NEW VIDEO - Untitled Goose Game (Patreon)

Good afternoon everybody. Hope you're having a smashing weekend. As always, thank you for your extreme patience with me. I do feel as though I take the piss sometimes. But after a particularly lengthy quality-assurance process, I've managed to finish Random Untitled Goose Game bullshittery. Made from the two live-streams available on the closet. 

The video can be found here for those interested - https://youtu.be/v3bLLLUhask 

So at the start of the project (16th July 2023) I calculated it would take about 11 weeks to complete. It was actually 13 weeks and 6 days. Though there are some extra things I'd like to add next - so certainly 14 weeks. A bit of an overshoot there sorry. But it is interesting to see that the old rule of thumb still applies - '4-5 weeks for every 10 minutes of footage'.  As the final runtime of the video is about 34 minutes.

For the new Patrons who are not familiar with this style,  I use Adobe Premiere to cut the video together. But then export clips to After Effects for the text animation. Meaning that before long the entire timeline is lots of little blocks of After Effects comps (.aep files), all about 5 to 25 seconds in duration.

Your average 10 minute bullshittery has about 30-40 clips from assorted live-streams. This means there will be somewhere between 40 to 80 .aep files as a general rule. It varies hugely based on where the comedic cuts are.

But Untitled Goose Game has a whopping 268 .aep files. And going through quality assurance for all 268 was a proper challenge. Particularly in making sure they all flow properly in sequence.

Some of you may well have been following that challenge in the form of this google doc over the last couple of weeks. I've been posting it very regularly in my livestreams in the mornings and evenings. Keen to reassure viewers that I was indeed working. And not merely twiddling my thumbs all afternoon.  Normally I keep a private .txt file on my desktop.

I'm told however that many found this intriguing to watch, as issues were crossed off one by one. Or new ones discovered with each morning review. It's not something I figured would be interesting, but perhaps I should do that for the next video too.

So insofar as the editing itself, there was nothing particularly crazy about the format compared to all of the others. Aside from the obvious in that it was taken from just two single-player livestreams. 

Meaning continuity between puzzle areas had to be preserved. And in many cases reinforced with 1-2 second additional clips to tell the viewer where everything was in the scene.

That's in contrast to more traditional bullshitteries. Were jokes are cut, often completely out of their original context from hours of footage, walking around an open world survival map and bantering.

I was correct in predicting that the keyframing was going to be very easy to automate. With the overwhelming majority of .aep files using a large amount of autotracking for all their layers. It was often just a case of telling the Tracker to "follow the orange beak on the white goose".

The downside though was that the "masking" (the previously mentioned process of cutting shapes) was frustratingly complex. Due to the presence of highly irregular geometric shapes and a wildly swinging (and zooming) camera. See my previous rants about garden trellises. Moving objects behind other objects absolutely bedevilled me.

That's a problem the vast majority of bullshittery projects just don't have. Sure, you'll have masking in something like Arma. But mask around the iron sights is a one-and-done. The masked thing isn't normally zoom to-and-fro like a drunk sailor. And simple bit of zooming can hugely complicate a masking job. 

But something you will certainly notice about the bullshittery is the presence of those cutaway gags. These are moments where I decided to get a bit cheeky. And have inserted about 5-6 cartoons, using models that have been drawn to look similar to the ones in game.

The artist "Zahmbei" was kind enough to offer her services early. And I commissioned her to give me some assets I could easily puppeteer for a small handful of skits.

For example, the transition out of Ron's garden through the back gate.

In the base game I thought it was a little anticlimactic. For Ron hits his finger, falls through the gate, and then just gets up again. Altogether too quickly for any comedic moment.

Hence I figured I'd tried to get a chuckle out of those familiar with the game by implying that Ron just...freaking died.

What I'd did was take a screenshot of a segment of the map. Then placed a bunch of NPC's nearby to use as body and height references.

Then I'd do a few traces, Giving a brief to the artist concerning what I need. How many assets, etc.

Then Zahmbei would go and do some drafts. Using descriptions and screenshots of things in the UK, such as ambulances in the South West of England. In the mean time I could continue editing.

But then, crucially, she would deliver the assets back to me on their own separate layers.Tto be stacked separately in an After Effects composition. Everything inheriting the motion of layers beneath it. And with a "Null Controller" layer, which lets me move everything around in sync (sometimes offset a little if I need a bit of parallax). 

From there, it's a simple job of exporting them to After Effects. Moving the anchor point to where limbs would be. And then using a couple of rotation and position keyframes. Intentionally keeping it simple.

With a final touch being to put a blurred grey solid below them all, but above the terrain. Then cutting shapes out of it to make it look like they have animated shadows.

And just like that you can make little skit. With the final insert of the goose in the top right corner, just watching. And as you can tell, I did that a few times here and there.  Often at points in the video where I'm just describing something.

Sure I could do lots of white text to read. But I fancied being more creative. And special thanks to both Zahmbei for the art. But also ZF Bavon for some important audio tweaks.

Let me know what you think of the video. And once again, thank you sincerely for being so generous to me. I will start the next bullshittery very soon.

First I need to do some finishing touches with the video. And prepare a v2 for public release.