Behind the Scenes: Belladonna Cove | Episode 1.3

Vivian Cho reading Jessica Peterson's newspaper

The raw footage for this part was about an hour and a half in total, and it certainly took a few hours to edit. (I’ll probably speak about the editing process in a different blog post in the future!) I didn’t think I would embrace the editing style – constant jump cuts – I'm using for this Sims 2 series. But we don’t always need to see sims get ready for the day or wait on them to eat – we’ve all seen that a million times before.

As the editor, I have to decide (actually, it sounds like I am speaking about the editing process right now, oh dear!) what’s important and sometimes I have to remove what I feel doesn’t fit in with the final cut. For this episode, I removed a few minutes of rambling – it wasn’t a Jessica-moment, but a me-moment – and it consisted of me considering a want that Jessica had rolled; her desire to learn a cleaning skill. You’ve seen it before, footage of Jessica sleeping while I process a moment that had occurred earlier in the sim day. And instead of focusing on Jessica’s relationship with Armand (episode 1.2), this time I was focusing on one simple cleaning-point want.

To summarise, in the deleted footage, I said maybe the cleaning-point want meant that Jessica was considering the idea to be a better wife for Carlos, because being such a doting wife to a man like Carlos would help her reputation. (According to her, that is.) That it meant – to outsiders – she had turned over a new leaf and learnt from her mistakes. Things like that. Just little storytelling ideas to give the characters more life.

I’m excited to experience more moments where the story for an individual sim just comes together so wonderfully. I’m definitely happy where I left Jessica, and I'm so curious what will happen in Carlos’ round, but I’m also eager to see the next household.