Divinity Bullshittery - Update #1 (Patreon)

Good evening everybody. A quick update on progress. Keeping it as succinct as possible in a TL;DR:

• Off the back of a couple of weeks of pre-production, I was able to cut together a rough draft of a Divinity bullshittery last week.
• I'm currently trying to trim it down. It's a bit long at 35 minutes.
• And also hoping to prepare a watchable version for the sake of feedback this week.

So the cutting job last week went pretty smoothly. I had scores of funny moments tagged across the Chapter II livestreams, courtesy of those two weeks of pre-production that revealed everything with Premiere's marker system.

My first task was placing them all down onto a timeline. Trying to see what I had available as jokes. Leading to roughly 1 hour and 30 minutes of assorted moments.

After about 3 days of trimming I ended up with 35 minutes. With each of the moments isolated in their own nested sequences.

I was trying to return to my typical process, where I have individual gags with names. Allowing for an easy drag-and-drop to other parts of the timeline - particularly with jokes that require no setup.

You can also see here the longer sequences (that I typically call "3" jokes), in the form of the blue and pink segments. Except in these case they're joke 'clusters' or important lore moments that cannot be skipped. Best positioned together for the sake of easy viewing.

I've also done the same with several jokes that existed in audio-form only - requiring no visual component. Intentionally making it look like they were told in these sequences to improve the cluster and reduce the number of times the camera bounce around. 

By Monday morning the timeline looked like this. Still roughly 30 minutes. But now you can see the cutting room floor to the right hand side. As I tried to identify the least funny moments and park them off to one side.

And then by this evening I've continued to scrunch it down. Getting it to about 28 minutes with more cutting required. I perhaps need to be fairly ruthless as I don't want it to be too long.

Interestingly my scrubbing efforts have something of a hard limitation due to a cosmetic change as part of a joke.

The Lady Vengeance (the ship the player characters own) has a mirror that lets you change aspects of your character. And after about 15-20 streams I had my character shave his hair. Playing the rest of the game as bald as an egg.

That means I'm going to struggle to include any jokes ahead in the timeline, unless I can find scenes where I'm wearing a helmet, because my character looks so drastically different. And since I was thinking of using that gag as the opening joke to the next bullshittery, it's something of a book end on the scrubbing. 

It shouldn't be a problem though. As you can see from the above, I think I have plenty. It's simply an amusing problem I can't say I've encountered before now :)

So the plan currently is as followings:

• Complete the cut this week. Intentionally holding off text and animation work in order to make something watchable. Perhaps with some light QA in the form of audio balancing.
• Present it to some viewers to get some feedback. As keyframing this could prove challenging and I want to make sure it's a sure thing before I commit.