Halo bullshittery - Update #5

Good afternoon everybody. Hope you're having a lovely weekend. A follow up post from yesterday as promised.

For those who didn't see it, the latest bullshittery is now available for viewing in the form of Random Halo Bullshittery - https://youtu.be/JiFGO5WSofE.

I hope you all like it.

A pretty smooth project, truth be told. Taking almost exactly 5 weeks. Delays were mostly caused by external factors - notable the UK tax filing deadline - rather than anything specific to Halo. I'd love to do another one eventually.

The timeline in the end looked like this:

This consists of roughly 50-53 clips, nested within Adobe Premiere's sequence system:

Let me talk about some of the editing challenges and choices in this one.

As mentioned before, tracking was really straight-forward, leading to an overwhelming amount of automated work. I found that the red/blue colours were very easy to pick out from the background, even in cluttered scenes. The Spartans even had very obvious details on their helmets that made for easy tracking, if not full-on blue arrows for allies.

I even had that occasional problem where sometimes it was overtracked. With every single bump of the models being translated directly into the text, frame by frame. Which sometimes ran counter to the objective of easy reading.

Here for example I decided to step in and redo it manually, intentionally letting it 'slip'. No longer following Harry's head, because doing so would make the text move in an unsatisfying way. You can see that I've given the text some nice curves. Making it move slower than Harry is, etc. No need to track too precisely if it makes it look shit.

Here in this scene, despite the prevalence of tracking arrows, I decided to forego the text entirely. For the multiple coloured arrows would prove to be competing with any additional ones I'd put in.

I also removed my speaking text at the bottom of the screen for the same reason. I shouldn't actively compete with lots of motion in the middle of the frame.

As you can tell, I decided to lean into the Halo colour schemes for the spoken dialogue, rather than the usual white and yellow. I did something very similar for TF2 bullshitteries and I felt it much more thematically appropriate.

Therefore most of the text is either red or blue.

The colour usually changes for Slayer mode specific armours too. Such as here with Bundy.

The process of 'making' - cutting shapes out of the layers to make the illusion of objects being in the frame - was actually very difficult on this project. Very geometrically complicated things to try and conceal, in most cases. A lot of it took quite a bit of time.

This particular scene below proved to be a bit of a bug-bear for an unexpected reason.

The front pillar needed to be masked to make it look like Rotary was behind it. But the nozzle of the needler gun is a very similar colour to the snow behind it. Meaning it looks like the masking job is flawed and the pillar is still blocking when it shouldn't be.

On repeating viewings, it looked like an obvious glitch to the right side.

My solution? Stick in something called an 'Adjustment layer' - which simply applies visual effects onto the layers below it. Add the effects 'Contrast and Brightness'. And cut a mask to wrap around the nozzle of the needler gun. Greatly darkening the metal and making the blocking object much more obvious.

That way, the viewer won't think it's a mistake.

The pixel polly effect makes a return. A regular part of my editing toolbox now. For it makes breaking things into little pieces much more efficient. As it simply fragments text layers into bits at a pre-determined time. Becoming particles you can control with gravity and velocity.

Tracking on the covenant vehicles was notably challenging. Pretty much all banshees, wraiths, etc had to be done manually. The smooth surfaces really confusing the positional tracking. Let alone scaling (zooming)

This bullshittery prominent features a little cheeky insert. Where I decided to replace the footage with one shot in singleplayer due to the high amount of movement.

The original visuals for a 5 second segment looked like this. A total mess. A giant scoreboard popup. Constant spinning on the spot, etc.

So I hopped into single player, loaded up the same map, grabbed the same gun, and switched out the shot for something that looked like this. It's noticable if you scrutinise the scene of course. But I can imagine most people won't notice the little cheeky switcheroo.

And lastly, the most prominent editing thing to talk about was the inclusion of a short clip from Source Filmmaker. This time joking about how I can edit things in post to make Rotary look silly and there's nothing he can do about it :D

Originally the plan was to outsource this to one of Digi's friends. Someone far more experienced with SFM. But a weekend dive into the program revealed just how readily available all the models I needed were. So I figured I'd give it a shot instead.

First I found a green-screen only map:

Then I positioned a spartan model at roughly the correct distance. The first attempts at getting it to dance were less than impressive.

By the way, I highly recommend Source Filmmaker if you ever wanted to dip into animation for fun. I've dabbled with far less forgiving animation suites. SFM impressed me with how easy some of the mechanics were. Such as letting you grip whole arms or legs, with the rest of the bones automatically interpolating the relevant movement. Not every program does that, so it feels like a treat each time.

After a few tries I was gradually making some progress. Though the colours were still way off and the armour far too shiny.

Since I knew I was using 6 seconds of the Swedish song Caramelldansen, I was able to find a 165 beat metronome and bake it into the audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKsfCu4SedY. That made it easier to animate to the beat.

And I was also able to find a small executable which removes all the native lightsources from the map. Letting me put in my own to remove that shine. And giving it a nice blue hue for the sake of matching the snow.

Once I was happy with the results, I was able to insert the clip into the scene with a simple green keying effect:

And then beneath his feet I inserted a fake blobby shadow. It's basically just a dark grey solid background with a slightly transparent mask cut into it. With some manual tugging on the handles to make it roughly match the dancing of the figure above. Nothing particularly fancy.

Lastly, I had two volunteers in the form of Umlaut and Duckslayer who were both kind enough to pop into a private game of Halo 3. Duckslayer stood behind a pillar and shot Umlaut with a needler gun, in order to provide a shot of Rotary 'being killed instead' and flying off screen.

With a small amount of masking, I was able to insert it, reverse it, etc.

And voila. Scene complete :)

Now, insofar as Halo as a project, this Master Project file has great room for expansion. There's a lot of highlights still to properly scrub. Including numerous funny mini games downloaded from the Halo workshop. I imagine parts 2 and 3 would go down really, really well. Let me know in the future if you wanted those queued for editing.

Right now, I'll continue to make little tweaks to the project in preparation for the full public release. And once it's out, prepare the polls concerning the next game. As always, thank you sincerely for your extreme generosity all. Hope you're all having a lovely weekend.