Ready or Not/SWAT 4 - Update #2

Good evening everybody. An update on how things are going with the latest bullshittery.

I'm currently working on a combi-video of Ready or Not and SWAT 4. And last week was the cutting week for the footage, whilst this week is meant to be for the keyframing/animating of the first 5 minutes. I should be on 3 minutes complete today. I'm currently ahead at 5 minutes and 12 seconds.

The reason for being ahead is due to the cold I caught last week. It rendered my voice inoperable, meaning I could only edit and not livestream twice a day. Those hours went into this.

Though admittedly the keyframing isn't as swift as I was hoping.

Now that the 'rubber has met the road' on this animating, I can report that the automated tracking is very challenging. I'm mostly having to do things manually. Use of the automation is rare.

Halo bullshittery was something of a treat. Having really strong colour/light contrast between character heads and backgrounds. With every Spartans have lots of stuff on their helmets that can be easily tracked. Not so for these games. There's lots of smooth surfaces, muted colours against dark backgrounds, and frustratingly for Ready or Not, literal camouflage for some of the SWAT 4 helmets.

That doesn't make a lick of sense to me from an in-universe perspective. Surely you want your police to be as obvious as possible? But the result is the same as Arma - an easily confused tracking algorithm that struggles to keep the text steady atop the head.

Ready or Not also has a horrid amount of misty particles for everything. Door breaches, gunshots, etc. Along with weird light reflections and changes in contrast. It's making it all a bit difficult. A lot of stuff needs to be keyframed by hand.

Aside from the normal scenes with text in them, I have at least two far more complicated animated sequences. I'll definitely save those for the last week of rework stuff. Before I sink hours into work that might hit the cutting room floor.

These complicated scenes are:

• An heavily edited bit from Silence of the Lambs, taking the piss out of the Fairfax Residence level which is clearly meant to be a Buffalo Bill analogue.

• A slow motion sequence where Jinx kills me by tripping over an obvious trap. And I have my character looking thoroughly unimpressed as the explosion spreads to engulf him.

I actually made a crude cut of that some months ago. A teaser, I suppose, for those interested - https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/m9p6z15ky4ndvh4cbel4z/Jinx-no.mp4?rlkey=4kn5mdkzncydwwslcokt6qzvm&st=wgzl9bsw&dl=0

Creativity wise, it's worth bringing up the opening scene of the video. I had a bit of fun with it.

Digby is giving a training talk to Digi by introducing him to the NPC civilian in the police station. Digi then did the usual ZF thing and shot the civilian just over a dozen times. Unfortunately all of this happened off screen.

I was originally planning to have lots of little BANG icons appear, in time with the gunshots. Getting the timing using placeholder numbers a bit like this. I was going to have the bangs fly into the frame, or maybe overlay the original text. Something to visually indicate what's just happened.

But I figured that might be a tad boring, so I wondered if I should make the text shake, or bounce, or break apart using pixel polly. An effect you've seen me use many times before. But I decided to experiment further.

What if I were to time it so that each time there's a gunshot, I punch a mask in the text to make it look like a simple bullet hole. The text layer remains, but there's just a series of mounting circular masks snapping into place with each shot.

But then I take that same layer with the masks, invert the property from 'Subtrack' to 'Add'. Making 14 little circles of text with their own properties. And then I apply Pixel Polly only to those.

I can make it look like the text is being whittled away by gunshots, like something out of road runner.

I'm having my fun. Editing continues :)