Helldivers 2 bullshittery - Update #2 (Patreon)

Good evening folks. Hope you're having a lovely week. It's the end of week 3 on the latest bullshittery video this is the progress so far:

• Week 1 - Pre-production to find the necessary scenes from about 35 hours of footage

• Week 2 - Properly cutting about 60 scenes together to make a 10 minute video.

• Week 3 - Keyframing and text animating the first 6 minutes.

The objective going forward is to finish the keyframing for the remaining 4 minutes, start quality assurance rendering, and maybe add a few extra scenes to bring the runtime up to 12 minutes. There are some some extra gags I'd love to add.

Should take me a week and a half?

So editing wise, this video has been exceedingly smooth. Very few problems compared to a lot of the bullshittery videos. I've been aided by several factors.

• The frame rate is relatively consistent, without frequent stutters that define something like Arma 3, for example. That means that if you have 4-5 keyframes that define the text moving from right to left, a stuttering model won't betray the illusion.

• The teammates around you have little coloured rectangles with their nicknames. Which means that, provided they're a certain distance away from you, the automated tracking can handle it easily. A blue "M2" is always going to stand out from the explosions and the dust.

• My character is always in the middle of the screen. And since he's always wearing the same distinctive yellow-striped helmet, tracking it has been a piece of cake.

That being said, it's not entirely automated. The split is about 60% to 40%. For there's a lot of physical "diving" in Helldivers, where the helmet bops around. Or a large pack pack conceal it. Or a fluttering cape blocks it, etc.

But even in those examples, the manual tracking has been easy.

At the risk of a boring Patreon post then, let me reintroduce the newer Patrons to a little effect I like to use called "Pixel Polly". It's rather handy in certain situations. Such as games with lots of explosions.

As you can expect, this game does have a lot of explosions.

Remember back in the old bullshittery edits, if I wanted to make the text scatter from the explosions? Often I had to physically type each individual letter and move them with their own positional tracking.

Whilst I still do that in places, there's also the ability to split text up into fragments. And then let After Effects calculate the physics. One can do lots of tiny pieces like so:

Or with much larger fragments:

Those fragments can be directed in certain directions with a little jolt. Handy indeed.

Or just flop down and obey gravity, falling off screen. Or turning into little tracked bits done seperately.

As you can imagine, all of this is very useful if you need to communicate that the text has been forced/destroyed/exploded in some fashion. In a way that simply having normal text flying would not. For example, Helldivers has tesla towers that do...this:

For now with this update, please know that the first 6 minutes of the video are finished. Working on the other 4 minutes. Then on with the QA work.

Thank you as always for your patience :)