Thank you @LynnMinmei! I’ve heard so few people talk about the video bits that, well, you just never know. It was really cool to do though. I had the idea the year before while walking around with some original devs and working on the SNK 40th collection. The next year I had this idea to do it, but nobody on the US team knew what I was talking about really. But I’d hired this cameraman and for whatever reason the devs weren’t told the right time to show up, so day 1 of interviews I only had one dev (adachi) for 2 hours, but I had the cameraman for 6. So for the first 4 hours I decided we’d go shoot b-roll of all the locations I wanted in this walking tour, and I brought SNK producer Laurent (who’s french also) with us to help identify buildings and also communicate in french.
That meant the next day, even though we were supposed to only have time for interviews, we were able to do all the live human sections of the walking tour in under an hour because we had (almost) all the b-roll footage already. So I basically pushed through my idea because it was possible to fit in the time. We only had the cameraman for 2 days and had 4 people to interview, but we got it all in there and I was able to push my idea through.
A couple amusing things about the french cameraman - he didn’t really speak english, and I could sort of understand when he said stuff in french but couldn’t reply to him, so we needed laurent to translate. Also at one point he was shooting some stuff and an older woman walked up to him, and he was like a block away from us, and we were like uh oh, is she chewing him out or something!? Turned out she had studied french in college and wanted to practice!
Then at the end of the 2nd day he and I were both taking the train back in the same direction for like 20 minutes so we tried to talk to each other, but again, language was difficult. Turned out his Japanese was better than his English because he had a Japanese wife. So we were two white guys speaking okay-ish Japanese on the train to each other and the salarymen’s faces were going wild with speculation, that’s for sure.