Rust - The Battle for Honeypot Hill - Update #10

Good afternoon everybody. It's been two weeks since part 4 of 5. And I can report that I've nearly finished part 5. It's soon to enter quality assurance for expected delivery next week.

At which point, all 5 pieces will be finished in draft form. And I'll begin the process of stitching them together. And attempting to replace the missing/temporary scenes for the final version.

Here's a total overview of the timeline for the near complete video. The total runtime has gone from 1 hour and 22 minutes to 1 hour and 33 minutes.

And here's a shot of the part I've been working on for 2 weeks. It consists of 14 individual sequences. Each with their own editing challenges. And this segment is a bit longer at 26 minutes.

First and foremost, let me talk about the Megalovania sequence. And oh hell what an editing pain that has proven.

My objective with part 5 is to present this whole Rust battle/siege in an interesting and funny way. And I figured the best way to start it, would be a short montage cut to some music.

The Rust game folders lets you insert MIDI files, to be played on the various instruments you can find scattered around the game world. Trumpets, drum sets, etc.

And during the livestreams, we all gathered in the lobby to show off our various MIDI collections. At which point I started playing the file for Undertale - MEGALOVANIA

From there, I'd like the camera to zoom up quickly to give an aerial view of the base. To serve as an establishing shot. To let the audience understand the geography before the cutting gets faster.

And also to show where the attack would be coming from. There's going to be a pan to the north west, then a zoom and then a cut to the incoming attackers, rushing up the hill like this.

But the first headache - the MEGALOVNIA track in the Rust MIDI file is not moving at the right speed.

Not being an audio guy, I wasn't entirely sure what the root of the issue is. But attempting any sort of transition into the full version of the song would produce very unsatisfying results. You could tell that the tracks were not in sync.

Thankfully though, Bavon to the rescue.

ZF Bavon - being a talented audio guy - was able to create three different versions of the track with a very smooth transition. I think he simply played the piano himself, rather than created a MIDI at the correct speed.

But it got me out of that problem in a jiffy. The entrance to the song is nice and smooth. So thank you Bavon.

The next problem, the establishing shots. I did have some drone footage of course. But since we were looking for enemies on the perimeter, rather than getting an overview of the base for viewers, they're not ideal.

So instead, I was able to get a local Rust server going again. Giving myself those aforementioned admin tools. Infinite resources, etc.

And after a couple of hours last Sunday morning, I was able to create this - a replica of Honeypot Hill.

It's not perfect. But it doesn't really need to be. I only really need it for distant shots. It's just a hollow façade. There's nothing on the inside. Therefore it was easy to create.

But whenever I need to communicate to the audience where everybody was, a third person static floating camera is extremely useful.

The next thing I wanted to use this shell base for, was certain action shots in the montage. For at one point we suffer an MLRS strike. We caught it from multiple different angles during the livestreams.

But of course, the shell of a base + admin tools lets me be way more creative with my camera angles. Therefore I wanted to do something like this clip below. In dispersed with our livestream reactions.

The montage isn't finished though. Because holy hell, last Sunday was one hilarious struggle. Let me tell you about these stubborn little prima donnas:

All they had to do during my cinematic filming, would be to shoot down the incoming MLRS rockets I would be repeatedly firing at the shell base. To let me film explosions, debris, cool bits, etc.

But oh noooooo. Sunday was going to be the 'lets make this a headache day for Soviet'.

The first take. The MLRS salvo comes in. But only a couple of AA guns actually fire. Leaving lots of damage to the squishy parts of the façade base. Forcing me to faff around fixing stuff, replacing campfires, water collectors, wind turbines, etc.

The second take, not only to the AA guns fail to shoot until the missiles are hitting the base. But when they do, they fire directly into the doors and fencing. And I'm again on base repair duty.

Then I shimmy the SAM sites back against the wall to give them more clearance. And they seemingly explode backwards/on themselves. And the missiles blow yet another hole in the façade base.

So I remove the walls for the sake of the close up angle and stop trusting the turrets. Telling the MLRS to fire wide. But now the angle is all wrong and it doesn't match the original footage. They need to shoot at the base, otherwise this isn't going to work.

The next take, they're firing straight now. And on time.

But now they're exploding the rockets really high up. So the camera starting position is wrong and you can see me rapidly panning up, whilst swearing under my breath.

Next came that cool shot of the MLRS missiles screaming past the camera. Not intentionally though, but the SAM sites decided they were NOT GOING TO FIRE AT ALL.

Leading to more unnecessary damage to the façade base.

SAM turrets you little bastards!!

After a short break to calm down:

I WILL GET THIS SHOT OF THE MISSILES EXPLODING. I don't care how many Sam sites I need to admin teleport into the sea as examples to the others. THEY WILL NOT DEFY ME!!

So the job isn't finished. I moved on from this part of the montage rather than get stuck. I'll circle back to it in the QA.

The next thing to discuss is the use of the program FORTIFY. A neat little base building Rust thing on Steam.

I was able to easy rebuild the entire layout of the base in Fortify. And then refer to it whenever I needed to explain where things were. Representing the players with those little green or red dots that Rust uses to identify players down binoculars.

Hopefully it should look interesting in the final thing.

Lastly, there's been a bit of an audio problem that's plagued me this project. I've mentioned it before.

I made a slight mistake of baking in the teamspeak audio with the game audio. Whoops.

Normally that's not too much of an issue. I can just shimmy the audio back and forth a little bit to drown out anything I don't need. But let's just say that the teamspeak during this battle was "busy". Lots of voices yelling. Be it enemy positions, battle orders, status reports, etc.

As such, trying to properly find clean audio is proving to be difficult. And it'll continue being difficult in QA.

The work continues. I'll try to deliver this part 5 to you next week.