Holdfast Bullshittery - Update #1 (Patreon)

Good evening folks. I hope you've all had a lovely weekend and a smooth start to your week. An update on how last weeks' pre-production work went.

I said that the Holdfast Nations at War Master file had quite a lot of livestreams to process. And that is very much still the case. Despite a full week going through them. There's something like 135 livestreams awaiting processing, down from something like 170.

That being said, I've managed to bring up the number of clips in the folder to somewhere over 200. Named and categorised and ready to be used. So I'm pretty set on creating a bullshittery for Holdfast. So I reckon I'll do just that.

I'm now starting the (often repeated) process (which I'm sure regular Patrons are a bit tired of hearing) of the "321" rhythm. 

My objective with any bullshittery is to keep the clips flowing, but not so quickly that the viewer is overwhelmed. And not so slowly that the punchlines are far apart. Therefore during the pre-production, each of the clips are tagged with a number between 1 to 3.

One being a quick gag that may be less than 10 seconds.

Three being a long and complicated sequence that might require some setup time.

And two being a middle ground between the two extremes. A joke that's funny in isolation and is nether too short or too long.

My objective is to then "paint" the timeline with a repeating pattern of 11122322111. In a way that provides a suitable variety and provides a good starting baseline. In fact, I've already made a start with the first 3-4 minutes of the bullshittery and you can quite clearly see the pattern. You can see the rapid-fire clips giving way to slower and more complicated gags before going back again.

This isn't a hard rule, never to be broken. Merely a good starting point before repeated viewings start to smooth things out and set the final position of the clips. It's also at this point that various animated sequences, artwork, music or anything that falls outside of my creative capabilities can be identified and commissioned. Emails sent out to those with the relevant skills.

A more project-specific thing to note in this update, is that I did commit something of a minor whoopsie with my Infowriter plugin. The button press that's supposed to track the timestamps of when something interesting happened.

You see, for Holdfast specifically, the start of the stream is often not the start of the .mp4 file recording. This is because there's often a 6-10 minute window where I have to race to log into the server along with everybody else. And the literally hide in a bush from the random members of the public making reeee'ing noises.

But what I didn't know is that the Infowriter plugin seems to reset back to 0:00 on the stream going live. Without adding the prior recording time in the calculations.

And since I'd often remove the opening start times from the top of the notepad as irrelevant information, I shot myself in a foot a little bit. As essentially, my timings would be dead wrong versus the raw .mp4 file recorded. Offset by however long it was since I started the recorded and waited in a hedge. Information now deleted.

Most other streams don't have that problem. Arma 3 for example starts recording the moment the stream goes live. This is just a bad habit from 2019 to 2020 Holdfast. Many of my timings are off because I don't need to start the stream, but absolutely need to get into the server whilst there's slots.

So pre-production scrubbing at times felt like a bit like I'm pratting around with a sextant. I know the precise times between individual gags. Therefore if I can identify one of them, I can calculate where the others should be on the timeline. It was a bit comical at times.

Again, a silly minor issue. Nothing insurmountable as I continued to build up clips. But a reminder that perhaps I should record everything in my notes, rather than deleting potentially useful information. Which is something I now do.

This week, I plan to build up the bullshittery timeline. And plan to have that complete by Friday as I move into the text keyframing.

Here's the dog tax in the form of Lulu being curious about a neighbour who's stacking rubbish in their front garden. She's making sure it's all up to code, naturally.

Have a lovely week everybody :)