Remake article ideas/organising

Flintlock · Jun 16, 2015

We're obviously going to be putting out a lot of content about the remake, so I thought it was a good idea for us to have a thread where (1) everyone can suggest articles and (2) site authors can coordinate their efforts.

I got the ball rolling with that transcript article, but now I really have to sleep. After all, a pro isn't someone who sacrifices himself for his job. That's just a fool. If someone wants to get working on the next article, an easy-ish one would be to round up all the promotional pictures that SE have published, upload them to our own server through Wordpress, and publish them all together.

Beyond that, all ideas are welcome. We have always been open to new contributors and I'm sure Lex won't mind me saying that that's particularly true now. This is our moment, let's make the most of it.

Also: I've got a fairly busy schedule coming up, but if I can find the time, I'll try to stream FFVII through from beginning to end for our Twitch channel and invite people from here on to discuss our hopes and fears for the remake. That'll be after E3 finishes, of course.

Jason Tandro · Jun 16, 2015

Well as I already mentioned, I'm the music man. Anything having to do with video game soundtracks is my bread and butter. And I have a little bit of musical training to boot (albeit nothing super formal since high school). I will be doing a complete evaluation of the FF7 Compilation soundtrack, detailing music from FF7, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children and if I can find enough noteworthy tracks probably Before Crisis too.

Also I just now realized this:

FF7
FF7: AC
FF7: BC
FF7: CC
FF7: DC

Anyways, the article will detail as much trivia and history in to the games music as I can mention, an analysis of common leitmotifs and references to other FF games, and other such musical falderal.

Lex · Jun 16, 2015

1. Image roundup article
2. Fan reaction discussion article (JasonTandro's video would be good)
3. Report on tomorrow with video (which I can do, I'll be saving to disk this time)
4. Musings on what it's going to be like from anyone (various opinion articles)

Also going to bed.

Jason Tandro · Jun 16, 2015

Hey, Flintlock. Not that you don't have enough on your plate as is but... perhaps another "The Seven" is in order?

Obsidian Fire · Jun 16, 2015

As already show in the staff chat thread, I'm going to be finishing up on polishing all of our index pages so they all match.

Speaking of which... I'm assuming we'll need a FFVII: Remake page for all the stuff you guys are publishing now...

I might as well start making an index page for that where we can link to all the "pre-release" stuff...

Claymore · Jun 16, 2015

It would definitely be cool to have LOTS of opinion piece articles encompassing different aspects that people want (or not) in this remake. This place is going to spike ... so now is the time to get the site up to scratch - filling in missing content and getting the look updated.

*Wanders off to find the site thread*

Shademp · Jun 16, 2015

Could somebody add the tag "FFVII Remake" to WordPress? I vaguelly recall that we are not supposed to add tags willy-nilly, so I'm officially requesting it here.

trash panda · Jun 16, 2015

Yes please on supplying links to all merchandise so I can buy ~~ALL~~ maybe some of it. :monster:

Flintlock · Jun 16, 2015

Shademp said:
Could somebody add the tag "FFVII Remake" to WordPress? I vaguelly recall that we are not supposed to add tags willy-nilly, so I'm officially requesting it here.

Sure, I'm on it. It will be "Final Fantasy VII Remake", though, to match all our other tags which use the full format. For what it's worth, I don't mind people adding their own tags as long as they've made sure they comply with the guidelines I posted here.

Tetsujin · Jun 16, 2015

Flintlock said:
Sure, I'm on it. It will be "Final Fantasy VII Remake", though, to match all our other tags which use the full format. For what it's worth, I don't mind people adding their own tags as long as they've made sure they comply with the guidelines I posted here.

That thread should be stickied imo.

Might come in handy to have a bunch of stickies as guides for posting articles and such in general.

Jason Tandro · Jun 16, 2015

Well the script for the first part of what has become my 5-part Compilation OST Review is completed. Of course there are the twin bugbears of recording the thing (complete with sound editing and actually inserting fair use acceptable samples of the tracks) and actually editing the video (which involves footage gathering, screencaps, custom title cards... god I wish I wasn't using Windows Movie Maker for this...

But I feel confident that the first part video will be completed sometime tomorrow. (It'd be tonight except I have a sick wife to take care of when she gets home)

And before you go "wow you work fast" remember that I'd been planning this for months and never actually got around to stitching it together so all the research had already been done.

Flintlock · Jun 16, 2015

@Tets: Stickied. I think there was some talk in the past of creating a full tutorial for writing front page articles. I know there are already some parts - like setting a featured image - scattered around the place. If we change the front page design then we can do it after that.

Claymore · Jun 16, 2015

A full tutorial would be ace.

Jason, I've got Vegas Pro, so if you need any help piecing together future video projects (since you already have this one in hand), let me know.

Jason Tandro · Jun 16, 2015

Claymore said:
A full tutorial would be ace.

Jason, I've got Vegas Pro, so if you need any help piecing together future video projects (since you already have this one in hand), let me know.

I used to have Adobe Premiere which was a beautiful piece of software. I would love to get my hands on CS 5.5 again. But thank you for the offer and lord knows I may very well take you up on it since Windows Movie Maker is an editing fate worse than death. When I'm having to make my own title cards in MS Paint, you know you f*cked up.

iMovie is better editing software, there I said it.

Edit: Also, Claymore... did you just use a Jake And Amir-ism?

Claymore · Jun 16, 2015

Had to google that. Never seen it, so only accidentally if it was one, lol.

Cthulhu · Jun 16, 2015

Re: remake article ideas, we should probably / at least do a community interview round with some questions like: what do you hope for, what's the worst they could do, etc.

Second, we should try and get an interview with the developers, or try and get exclusives from SE or whoever's making it; we're the premier FFVII fansite (as credited in that magazine thingy the other day), and we will be responsible for at least 5 sales of the game when it comes out, they owe us something, :monster:

.

Third, we should probably make arrangements and plans towards cramming every possible tidbit of information about the game - before and after it's released - into our sites. Guides, walkthroughs, tables full of stats for nerds, all that shit collected on Gamefaqs, only better.

I'll need you guys to assertively tell me what I should do tech-wise, who should get access to what, etc.

We might also need to consider a site overhaul; redesign / freshen up the designs, upgrade the forum software to something modern (although the last upgrade attempt kinda highlighted that there is no such thing as a modern and feature-rich forum software out there, :/ ), etc. This time around we should probably go for a commercial WP theme or CMS with loads of features (carousels, mobile-friendly, Twitch / YouTube / image gallery integration, better comments, nicer fonts, ad integration or alternative sources of income / helping me pay for server expenses, etc).

Claymore · Jun 16, 2015

Started getting the ball rolling over in The Lifestream & 2015 thread. I also felt that a new theme and layout to showcase our content, and cramming all information about both versions of the game, should be a high priority.

Flintlock · Jun 16, 2015

Cthulhu said:
Re: remake article ideas, we should probably / at least do a community interview round with some questions like: what do you hope for, what's the worst they could do, etc.

This looks like a job for me.

Second, we should try and get an interview with the developers, or try and get exclusives from SE or whoever's making it; we're the premier FFVII fansite (as credited in that magazine thingy the other day), and we will be responsible for at least 5 sales of the game when it comes out, they owe us something, .

It's definitely worth a shot. Also - and this is a long way away - we should try and get a review copy of the game. I'm sure we'll have fun arguing over who gets to play it. :monster:

Third, we should probably make arrangements and plans towards cramming every possible tidbit of information about the game - before and after it's released - into our sites. Guides, walkthroughs, tables full of stats for nerds, all that shit collected on Gamefaqs, only better.

Absolutely. We've got the people to do it.

I'll need you guys to assertively tell me what I should do tech-wise, who should get access to what, etc.

So, no change from before, then?

We might also need to consider a site overhaul; redesign / freshen up the designs, upgrade the forum software to something modern (although the last upgrade attempt kinda highlighted that there is no such thing as a modern and feature-rich forum software out there, :/ ), etc. This time around we should probably go for a commercial WP theme or CMS with loads of features (carousels, mobile-friendly, Twitch / YouTube / image gallery integration, better comments, nicer fonts, ad integration or alternative sources of income / helping me pay for server expenses, etc).

I agree about the front page revamp. The forum situation is pretty crap, but we're going to have to bite the bullet at some point. We should set up a proper consultation for it, that looks at things like: What are our most pressing reasons to upgrade? Which features are we determined to keep and which can we do without? What's the best alternative solution? How easy would it be to migrate our database? Up to now our discussion has been very fragmented and hasn't taken us anywhere (beyond establishing that vB5 is out).

Flintlock · Jun 17, 2015

Update on the status of the article ideas put forward in this thread so far:

Flintlock said:
If someone wants to get working on the next article, an easy-ish one would be to round up all the promotional pictures that SE have published, upload them to our own server through Wordpress, and publish them all together.

Let's scrap this idea. It would only have been worth publishing very shortly after the announcement; now that we've got five articles about it on the front page (in just over 24 hours!), we've basically used all the source material already.

JasonTandro said:
I will be doing a complete evaluation of the FF7 Compilation soundtrack, detailing music from FF7, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, Advent Children and if I can find enough noteworthy tracks probably Before Crisis too.

Jason posted the first part of his evaluation here but we agreed we'd wait a while before publishing it on the front page, since it's not really connected to the remake.

Lex said:
Fan reaction discussion article (JasonTandro's video would be good)

Done.

Report on tomorrow with video (which I can do, I'll be saving to disk this time)

Did you mean the Square Enix conference? It was kinda dull, but it couldn't hurt to get an article up about it. We should mention World of Final Fantasy somewhere, maybe Kingdom Hearts too.

Musings on what it's going to be like from anyone (various opinion articles)

I don't think anyone's started writing one of these yet, but there's no hurry. We have so little information about the remake right now.

JasonTandro said:
Hey, Flintlock. Not that you don't have enough on your plate as is but... perhaps another "The Seven" is in order?

I'll probably make a pair of these articles once more people have replied to the survey I set up (see below).

Cthulhu said:
Re: remake article ideas, we should probably / at least do a community interview round with some questions like: what do you hope for, what's the worst they could do, etc.

The survey is up and an article will be posted to accompany it tomorrow.

Second, we should try and get an interview with the developers, or try and get exclusives from SE or whoever's making it; we're the premier FFVII fansite (as credited in that magazine thingy the other day), and we will be responsible for at least 5 sales of the game when it comes out, they owe us something, .

Is it too early to start making enquiries with Square Enix about this? Part of me thinks we should get our front page design sorted out first so we can give them the best possible impression.

More ideas welcome.

Lex · Jun 17, 2015

^Sort site, contact devs. I'm setting up a virtual dev environment offline today so that I can fiddle with Wordpress templates.

Tetsujin · Jun 17, 2015

(whenever they have a playabe demo of FFVII at E3 in the future we totally need to be there and report, we know E3 is a possibility for us, we should try again right? o.o)

Tetsujin · Jun 17, 2015

Mentioned this in another thread but I had an idea of a retrospective of all the remake rumors and comments from Square Enix and stuff up until the point of the actual announcement.

Like, I dunno "On The Way to a Remake" or some shit :wackymonster:

Shademp · Jun 17, 2015

Tetsujin said:
Like, I dunno "On The Way to a Remake" or some shit

Whether it be the article title or just the title of an article section, that has GOT to make it into the retrospective! "On the Way to a Remake". GENIUS!

Flintlock · Jun 17, 2015

Tetsujin said:
Mentioned this in another thread but I had an idea of a retrospective of all the remake rumors and comments from Square Enix and stuff up until the point of the actual announcement.

Like, I dunno "On The Way to a Remake" or some shit

Love the title. Do you want to be the one to write it for us?

Cthulhu · Jun 17, 2015

IDK how much I can do with regards to a front page redesign, but, taking an off-the-shelf theme and just installing it, sorting it out, and making some changes in terms of colors and shit should be doable.

As for Square, if possible, start throwing out hooks already.

As for review copies and arguing about it... they could just give us a dozen copies, :awesome:

. A giveaway would be nice too.

Remake article ideas/organising

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