Patreon Peeks 33: Tailoring Game Footage (The Pocket in ACNH) (Patreon)

Hello! You may or may not have noticed that, since around my Animal Crossing: New Horizons video, I have been trying to use less and less actual game footage in my videos. There are two reasons for this:

1. Even if it is under fair use for being used for educational purposes, I try to be overcautious with displaying game footage so as not to incite even an erroneous copyright claim from YouTube's algorithm.

2. Capturing and editing game footage to make an educational point is tough.

But sometimes no source can make the point better than the game itself, and so I wanted to share one of the hardest parts of my Animal Crossing: New Horizons video. You can watch it here, the part in question begins at around 4:37: https://youtu.be/A4mN7CsAys8

I wanted to show how the pocket's UI sounds pan left and right as you select different things. My friend DavoGato graciously provided some footage of rummaging through this UI element, demonstrating the effect. There are deceptively many moving parts to this visual UI, such that it seemed isolating this thought bubble itself would be easier than recreating it from scratch. Well... the jury's still out on that! :P

I wanted to remove ulterior information and just show the pocket on screen, in the monochromatic style of the rest of the video. First, I created a series of masks to isolate the shape of the pocket and create a matte for the multicolored/moving elements. I did this inside a nested composition. The grey bubble is the entire mask, and the yellow parts are the matte.

The pointer hand in particular needed its own unique shape since it moves around the screen so much, and otherwise it kept getting clipped by the edge of the mask. It had to be pretty precise, and I used pixel-based camera tracking to sync up the mask's movement with the pointer.

You can see I gave it a little outline to give the pixel-based camera tracker a wide margin of error. It needed a lot of manual editing. But in the end, I could create a second layer of this footage that could use a saturation matte to isolate everything (hence why the yellow is so saturated), and a "Colorama" effect to give the whole thing a custom sepia-looking palette.

It turned out how I hoped, although I perhaps could have cleaned and sharpened up the mask a bit more if I had more time to devote to it. The result is a pocket that conveys information straight from the game, but without any superfluous information on screen or in your ears. But from then on, I wanted to use more original assets as often as I could... it's easier to plan than pixel tracking, and it's certainly a creative challenge! All that said, kudos very much to DavoGato for providing game footage in cases where I can't go without it!