Behind the Scenes: Belladonna Cove | Season 2, Episode 3.2

The poor Witch Doctor!

For an ordinary, non-vacation episode (this is for 2 sim days), it can take me about 2 hours to record footage. But for this honeymoon episode, and this happened with Kimberly Cordial's vacation episode as well, it took me more than 3 hours to get all the footage I needed. We frequently travel between lots - hotel, community lots and so on - so all that loading means that it takes much longer to get the episode done. 

Even though it takes much longer to record everything, I only had about 43 minutes of footage for this episode and then the final cut has a duration of about 17 minutes. With Kimberly's vacation interlude episode, I had a final cut of about 31 minutes. For this episode, I removed a lot of footage because vacations can get repetitive. 

Plus, some simmers aren't into Bon Voyage like others aren't into University or even Open For Business. Because of that, I long ago made the decision that a vacation will have their own video(s); then, a viewer can skip the vacation if they so desire. A vacation, in the end, doesn't add that much to the story. Well, so far the vacations (Kimberly's, the Riley's) didn't drastically change anything.

Also, about footage, you can see above that the Witch Doctor got electrocuted. That moment wasn't shown in the episode because I had to send Vivian and Timothy to the Witch Doctor a second time. During their first visit, the Offer Help interaction disappeared, so the Witch Doctor got zapped. In their second and final visit, Timothy could offer his help and so he got the voodoo doll as a reward. But the Witch Doctor didn't get zapped then …

Lastly, I'll include a few deleted moments in a special post when the round with the Riley family is done.