Sons of the Forest - Update #6 (Patreon)

Good evening all. It's the end of week number 7 on the latest video-essay for Sons of the Forest. And here's a summary on progress.

I must apologise for week 6, for despite my desire to dive into the project immediately, I came down with a common cold. Normally it wouldn't be an issue. But since an important first step for the production is recording narrated dialogue, I felt it best to wait until my voice wasn't so nasally. So I paused audio recording.

Last week saw me doing the following alternate tasks:

• Sons of the Forest script polishing.

• Editing a recent fishing trip into a second video of that type. Unlisted for you here -

  https://youtu.be/XjroX3FD5qU

• Writing very small video-essay script named "Boneworks vs Half Life Alyx". Only about 1100 words compared to this projects 33,000. Might edit that some time.

• Making this scene as a short gag: https://youtu.be/yR5yUG0uwAU

This week though, I've lunged directly into the main production.

This video-essay is broken up into 40 segments. Each one bringing up (or revisiting) a specific topic. And my current goal is to deliver the first 14, as soon as possible.

Allow me to walk you through my current video-essay production process.

Late in the evening, when the traffic noises in this city have calmed down, I sit down with a coffee and narrate the script into a Rode microphone. Using the recording software Sony Sound Forge Audio Studio.

I like to record multiple takes of all lines. Redundancy for flubbed words. Often putting emphasis on different parts of the sentence structure. This builds up a large singular audio track which I can then import into Adobe Premiere.

What follows then is the process of Ctrl + K cutting the audio file into dozens and dozens of lines, reviewing and selecting the best ones from the reading and simply ignoring the rest. A 30 minute long file can then become something like 6 minutes.

From there, Premiere comes with the functions "Close Gaps" and "Ripple Edit". Which lets me snap all of the clips together end-to-end and begin the process of tweaking the timing. A few milliseconds here, a few milliseconds here. Replaying the dialogue again and again until it sounds natural. With no cut off words. Note the 6 minutes here turning into 5:31.

An important early consideration is the relatively high speed at which this process can be done. Because that is going to rapidly change in a few short days.

I do not know the technical term for this. But the timeline is soon going to "bloat" with a large number of additional .mp4 files that Premiere cannot play in an instant. Sooner or later it's going to need a few moments to process any preview. That cache time may only be a few seconds. But it'll be for every interaction. Therefore I feel it's important to start with the audio narration first to be efficient.

From there, based on the previous scrubbing of the livestreams, I'm able to import the livestream footage. And specifically retrieve the "marked" scenes I know that I'll need. Inserting them between the narration deliberately.

What I like to do is insert my ingame speaking voice as often as possible, rather than simply have visuals that are cut to spoken narration. It breaks up the flow, bring emphasis onto things I really need to emphasise, and in my opinion, provides a greater feeling of legitimacy.

In the sense that I can show how something went down in a story game. Rather than just show some disconnected footage.

From here, it's mostly just a case of adding the remaining footage until all the gaps in the timeline have been filled.

Progress wise, I've managed to record all the audio for sections 2 to 13. The audio cutting for that is about halfway complete. With segments 2 to 6 already having quite a considerable amount of their visuals. Things are going pretty well.

I can't easily put an estimate on time remaining. But by the end of next week I full expect to have all audio cut for 2 to 14 and making strong headway on adding the visuals. So this shouldn't take super long, especially with placeholder inserts for anything too complicated. My goal is to present a 'work in progress' render. So there will be unfinished assets.

Segment 14 is probably going to be the most interesting to the point that I figured it would be best to end the first WIP render there. It's where I dive back into the weird logic-talk about The Forest and go off on some amusing tangents, I hope.

Will work as swiftly as I can and keep you updated.