Making of the Bachelor's Finale Animatic

Hey all! Hope you're doing well ✨

So, been a little while since Act 2 dropped, but wanted to take some time to talk about what was, for me, maybe the most interesting challenge the whole process had to offer:

Putting together the animatic for the climax.   

So let's start with the 'why' and use that to work our way towards the 'how', shall we?   

Thing is, I knew pretty quickly that I was gonna need to do something special for the grand finale of Daniil's story. Even before I'd finished the script, I knew that I wanted Day 12 to more or less be nothing but lines from the game itself, and that it was gonna be roughly structured as Healing people -> Polyhedron -> Theater + my final bit -> Cathedral, because that's more or less the order you're told to go to visit them in game during the true ending.

The problem with that is, for the Cathedral scene to land with the gravity I wanted it to, I knew people were gonna need to be invested. However, I also knew that rallying the audience to be hype for a third god damn finale was gonna be a hard sell, especially considering that the first two climaxes are effectively about how the choices made here don't actually matter, and double especially considering that this was the ending of an emotionally exhausting 6 hour long story. This video has more false endings than Return of the King and almost double it's length, I swear. The idea of trying to return back to the normal talking head dialogue structure after the back-to-back 4th-wall-breaking kicks to the chest that the scenes inside the Polyhedron and the Theater represent just felt absurd. I knew I needed something to elevate the scene and make it feel as impactful and important as everything else around it, but what that was, I still wasn't sure.

Around the same time I'm trying to figure this out, two things happen:

A) I rediscovered Eva Yan's ghost. I'd found her first time around of course, but reading through her dialogue this time, with the full and fresh context for everything happening around it and after giving her storyline in particular a lot of consideration for this project, it hit completely differently. It was the perfect, tragic capstone, the exact final line I needed to sneak in one more twist of the knife that few would expect because, as always, my aim to share the pain this game causes ^^

and B) I got an @ on Twitter, from @peachy_dani. She had gone through the effort of creating an animatic out of a conversations on Day 2, and it was instantly one of the coolest things I'd ever seen. And then she made a second one for the end of Day 3 which was also incredible. 

It didn't take long for me to put two and two together, and before long I was in talks with Dani to find out if she'd be available for commission. I'll spare you the fine details but suffice to say, after talking it over, it was decided that we'd do 4 of the 6 conversations from the Day 12 Cathedral with a focus on character expression and framing over background detail or coloring while also dropping Haruspex and Changeling's discussions to make the workload more reasonable. We end off by agreeing that I'd put together a general storyboard and get it to her so she could begin working on the animatic itself as soon as possible.

This, however, presented a new problem which I really should have anticipated:

'Wait, how the hell am I going to make a storyboard?'

Some fun and relevant trivia about me is that I have dysgraphia. My hand movements when I'm using a pen or pencil inevitably turn out completely unintelligible to anyone other me. Making a straight line is somehow just beyond my abilities (insert joke about being gay here). This naturally translates over to drawing as well, so any sort of traditional storyboard was a non-option. I knew there had to be some kind of work around, even if it was just taking in-game screenshots at the proper angles in no-clip mode and dropping character pngs on it to get the general idea. However, that would also mean I'd have a hard time showing the exact character angles I was thinking of. I knew there had to be a more elegant solution.

And that's when I remembered: 

Pathologic 1's console actually allows you to load in any character model you want in any location you mark. Which, in theory, meant that maybe I could storyboard it with exact in-game screenshots, complete with the character models standing exactly where I want them. 

I load up my Day 12 save in the cathedral, open up the console, spawn Daniil's character model in front of the Cathedral door, step back, and took this screenshot.

The benefits of working with a game that has no HUD. This is where the whole prospect of storyboarding this went from intimidating to exciting, and would eventually lead to the potato-faced prototype at the top of this post.

For the few days, I was routinely loading up the Day 12 Cathedral, spawning in Daniil's model, using the no-clip camera to compose a shot that felt proper for dialogue it'd be accompanying, and taking screenshots, then reloading the save to remove that spawned Daniil model so I could begin the process all over again with him in a new spot. I would then load those shots into Premiere and began stitching them together while writing annotations and movement directions. Once that was done, I'd sync the voice audio and music in order to make sure Dani had as much context as possible for what the final scene would look like and the tone I was aiming for. Finally, I exported the initial sections I had, upload it to my side channel, and then send it over to Dani for feedback or approval.

This eventually lead to the first draft from Dani, which you can see here: https://youtu.be/Zqlfg76fjwI 

The moment I saw Daniil enter, I knew I'd made the right call. 

Skye's impeccable performance of the Bachelor really deserves special note here as well. I sincerely mean it when I say that I believe that everyone turned in a fantastic performance, particularly here in the finale, but Skye's performance is really something special. It's staggering to me how well he managed to navigate these 4 very distinct conversations with radically different moods while consistently finding new emotions and readings on often repeated lines. As an actress, I respect the hell out of him for pulling it off, and as an editor, I love it because this kind of emotional range gives me a LOT to work with. 

With that said, I'm still in awe at how much personality Dani brings to the prickly prick, even in these early draft versions.

He looks so smug and grumpy, I love him. Dani does such an incredible job at nailing his characterization throughout. Until he finds Eva, I don't think there's a single shot of the animatic where it doesn't feel like Daniil's thinking and analyzing while still feeling overwhelmingly self-assured, which is about as true to character for him as anything could be. The whole thing shows an amazing understanding of who the Bachelor is as a character and I'm still incredibly impressed by it even now.

From there, I kept working on rounding out the rest of the storyboard over the next couple weeks in between working on the main video and contacting collaborators, while Dani continued polishing and refining what we had. 

As things continued though, I began to struggle a bit in trying to figure out how to connect the different conversations. Looking at the first draft of Block's conversation in this later WIP cut shows what I mean: https://youtu.be/ZfmFCwpkazI

Initially, I hadn't really planned on how the characters near the throne (Maria, Aglaya, and Block) would exit the scene, so when it came back in the animatic, I realized that they just kinda... vanished. Wasn't too worried about the continuity of it cause, I mean, it's Patho, things popping into and out of existence is the norm. The bigger issue was that it made Aglaya's final shot feel a little weightless and anticlimactic. She deserved better than to just be awkwardly let go like that. The transition between the conversations was begging for an exclamation point to show that Aglaya's story was over, but one that also had to serve to make Block look all the more important since this is where you choose your final ending. So I needed a way to make Maria and Aglaya vanish in a dignified way, while also making Block seem as powerful as I could. 

I dropped the WIP into premiere and found the frame where Daniil was walking away from Aglaya. I dropped a transparent rectangle of solid black on top of it, then cut out a spotlight shape over Daniil, and roughened out the edges to make it a bit more natural. It looked pretty good, all things considered, made Block look badass while giving his conversation a unique look, gave a good excuse for where the girls go to, and with the Patho2's spotlight sound effect, it'd be a perfect send off for Aglaya. So I went through and made an overlay for each new angle and suddenly the whole exchange became a spotlight conversation. 

The second, similar problem was figuring out just how the hell I was going to get Daniil to go upstairs. For a player, it's a perfectly reasonable action cause, hey, video game, poking around places on a whim is part of what games are about. But for a character like Daniil, he'd be ready to wash his hands of all of this and finally get so god damn rest, so I needed to find some kind of excuse. 

This excuse came when my friend Chris Doerksen sent me over the second album he composed for this project, Steppe by Steppe, which happened to feature the track New Day. As soon as I heard it, I immediately realized the right answer would be to have him simply sense her spirit right as he was about to leave. She is a phantom after all, and a big part of Daniil's arc throughout his story is coming to terms with the fact that there are things beyond his limited senses and understanding. Not to mention the rolling synths at the start of the New Day had a really ghostly mood to them, so using the needle drop as almost a wordless call from Eva to get him upstairs felt right. Once I plugged it all in, I also found that the song itself perfectly captured all the peaks and valleys that conversation goes through, while also running long enough to be able to continue even after leaving the Cathedral. With all these strengths going for it, New Day quickly became the bedrock for the ending of the animatic, as well as the main show. 

Once I had that figured out, everything else came together pretty quickly, and before I knew it I had the final version of the storyboard in hand to send over to Dani. Flash forward to a month later and she gets back to me with what would be the final Work-in-Progress cut: https://youtu.be/p-4o8KieSD0

It was everything I was hoping it'd be and more. I honestly only watched through the entire thing once before giving it the greenlight to begin work on the final draft because I was so floored that I couldn't wait to see what it'd look when all was said and done, especially Eva's section.

From there, you can more or less guess the rest. I kept piecing together the video as a whole, while Dani wrapped up work on the animatic about two weeks before the video was scheduled to go live and sent it over. I drop it into the project, add the last of the polish, footstep sound effects, musical stings, a couple adjustment layers, etc. and, well, you know what the end result looked like.

I loved working on (almost) every part of this project from beginning to end, but I guess I wanted to hone in on this section in particular both because of the unique solutions and approach it required, but also just cause I'm honestly really proud of it in particular. It's something that required a lot of coordination and  to put together and the end result is what I personally think is the single coolest thing on my channel.

Perhaps more importantly though, I think it's without question the single most successful creative collaboration I've ever been involved with. It took a lot of people's very diverse talents to make it as fantastic as it is. Dani's fantastic and expressive art rightfully takes center stage, but when it gets mixed in with Chris' stunning music, the incredible voice work of Skye, mothcub, SulMatul, Eyepatch Wolf, and Jade, not to even mention the brilliant writing from Ice-Pick Lodge themselves, and (yeah, I'll be proud of myself) my own personal touches in direction, shot composition, and editing, it all come together to make every piece of it so much more memorable than any of it would have ever been on it's own.

Whatever else can be said about that animatic, the most undeniable thing about it is that there's no way I could have ever made it alone and I'm unbelievably appreciative to everyone who helped make it happen. By it's very nature, it can be really easy while working on YouTube stuff to get stuck in the mind set of 'I have to do everything on my own.' You get so caught up doing your own writing, recording, editing, etc. that you forget that working with other people to improve it all can be an option. However, working on this animatic did more than anything else to shoe me just how valuable these kinds of collaborations can be, how much they could push me to improve my own skills, and how much they can lead to something that's greater than the sum of it's already incredible part. Suffice to say, that's a spirit I want to do my best to maintain going forward on these projects and with everyone kind enough to work alongside me to make them happen. 

Anyways, I think that covers everything I wanted to say about the animatic for now. This is my first time writing a 'behind the scenes' post like this, so if you have any feedback about it or have any other sections or elements you'd like me to break down, please be sure to comment and let me know. I'd like to be able to make more posts like this in future, especially as the next projects continue to come together, but of course I also want to make sure they're well worth your time and relevant to what people want to know.

With that said, I think we'll call it there. As always, think you for your support, it sincerely means the world and allows content like this to happen in the first place.

Hope ya'll have a good one today~
- Ruby ✨