"A Light in the Darkness" | Sonic the Hedgehog | Tessa | RICE Best Storytelling

THIS VIDEO IS NOT FOR KIDS! It is a fan made music video for older adults. Content warning that involves grief and death. Prepare yourselves for more Sonic vids!!

For anyone curious, RICE is a yearly event that takes place in February, hosted by BentoVid on Discord. It is an anonymous contest where editors leave feedback on videos and no one knows who made what until final voting is over. I have been entering since 2023 but have never won anything until now! This year I made 2 videos and this video won Best Storytelling which really surprised me because these kinds of vids with heavy voiceovers are rare for me so I’m not used to doing them as much. The audio mixing took FOREVER...

The live action Sonic movies mean a lot to me and I really wanted to highlight the most emotional moments of the three films, but mostly 3. These films may be corny and have too much humor sometimes, but they still have a lot of heart and Shadow’s story moved me so much that I wanted to make a video for him. Of course I couldn’t leave out Sonic so I made as many parallels as I could between them, like light and dark. The line “The light still shines even though the star is gone” is what inspired the title!

I knew the contest was coming up quick this year – the deadline was February 1st and Sonic 3 came out on January 20th so I only had about a week to make this and kind of rushed it, but I took the feedback received into consideration and changed/added a few things.

I had a few other ideas in mind but I really wanted to focus on the heart of the movies, and then I remembered the instrumental “Tessa” from ‪@theNightFuryfan95‬ Zuko vid:    • Zuko 🔥 The Redemption of the Banished Prince  

Once Tessa came to mind I knew that was The One. I thought it fit Shadow’s story well. I did not expect it to win anything but I’m so surprised and happy! My original goal was just to get people to watch Sonic and I think I succeeded! Please give them a chance if you haven’t yet, especially Sonic 3 and Shadow!

This version of Tessa is also a mix between the original track and this epic version, which I combined together myself:    • Transformers - TESSA | EPIC VERSION (feat....  

And I used this isolation tool to remove music from the voiceovers: https://vocalremover.org/

Oh, and thank you to ‪@HiddenWhiteFang‬ for creating the subtitles! I had to add a few more since I added more voiceovers after the contest!

RICE info: https://bentovid.com/kondate/