The Forest Update #13 - The battle of the blockers

Good evening folks, I hope you're doing well. Another update for you on this video-essay front. Currently grinding to squeeze this out the door.

Grind is absolutely what it feels like. The video is in a stage I'm calling the"battle of the blockers". Meaning the overwhelming majority of the video is complete. The audio is balanced, the points are in the right places - but there are 14 blocker issues that collectively make it incomplete..

Solving them requires knuckling down on them one by one. Sometimes for the whole day. There are 14 now. And they're dropping. Agonisingly slowly.

They're so few that I can list them, if you're curious. This is what I'm currently working to resolve. As you can probably tell on a brief inspection, some of them fairly big:

• 1st - The reading, cutting and visual editing of 01 - Introduction. Script being touched up. Intentionally made to be the final part to make sure I don't repeat points made later.
• 2nd - The reading, cutting and visual editing of the closing statement - 24 - Conclusion. Script complete. Recording session tonight when the city goes quiet.
• 3rd - Art asset to insert - A rendition of the milk carton kid from The Forest as part of a joke about where the crayon pictures are coming from.
• 4th - Art asset to insert - A parody of a gossip magazine themed around the Ottoman Empire.
• 5th - Art assets to insert - An animated composition of speculation about there being something evil beneath The Forest. Final animations to complete.
• 6th - Art assets to insert - Cartoon figures talking about dynamite. Final animations to complete.
• 7th - A reminder to sweep all feedback/comments for easily correctable errors. The audience often has sharper eyes than mine. Especially this late in the game.
• 8th - Assorted stock images I would recognise from my quality assurance training.
• 9th - Castaway parody scene. "Wilson", parodied with a cannibal head from a far darker version of that film that uses this game's survival logic.
• 10th - A composition in which I show the audience the drawing of the bum Ilsemakesstuff covertly inserted into work I commissioned. Highlighting her joke would amuse the audience.
• 11th - A short counterpoint argument about the properties of nitro-glycerine from a blog post in America. Not entirely mandatory. But interesting to consider insofar as how effective 100+ year old dynamite would be.
• 12th - A demonstration of just how cumbersome a packed "bivvy" tent is, as a point for something in The Forest. I have one with me in this flat. It would be a shame to not simply show it. It's buried under furniture. I need to go and dig it out.
• 13th - A reminder to insert Youtube "tags" to let viewers skip over spoilers for the films Underwater (2020) and the adventure game Valley (2016). Can only come last, as it's something you do post-upload.
• 14th - A segment of the video shows the thumbnail in Youtube studio. But I've not made that yet. This would need to be one of the final touches.

So to the surprise of nobody, watching back a 3 hour project as part of quality assurance is a bit of a headache now. Particularly when one needs to stop, make notes, or corrections to the audio timeline. By the time you're done you've lost a significant portion of the editing day. Heck the last full check took away most of Monday.

But I am getting increased confidence in it now. It's getting there. There's really not much left.

Another property of this edit is how easy it is to introduce errors at this late stage. Owing to the fact that there are so many moving parts, that accidently making mistakes is frustratingly common. In the previous Monday edit, a simple keystroke accidently muted an whole segment. I now have to tread very carefully.

This is one of the reasons "Nests" are used in Adobe Premiere. Essentially breaking up one gigantic timeline into lots of smaller clips. Each one their OWN isolated timeline, with their own settings. Compartmentalisation. It's feels easier to quality assure a series of clips, one after the other, than it is one gigantic single video.

So for now I'm doing my best to knuckle down and crack on with it. Solving each of the issues one by one and doing another full watch through soon, looking for more I may have missed.

As always thank you for your extreme patience folks. I promise I'll be cracking on with a proper bullshittery as soon as possible.