incorporate what I stream into the intro" since it still needed to tie directly into the actual stream. Well out of the two games I mentioned above, what did they both have in common? Going down a "track" at high speeds. Audiosurf's tagline is literally "Ride Your Music" and you do that by driving a spaceship thing down a track generated based on a song (or YouTube video). Sonic on the other hand is less obvious but with how fast he runs, he could basically be considered a car and the track being the ground. So that was pretty clear cut and fit well into the theme already.
Second matter of business was determining what else to put in beside it. I could easily have only done Sonic and Audiosurf but I didn't want to linger too long on any one item so I needed more. I remembered a old bumper that HBO used back in the 80s that has you flying down a road, over a theater, through the forest, and into space. That was a great one to use to start the whole thing off since the beginning started out slow and quickly built up speed, great to show my point of speeding into the stream from the sudden glitched interruption.
However the 80s version of the intro didn't have much more footage to use other than that first clip. So I also grabbed some scenes from the 90s version (which was CGI instead of stop motion) which ended up being the thing that glued everything together, acting as really fast and bumpy transitions to guide you from one scene to the next. The bumpy part also is kinda symbolic of how not everything can go to plan when doing live content.
Part 4: Final Touches
First I needed a song to tie up Part 3. I turned to one of my favorites, FadeX's Truecolor Alchemist, which I also used for my 2017 Lookback video. It's high energy and being chiptune again is kinda symbolic of my initial point of speeding through the internet, the viewers could be the bits that make the sound in the song.
To end the whole thing, I used a image based on those custom screens from before but this one using my normal video outro background, making the whole logo fill the screen, and using the text "Starts Now" before ending with an tube TV shutoff effect which then transitions into the actual live stream.
I tied all the parts together with Adobe Premiere Pro. I used the VR Light Leaks transition and Lumetri Color corrected each individual clip to bring out the contrast and make everything vibrant with color. I also put a blurred and scaled version of the 80s HBO clip behind it since that clip was in 4:3 unlike the rest of the clips in Widescreen.
I hope you guys enjoyed the intro and hearing my thoughts behind it. I usually don't go into the specifics of how I decide what I do for a video so it was nice for once to put it all out in words for others to read.
You can watch me sucking at games and playing this intro every Tuesday and Thursday at approx. 1pm CST on Twitch, YouTube, and Mixer.
►► Check out my website: BrandonGiesing.com ◄◄
Awesome, looking forward to more posts, Brandon! Keep it up!