The Forest - Update #7

Good evening everybody. So it's week 13 on progress on The Forest video essay. Here's how things are going: 

• Week 11 - Completion of the 1st hour render.
• Week 12 (last week) - Audio recording of sections 14 to 19 (of 24). Slowed by some rework of the script.
• Week 13 (this week) - Filling in the visuals for this section.

Here's a shot of the current timeline as it exists in Adobe Premiere.

And here's a second breakdown of the two headaches I'm getting currently. The areas that are going to prove challenging to get right:

So firstly, the transition from script to audio was not as smooth this time around. The preliminary quality assurance process for this type of thing basically involves repetition, repetition, repetition. And I felt some parts needed improvement.

So I reworked the script over the weekend. Re-recorded those areas last night. And managed to cut most of it today. It has set me back a little bit though.

So right now, I'm adding the visuals to match the recorded audio.

Difficult Bit 1:

So the first challenging visual section is right at the beginning: 14.) The problem of scale. It's the segment that I really wanted to end the last render on. But simply ran out of time.

This part is hopefully not too indulgent. But it's where I go down a bit of a rabbit hole in relation to something The Forest is doing. Concerning an error that I feel some pieces of media often make, in which the creators lose sight of the limitations involves in their central premise. Things that can severely damage immersion, particularly if the plot relies on those limitations.

I wanted to reference the 2020 film Underwater. And the 2016 adventure game Valley. Showing relevant clips from both.

Getting footage of Underwater has proven to be a bit of a headache. Despite having the footage in mp4 format, Premiere refused to recognise it. No matter how much I'd try to tweak it.

Using VLC Media player to convert/save it into a different format produces anomalous results. Including bizarrely corrupted audio layers and unacceptable compression artifacts. I'm pretty sure I have a solution, but it's probably best to test it overnight. Visuals still pending here.

Some efficiency hours lost trying to work out this headscratcher.

The other game example, Valley has a unique'ish problem in that the footage I have for it is so old that it uses FRAPS. And is about 876GB in size.  That took a bit of time to unpack. And generate the necessary cache files for editing.

But once I had it, scrubbing it was actually really easy.

I sped up the footage by about 1000% and cycled through the playthrough over the course of 2 hours looking for a very specific visual thing. And have placed markers down for where those are. So with that scrubbing done, I'm hoping to visual component should be easy to assemble.

But again, some efficiency hours lost just trying to find the necessary footage. Some late-stage preproduction I suppose?

The middle bit of the video should be simple.

Difficult Bit 2:

So the second difficult bit is towards the end.

Throughout the video, I've been walking the viewer through questions being raised by the plot, for a purpose that should become clear later. But previously the order didn't matter much. Since those queries are raised at multiple points in the open world game.

But section 19.) The Finale concerns the ending to the whole story. And it's here that something weird happens. Because I'm finding myself actively vocalising the questions in the livestream as it's all moving in a linear fashion.

For example, the recorded script might say "the player moves into the room and sees Meagan, sitting near a pool of blood". But the livestream itself has me walk towards her and say "Meagan...?", with much more natural emotion, since it's my live reaction. As such, the edit far favours the livestream voice for the authenticity.

But now the relationship between visuals and script is flip flopped. As the visuals are not filler to go with the voice, but the voices follows the pace of whatever happened in the livestream.

Here though, Adobe Premiere live recording to the rescue. 

As I can just record directly onto the timeline to match the footage on the screen. Rather than doing it in one long session and cutting.

It's a little unusual, but it should be perfectly doable. It'll just make that section of visual editing a bit more complicated. As I'll need to voice the last 5 minutes as it's happening.

So in short:

• Audio recording for 1:00:00 to 1:30:00 mostly complete. But it wasn't as smooth as I wanted to change some things.
• The initial 10 minutes involved getting some footage for Underwater (2020) and Valley (2016). So a bit of extra preproduction time.
• That last bit of audio/visual editing might be a little tricky to get right.
• Adding of the visuals now underway. Then quality assurance.

Have a lovely week all :)