data recovery // behind the scenes

render by @BB12_fx on Twitter!

    Back when we were regularly doing DarkTriforceFilms stuff, I would write little blog posts either about what work we were up to at a given time or going in to the behind the scenes of our most recent videos. I really liked doing that but since we haven't done much live action stuff recently, I haven't had a reason to be writing any new ones. What I HAVE been doing during that time though is a whole bunch of Halo Machinima on mellohyelloh - a channel I originally made just to spam post on, but then kind of stumbled into being a Halo channel when I made "New Friend", the first episode of our series Flying By Wire.
     Halo machinima is what originally inspired me to make any sort of content online (shoutout to the Halo 2 Tricks movies), and I had been trying to make a series even since BEFORE the start of DarkTriforceFilms. So it's been a dream come true that Flying By Wire has been a hit with so many people! Last night Episode 8 came out, and it was a WHOLE process trying to get this episode done. 
     Mix together multiple drafts and rewrites of the episode, balancing schedules for voice acting and body acting, all sorts of visual effects, cameos, AND a deadline of getting it out before flying to Seattle for HCS Worlds 2025 and you get a lot of late nights and stress that eventually led to this existing! I'll break stuff down into sections below for easier reading,  but here is my little write up on the behind the scenes for Data Recovery - Flying By Wire Episode 8!

WRITING
     A big thing to know about Flying By Wire is that when the first like 3ish episodes came out, it wasn't REALLY intended to be a series. My original idea was just to make a bunch of little Halo shorts that starred me and my friends who played Halo with me. Then we started getting an audience and that ever burning desire inside me to make a Halo Machinima series was reignited and I started connecting the dots and figuring out what this could be. That means that a lot of Flying By Wire's plot has been written kind of retroactively - and I'm HONESTLY kind of making it up as I go along. 
     That part means that every episode has like 100 drafts before I finally decide I like it. And honestly, episode 8 was really giving me trouble. I had no idea how to go about it, what exactly it should be about, or how to make it funny! We had a few plot threads that were kind of coming to a head, like our villain Eagle making his way to The Academy.

     Above are just the drafts that show up when I search "FBW 8" in my Google Drive, I don't know how many I wrote that I didn't bother labelling with that. Some were written pre Episode 7 coming out so ideas were shifted and changed after figuring out that episode, but ultimately the thing that decided what Episode 8 would be is a deadline! I wanted to get a video out before HCS Worlds this coming October 24-26th so I could talk about it at the event, so a decision had to be made!
     I kept having this idea of Excelled in the medbay and bringing Dr. Petalbrook back, originally I was just going to have it be a small scene in a larger episode (or at one point even was almost Episode 9 instead), but then I was like well - this is the idea I actually have and like so let's just develop that! With that I also had this idea of a scene of Eagle dumping Sgt. Anderson's body to the song "Green Bird" from Cowboy Bebop which ended up being the intro to this video to kind of establish where that story was going.
     But THEN due to some issues trying to film in Halo Infinite I had to edit that opening a bit. That led to me using Halo 2 for the sort of flashback scene that Eagle has. It was kind of just to pad time but I think ended up being a much better opening that tied that little scene to the rest of the episode despite technically being entirely disconnected.
     After that the video kind of flowed naturally writing wise- the only other thing to mention is that this video has had like 3 different endings over the course of writing it to getting it out. There was an ending where Synergy came and broke up the whole lab scene, one where Emily accidentally opened a portal to where Sgt. Wolf was being held, and one where Yelloh DIDN'T get disintegrated and instead the explosion just happens without that wrinkle.
     Ultimately, I wanted the scene to show something (no spoilers) about Emily and I think the explosion alone didn't get it across as well as I wanted to and so Yelloh getting disintegrated and then re-integrated (?) was added and boy do I think that was the best decision I made in the entire script!

MACHINIMATING
     It feels a bit weird to type about body acting because it's such a visual thing but I'll do my best and provide photos where I can! Flying By Wire has a very nice advantage in that there's never really more than like 3 characters on screen at once, which makes it very easy to do most of the body acting myself or with one other person. That's kind of entirely how this episode was made. Usually, I'd be pulling Ethan and Kip (who play Excelled and Synergy respectively) to body act as themselves but for this since Synergy only had a brief appearance, Ethan body acted for Excelled and then I played everyone else.
​     For Flying By Wire unless I need to go in and refilm something, we do all our filming live and in Custom Games instead of using Theater Mode. Machinima tools make it very easy to do everything live and not have to rely on watching the game back and trying to remember if this was a good take or not (and not to mention you don't have to deal with all the Theater Mode bugs like raised weapons or wrong coatings on armor).
     Technically, the first thing was build the various sets for each scene in this video. I love getting to film stuff in areas of maps that you usually can't access, and this video was a bunch of that. The medbay is in the storage room on Live Fire, you can open the door in Forge mode and once I did that I knew I needed a scene in there eventually. Throw up some decoration and it becomes a pretty convincing Medbay! Then, Petalbrook's lab was made in the little Overshield testing room on Illusion - getting in by placing teleporters. Nothing in there has collision since you AREN'T SUPPOSED to be in there, so in Forge I just added a bunch of blocks right underneath or behind walls in order to be able to stand in there without falling to our deaths. 
     Then to show more about Dr. Petalbrook and her interests, I added a lot of hardlight/forerunner weapons and props - all coincidentally having lots of pink which fits Petalbrook perfectly. 

     Going in chronological order, the Halo 2 scenes were filmed by using Halo MCC on my PC as the camera (by starting a custom game with the Blind skull on), and then connecting 4 controllers to my Xbox and doing all the body acting myself with those. That's why nobody really moves in that scene! The next one with Eagle in the Pelican was also just all me, switching from Eagle's setup to Sgt. Anderson's and just trying many, many, MANY ways to throw myself out of the ship. 
     I had the Pelican set up on a version of Ecliptic, which I had used for the shots of the ship flying in space, and added some lights to match the red lighting from the interior we saw at the end of Episode 7. I tried multiple ways to show Anderson's body falling:

 - Putting a killzone directly outside the Pelican and jumping out backwards
 - Putting a gravity slide to propel myself out of the Pelican and into a killzone
 - Changing teams and punching the dead body out

     But none of them really worked out like I wanted to and for the first few the shield pop really was taking away from the effect. What finally ended up working was loading in with 2 controllers and no shields, and killing the Anderson body with a sword, launching him into a gravity slide that propelled him out of the pelican. It's honestly a very funny shot that I really like and I think got the point across the best of any of them.
     Originally, I had filmed the shots of Eagle looking out on the same map, but the lighting just wasn't really doing it for me. Infinite's lighting can be really weird and wonky sometimes, especially on Forge maps and it just made the shot look kind of "fake" to me. I ended up switching to House Of Reckoning, where I had shot the pelican shots from Episode 7 because that map has VERY good lighting and setting up the same sort of lighting I had on the Ecliptic set. Red for the interior and then a kind of dark blue to show the spacey vibe since he was looking out into the void.

Lighting on Ecliptic

Lighting on House of Reckoning

     I think it helps too that I just got better shots in general when I did them the second time around. The rest of the video was split into like 3 filming sessions, one by myself for the scenes of Excelled and Synergy or Excelled and Spy, then 2 with Ethan for the rest of the Medbay scene and Petalbrook's Lab scene. Originally my plan was to get someone to body act for Petalbrook and I'd play myself, but ultimately (after making sure my internet at my new place could handle it) I signed in on my 2nd account on my PC and then my main on Xbox to play both myself and Petalbrook.
     For the most part this was all a breeze, only split into 2 due to scheduling conflicts. We used the radial menu machinima mode by @_Okom (on twitter) for filming this time around rather than my personal machinima mode and it really really REALLY made things easier. Big shoutout to Okom for that mode, being able to grab whatever weapons, equipment, etc that we needed on the fly really sped things up. We could all get our respective weapons easily, switch to no weapons if needed, and get as many repair fields as we needed for throwing at Excelled's head.

     The hardest parts of filming this scene were probably just getting Excelled's body onto the table for the like SPLIT SECOND shot of Yelloh standing over it - (I would later just film his dead body on a greenscreen and edit it in because man that took FOREVER) - or just making sure the repair field landed correctly on his head. Even that though only took us about 4 attempts before we got one we liked. 
     There were a LOT of reshoots for the entire video, it's not always easy to exactly see what the video will look like when you're filming, so when I'm editing there tends to be a lot of "oh this shot actually sucks" or "the headbobbing doesn't line up AT ALL with the voice line", so for any of those I would usually just go back in by myself and quickly reshoot it. For the most part, it was either shots with only one person in it or ones I could switch to being 2 people max.
    Petalbrook's lab also went smoothly, with the only hard part coming up with Yelloh's disintegration and reintegration (again is that a real word? the right word?) Originally, we figured we could just drop shields and health and then shoot me with a heatwave to get the particle effect that the hardlight weapons leave behind. What we didn't think about was that the heatwave BOUNCES and in a room full of explosives, sets them off and completely ruins your view of said disintegration. 
     So we pivoted to shooting Yelloh with a Sentinel Beam, but unlike the heatwave that killed and started the animation in one shot, the sentinel beam had to be held down and shoot through the player for a few seconds before finally killing and starting the animation. This meant a big beam shooting through for kind of no reason in the middle of this explosive moment and it didn't REALLY work. I was going to use it because I couldn't think of any other way until the very last minute.
     I went back into theater mode to reshoot some parts of the explosion, and I noticed that due to Theater Mode's wackiness and bugginess, it played a slightly different animation for Yelloh's body when the explosion went off than we saw when we were filming - that was LAUNCHING him into the back wall before starting the disintegration animation.

     I saw this and knew I HAD to use it. It works perfectly in motion and in tandem with all the other chaos going around and I think even gives a second of like "wait what did I just see??" which adds to the surprise I wanted from Yelloh getting disintegrated in the first place. 
     For the reintegration, we just ended up doing the same sentinel beam kill and then I just reversed it in post and cut out a few frames to kind of save us from the few seconds of just big beam hitting Yelloh. The cut is honestly kind of abrupt, but I think it worked really well for the suddenness and awkwardness of his reappearance. 
     It was very nice to have such a smooth go at body acting for this video, it helped that there wasn't any big action stuff like in Episode 7 - but the speed at which we got all of it done really helped me be less stressed about hitting our deadline!

VOICE ACTING
     Honestly, there's not a lot for me to say in regards to voice acting behind the scenes. For my lines and Dr. Petalbrook lines - we just recorded them using Audacity (a free program!) and a Shure SM7B (that Kip bought me, thanks kippers). But don't think you need any sort of fancy mic to do this stuff!! Everyone else's lines (with the exception of Spy's that were done in his car) I just recorded by getting in a discord call and then screen recording it. 
     Kip uses their own SM7B, so their lines sound similar to my own, I cannot tell you what mic Ethan uses but (you can tell him I said this) it sucks! Luckily, as I said before, you don't need a good mic to do this stuff! His mic glitches out and picks up a lot of background noise (and he also likes throwing it around while we are trying to record) so we had to do a few retakes here and there but it all worked out in the end.
     In post, I add a filter to everyone's lines to kind of make it sound like they are talking through a helmet mic or a radio, and this doubles as a way to kind of even out everyone's lines despite our differences in mic quality. All I do for that filter is a highpass effect on everyone's lines at 600(db? I don't remember the measurement right now but it's at 600 whatever it is).
     In the past I would try and set everyone's at different ranges to make it sound more even but I've gotten lazy and setting everyone at 600 sounds good enough. 
     A shoutout to everyone who voice acted in this video here below! Getting some other creators in for little cameos is always fun and shoutout to Spy and Corbin for both being down to do this kind of last minute!

yelloh - logan gonsalves
excelled - ethan rolfe
dr. petalbrook - kristina (my lovely girlfriend <3)
synergy - kip raymond
spy - @SpylensHalo
oni agent - @CorbinBamBeano from @CeCoShortFilms

     Some other little things about voice acting, Eagle's VA, DarkTriforceFilms Intern Austin, couldn't get lines done in time so that's why he's quiet during the opening scene. I originally wrote some lines there, but honestly I think it works better without him talking so it all worked out.
      And then with Emily, who is literally just done with Text To Speech tools, she had to be recasted for this episode. Previously she was done by a bot named Alice but that website updated and started requiring purchases in order to use that TTS voice so I said NO THANKS! The budget for Flying By Wire is however much it costs to commission BB12 for the thumbnail and THAT'S IT!
    So she was switched for another free website and used a new voice who's name I can NOT currently remember. I should figure that out before I have to recast her again in the next episode. 

EDITING
     While every video is kind of mess when it comes to editing, this one added a whole new layer in terms of a ton of different visual effects I had to add on top of just throwing the normal footage together. Lots of glitch effects that weren't too hard to do, there's lots of glitch overlays you can find online and I think the one I grabbed was free from some stock footage website. Toss that on and either do an Ultra Key effect or change the layer style (I THINK that's what it's called?) to screen or something and boom you got a little glitch effect! I'd pair that with a random little thing with the footage for the few frames it's glitching out for - whether that be a flip, overlay, or something else.
     When Emily would glitch, I'd use the Turbulent Displacement tool and just kinda make her look all wacky (see above). Emily had a whole host of things to do to get her in the video. Firstly, you may have noticed that all of her stuff is filmed in Halo Reach. I have a Green Screen map that I shoot her on and then take that footage into premiere, throw on an Ultra Key, and overlay her with a circle mask to get her to look like a little AI. I COULD technically just film her in Infinite, but I like the kind of uncanniness that comes with her being shot in a different game.
     I kind of forget every single time I have to edit Emily how I did it before. For this one, I duplicated her footage and put a directional blur on the bottom layer to give her a kind of haze, and then once she was in Recovery Mode, turned down the saturation on her footage to make it visually look like something was wrong with her apart from all the glitching.

     Since she's just superimposed over the footage I usually try to stop anybody from crossing in front of her, but it does happen a few times in this video. Since it's literally just like a few FRAMES where someone is in front of her, I just kind of poorly cropped her to get the visual across. I wasn't really worried about it looking perfect since if you aren't looking for it you'd never notice.
     The next biggest visual effect in the video was probably getting everything in Petalbrook's Lab to glow as we approached the explosion. It's a lot less impressive on an effect than I thought it would be, honestly. 

     All I did was make a bunch of pink boxes to overlay over the things I needed to glow. I put a Gaussian Blur on them and kind of MAXED it out so that it looked like a glowy haze, and then used keyframes to slowly increase the glow over time in each shot. I was going crazy trying to figure out how to make something glow like this and was watching tutorial after tutorial. Then I found out about the rectangle tool IN premiere and was like OH I can just use this! It worked perfectly to get across what I needed and I think clicked once I added all the sound effects on top of it.
     Other than that, besides a few edits like these files (below) that I edited in photoshop to look like the old Halo 2 customization screens, editing was pretty straightforward. Also shoutout to HaloBoxStudios for telling me about the corner pin tool which REALLY helped all the scenes in this where I had to edit something onto a computer screen. I HATE doing that and I don't know why I keep writing it into videos but that tool helped!

     I did 2 main sequences in premiere (with a few nested sequences to make Emily's effects easier), and the first I named the Rough Cut. In this one I did the basic putting all the footage in and lining up voice lines, as well as finding background music and adding any key sound effects. When Flying By Wire first started, I would use the native sound to whatever footage I was using unless there was some big sound in the background I didn't need - but nowadays in this rough cut I'll cut out all audio from the footage and just redo it myself after. 
     With voice lines in the rough cut, I'll take the opportunity to get all the volume levels right as well. I aim for all lines to be between -12 and -6db (I THINK it's db don't quote me) because that's what Woody Hamilton told me they should be at years ago when we were filming our webseries Bacon. I'll just mute all other sounds and listen through only with lines to make sure it's all good and hitting where I'm aiming for.
     For background music, I honestly switched out all the songs besides the intro with "Green Bird" out a bunch. I had a track from Trigun playing originally during the medbay scene, "Cynical Pink", but it ended up making the scene feel way too fast so I switched it out for the classic "Spokey Dokey" from Cowboy Bebop. I have like a little library of soundtracks I pull from for Flying By Wire - since we can't monetize anything I don't really care about copyright - and shuffle through them to pick songs. I think music wise I'm kind of going for a like blues/jazzy tone for the most part like Cowboy Bebop, but I do like to sneak in stuff like "Hits Set" by Bomb The Music Industry in Episode 7. I had a Halo track originally for the scene in Petalbrook's lab, but I felt like it didn't have enough of a build for what the scene was. Enter Kristina's love of The Hunger Games leading me to use "Snow Lands On Top", which I thought felt very fitting since it was the lab of Kristina's character. She's The Hunger Games' biggest fan, after all. The build is PERFECT for the scene I love how it ended up fitting.
     All the visual effects I was rambling on about earlier I also got done in this initial rough cut. By the end of the rough cut, the video is basically done except for the fact that it's like empty sound wise.

     Now you might be thinking, the next sequence must've been named "Final Cut" which in hindsight would've made sense, but I went more literal and just named it "Sound Cut". This was where I'd just throw sound effects for EVERY LITTLE THING! Unfortunately HaloBoxStudios cursed me with the knowledge that adding little sounds for quick movements, every footstep,  effects in frame, and anything else you can think of, kind of makes the video a whole lot better!
     In the first few episodes of Flying By Wire I didn't add sound effects for NOTHING! I'd just use whatever in game sounds were in the footage unless it was something like Emily or the other AI appearing that I was superimposing onto the screen. Now, I have an entire Halo 5 Guardians Sound pack full of like every sound effect from the game AND another smaller pack of Halo 3 sounds that HaloBoxStudios also provided me with.
     It's a game of adding them all in and then fighting with myself about whether or not the sound effects are too loud or too quiet in comparison to everything else. Literally the last like 2 days of editing this were just adjusting volume levels up and down. Once all those were in the video was done! I went back and added some quick shots and adjusted little bits here and there to help with the overall pacing but that was no problem at all.

THUMBNAIL
     Ever since seeing BB's work I wanted to commission him to do something for Flying By Wire, that started with Episode 6, and now I love getting his work for every main episode of the show! I knew he was as busy with stuff for Worlds as I was, so I had honestly planned on making a temporary thumbnail first, but he locked in and got it to me right as I was exporting the final cut!
     I sent him the very beautiful above sketch to give him an idea for what I wanted in the thumbnail and he really made it come to life.

yelloh's sketch

BB's render

     I can't speak on the process of making it in blender because of course, I DIDN'T DO THAT! BB killed it though and I've labeled the above two photos so you can tell which is which. I know it's hard. 
     I love having a consistent thumbnail style on a YouTube channel, I think it's so neat to see everything feel so unified! mellohyelloh has had it's own since before I even started making Halo Machinima on this channel and I've always thought it felt cool and unique - so after getting BB's amazing render I threw on the mellohyelloh border and added the name of the episode (I use a drawing tablet to write the text myself in my own handwriting!) and we ended up with this for the final thumbnail:

     Sure hope you liked seeing the same 2 photos over and over again in that segment! Got that done and then bada bing, bada boom - it's uploaded and premiered! I usually aim for like afternoon on a weekend for uploads, but since this was on a deadline to get out before Worlds and I still wanted to upload on a weekend, it was premiered at 9 PM (EST) on 10/19! Worked out though, lots of folks were able to make it to the live chat which was very fun!

Render by @BB12_fx again!

SPECIAL THANKS AND SEE YOU LATERS
    And that about does it for Data Recovery! I got some special thanks for everyone who helped out on this video - of course to Ethan, Kristina, Kip, Spylens, and Corbin for staring in the video and Ethan for helping with body acting - then also to HaloBoxStudios, Spylens, and everyone else in our little Infinite Machinima community that gave me advice and help when I was up at 2 AM editing this in the discord VC.
     And of course a special thanks to The mellohyelloh nation community and discord for sticking around and being excited for all this flying by wire stuff! Very cool to have our own little community (and I promise I'll TRY to get back to streaming again soon now that I have met this deadline)!!!

Render by @SpylensHalo (on YouTube/Twitter)

     Now, this weekend I'm heading to Seattle for HCS Worlds 2025 as I've said - and I'll be joining a bunch of other Infinite creators and even taking part in an Infinite Machinima booth on Saturday in the Community Spotlight area!! I'll have some stickers and prints to hand out (see below) and am SO excited to see what the future of Halo holds!!! If you see me, don't be afraid to say hi! I'll most likely be wearing a lot of yellow so I won't be hard to spot!

     OK THAT'S ALL I GOT SORRY IF IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE MAYBE I'LL UPDATE IT WITH SOME BETTER PHOTOS OF THE EDITING PROCESS IN THE FUTURE I'M DOING THIS AT WORK INSTEAD OF MY JOB AND JUST TYPING WITH MY TRAIN OF THOUGHT OK BYE!!!!!!!!

- YELLOH//LOGAN