Holdfast Bullshittery - Update #3 (Patreon)

Good evening everybody. Hope you're all doing well. Another update on the Holdfast bullshittery.

So it's the start of the 6th week of work. Quite a bit longer than I was hoping I'm afraid. Sorry about that. It's been due to distractions in the starting weeks, surprisingly complex individual scenes (in places) and rendering complications.

But the project is currently in phase 2 editing/QA sweeping. Meaning it's complete/watchable. But the final polish is still being applied. With 32 scenes finalised out of 38.

Here's a picture of the timeline. The green ones are edited, but might have the odd blocker issue lurking. And each of the pink ones are being given attention:

So the first thing to note is that the bullshittery features an unexpectedly large number of - I'm not sure what to even call them? Rapid-fire quick vocalisation scenes? Scenes where people speak often. And with few syllables. BUT (crucially) are still in frame when they say them. Which are often pretty time consuming to properly create - particularly if the camera is moving a lot. For example:

As you can imagine, the effort to complete these is far greater than usual. Since they require a lot more attention to timing and the preservation of motion. Along with a lot of keyframing to rmove that tell-tale "sliding" you see with some editors, when not enough keyframes have been applied to make it look convincing.

The overall effects looks good, I think. But it's certainly something where it's hard to cut corners. And this bullshittery has a few of those, such as that scene I linked before:

The second headache to talk about is the return of that dreaded rendering bug. Which you might remember from The Forest video-essay. I was worried that it would appear in future bullshitteries. And it appears I was correct to be concerned.

In short - After Effects and Premiere are refusing to properly communicate during overnight rendering. Freezing the project.

The workaround? Have After Effects make lossless (and massive) .avi files and paste those in on the timeline instead. There's about 73 of those, totalling about 110gigs. And I'll simply delete them at the end of the project.

I expected this to happen. So was quick to generate those .avi files as I went.

It is something of a pain though. As every time I make a minor change, I've got to have After Effects churn out a the corresponding .avi. Gumming up the editing process unnecessarily.

After this project I'll do an long overdue reformat of main hard drive. That should hopefully purge this sucker. And it's a good idea for general PC hygiene reasons.

The next thing to talk about is the inclusion of the "grace minute" as I call it.

This is where, due to repeated viewings, my confidence as an editor drops as the jokes are simply no longer as funny to me on rewatching. And I have to try and resist the urge to delete huge chunks of the project to "improve it". Even though - it's fine - I'm just being paranoid. And it's a predictable part of my process.

As a result I often leave 60 seconds until the very end. Just to patch in fresh new jokes to help sooth my suspicious editor-brain.

I will however admit that perhaps I've gone a bit too far this time. As the grace minute has ended up being 3 minutes instead, by accident. And I'm currently working to dial it back a notch.

The last thing to talk about would be a general walkthrough of what an average scene looks like. Partly because it's fun. And also because it illustrates what I'm really doing on any given day.

In this case, scene 174/01-16, part of a compilation of cannonball moments after patch 0.2 introduced artillery to the game.

In this scene, the joke was that someone was nervous about the line potentially getting hit by artillery, only for a cannonball, with excellent comedic timing, to whizz overhead mere inches from us. Prompting Dinklebean to tell that man to be quiet - lest he tempt the devil again.

In such a scene, I could place the text low to the heads and simply track it with position keyframes. But looking for opportunities to make it creative, I notice that I could place it in the path of the cannonball and have it interact with it by being literally hit.

That's fun and all. But lacks the wow factor. So I do another experimental cut. This time where the cannonball punches a hole through the paragraph. By putting a simple circular mask in the text and moving that.

But it didn't quite feel there yet. Coming across as too cartoonish, I think.

So what I then decided to do, was use a small plugin to break the single "text" block into individual blocks. One for each letter. Which gives me a lot more control, since they all become separate objects at that point.

Another fun trick there is to keep the original block of text but change the stroke to something like bright pink. That way you can ensure the individual letters starts in the correct places as you're keyframing them around, by moving them until there's absolutely no pink pixels showing. The same trick used when doing rotoscoping around greenscreens.

Then I can move the letters in time with the ball.

Then there's one last thing. The cannonball isn't actually visible for a few frames in the original footage. It's not even that clear that it came from the smoke, since the frame rate for the Holdfast game didn't properly show it.

But since I want  viewers to comprehend what happened, I can manipulate the footage. Freezing the cannonball in its closest take, cutting it out, then pasting in a fake version, moving it manually across the screen for the opening few frames.

And then here you go. Much more interesting to observe, I think.

See it's stuff like this that makes this sort of thing fun for me. Playing with little interesting quirks in any given scene to make it stand out. Asking myself 'how can I make this interesting to watch?', and 'how can I make the text interact with the moment so it's not just subtitles lazily slapped on.

So editing continues. 32 scenes done of 38. Then it's a case of dealing with the blockers. Give me a few more days.

Thank you as always for your extraordinary patience.