Random Gooseshittery - Update #6 (Patreon)

Good evening folks. So I've had about 11 weeks on this pretty lengthy bullshittery project. And I've completed the second half. I'd pitched about 10 weeks for this bullshittery, so something of an overshoot, sorry.

Still a bit to go before it's out of the door though. It's fully edited but not yet polished.

It needs to go through it's own quality assurance process before it's ready for viewing, though thankfully the first half is already sorted. Now to do the same for the second half to bring it up to 33 minutes and 30 seconds.

So there are three tasks I need to complete. And therefore 3 things to talk about.

The first is that the typical QA process of 'render, watch, repeat' that forms part of normal QA. Essentially every morning I check an overnight render, watching through the whole video and building a laundry list of fixes. Usually minor things that are difficult to notice when you're in After Effects and focusing on hundreds of tiny keyframes.

Here's an example from this morning. The sort of thing that normally forms a day of bug fixing:

All of that is fairly bog-standard. The quality assurance sees me bounce between lots of minor issues. Anything from spelling errors to creative improvements. Eventually reaching a small handful of minor problems as it approaches the final version.

The second thing I need to do is finalising some "masking". I spoke about that in Update #2. This is the act of cutting out shapes from pictures (or text).

I use that little trick to create the illusion of the text moving behind things in the foreground. To make it look as though the text is physically in the frame and interacting with stuff.

And bloody hell, what a nightmare that's been on this project. There were SO many things the goose walks "behind". And so many of them were geometrically complex.

None of this is usually very difficult. It's really just a test of patience. You cut out of the shape and then adjust its course and size based on how its changed in the frame. In most bullshitteries it rarely changes size. Think of a gun held in front of the player in Arma or Rising Storm. How often does that change size? It's not moving towards or away from you, despite being in the direct foreground and likely to obscure text.

But holy smokes, some of the geometry in Untitled Goose Game is messy. Especially since the default camera adjusts the zooming based on the number of things in frame. That means the masks in question are shrinking and growing ALL the damn time. Along with lateral movement.

Understand my pain. This trellis. This god damn trellis. I have proof that Satan exists!! Because he created this trellis! It's in the garden of chapter 04. And the goose has to repeatedly walk underneath it. Look how geometrically complicated that trellis is.

Understand my editing suffering because I had to mask every single little gap. Often with scaling underway to alter the sizes of those gaps. For what was often frame-by-cursed frame!

I was tempted to bin the footage in question, or shimmy the visuals so I'm not near the trellis when I speak. But I walk through that area constantly. There was simply no escaping it. The trellis was everywhere.

And if I tried to get around it, Satan wins. I had to face the trellis. Every frustrating time I walked under it.

If there's a minor fire in a the trellis section of a local Homebase in the UK my lawyer has directed me to say that I wasn't there and I had nothing to do with it.

The third thing I need to talk about is the presence of incoming commissions. And that's a bit of a headscratcher. Because normally what I do is let each individual artist bring their own style. But here the style is simple geometric shapes. BewBew's art after the stream is a great example.

And it's has me wondering whether or not I can simply do some of those myself in After Effects, letting me animate them.

What I'm going to do is queue up some simple static commissions with some available artists (doing so right now before getting on with QA). Then I'll do a quick test of one of them to see how it looks. It might be relatively simple. Or it might be something best left to artists.

All of the commissions are a tad optional however. So if they end up holding up the release I can park them. They're generally speaking "nice to haves".

An additional note to mention is the presence of the 'rendering bug' that's prevented me from properly checking projects previously. Where Adobe Premiere refused to talk to Adobe After Effects.

You'll be pleased to know that I've taken step to circumvent it early. About 4 weeks ago, in fact. During the creation of each clip I've been pre-rendering an .avi file equivalent and laying it on the timeline in the same place. Ordering one of my 2TB hard drives to dedicate itself for that purpose. It's built up its own little library that's about 700gb in size.

Essentially I've been like a bricklayer, putting down 261 bricks. But quietly making an identical brick each time and building an identical wall using materials unaffected by the problem. Meaning the rendering process should be completely uninterrupted. Huzzah.

So long story short. I need to do the following to release the video:

• Get 7 (optional) funny commissions ordered/inserted.
• Mask the remaining parts on the timeline. There's about 10 of them.
• Render, watch, fix errors, repeat. Until the entire video is polished.

That's the plan now :)