NEW VIDEO - Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bullshittery (part 3)

Good afternoon everybody. I hope you're all having a lovely week.

I'm pleased to report that after about 11 weeks (bugger me), I was able to finish the latest bullshittery. I present to you Divinity II: Original Sin Bullshittery (part 3)

Let me know what you think. Once again, thank you for being so patient with me :)

This bullshittery ended up being very challenging indeed. Being the length of two back-to back-compilations. And it was far more mechanically complex.

It's made up of about 6 segments in Adobe Premiere:

• 4 the usual bullshittery editing
• 1 constructed for the sake of flow
• 1 cutscene replacement

Out of curiosity I've unpacked those segment to see what it looks like underneath. No wonder that takes about 4 hours to render. It's almost 300 individual After Effects compositions. I'm surprised my PC hasn't burnt into flames.

As an editing wrap-up phase, two lessons learnt or reaffirmed:

The first one is that this type of editing stands in rather stark contrast to your typical bullshittery. Much more akin to previous horror videos like Alien Isolation. Continuity between scenes has to be preserved for the sake of the developing story.

Rather than cutting isolated clips from long live-streams (with 99% of the content being irrelevant), this was a case of carefully going through 5-6 streams and shaving down to only what was necessary. Whilst memorising everything else in the event that I needed to go back to find an adjoining scene.

For whilst the process would be simple if this were a linear game, Divinity II has lots of open-world roaming. Which naturally meant that we'd go off in a weird directions. Or even get stuck on one boss fight, go away and then come back again.

That guide that I sent out before, showing our path:

Untangling that and memorising livestreams made the cutting and quality assurance complicated. Because rather than just assembling clips from a bucket of clips, I often had to go back to the livestreams to find short (5-10 second) audio clips to act as connective "glue" if something seemed weird in post.

A good example, that part just after meeting our gods? (the recording that I botched on the night itself and I talked about before?). The transition to the banter about being "god" was extremely abrupt. Necessitating an insert of me going "huh" in a forest. Followed by a couple of seconds taken from the very start of a livestream, bringing the audience up to speed "so that's where we are insofar as the game is concerned".

The original cut, which just hard cuts directly into into the godwoken talk. Because I genuine had no relevant scene in which we discussed meeting our gods. It never came up in conversation outside of here.

The revised cut, with a breather for the audience. Necessitating having a strong understanding of where everything is in the edit to find such connective glue.

There are tons of moments like that. Where just merrily cutting clips together would have made for a confusing and frustrating watch. I had to be a bit more elegant in places. Quality assurance took so long because it was rarely a case of minor mistakes. But much more a case of trying to identify which sections were hard to follow.

The second lesson, I was completely wrong about the later streams perhaps being easier to edit. As I speculated in part 1.

The fact that the party are accepting quests together is great. But that doesn't stop the overall roaming nature of the open world RPG. And with the party together it also means that the individual party members are visible on screen - a lot.

And static, unmoving text becomes weirdly obvious if the speaker is on screen and moving.

As an editor, that's great. It means more opportunities to make animated text. Which I think looks way more interesting than anything static. But as with all things in animation, it takes time. Lots of time. Even with auto-tracking in places, each scene takes work and rework.

Alas I don't really have the numbers. But to guess, I'd say that the older bullshitteries had something like 70% static text and about 30% animated. But this one, by virtue of the subjects usually being present somewhere on the screen has more than 95% of the text animated and following heads. And the vast majority is frame heavy.

Fun to look at it. But as you can tell, pretty time consuming. And that's absolutely going to remain an issue for part 4 and something to plan for.

Lastly it's worth talking about that cutscene.

Divinity II's chapter switchover was quite lacklustre. Consisting of a papyrus scroll with poorly timed text.

Therefore I asked BewBewDingo to draw something a bit more interesting. I provided her a rough guide in the form of this draft. A rowboat making its way to a ship:

She came back with this initial test version for feedback:

And then later she provided the final assets, which looks marvellous. Super detailed!

Because each of those layers are "smart layers" in Adobe Photoshop, I was able to reconstruct a mirror project of them in Adobe After Effects. With each piece (the rowboat for example) being it's own independent composition. With position, rotation and scaling properties and the precise same resolution as specified by BewBew.

From there it was simply a case of moving the positioning to animate.

I had some fun in many places. I'm up to my usual tricks with "Null Objects". Little invisible squares which are quietly doing their work behind almost every scene. My little helpers. 

The action is keyframed onto them rather than the text. Sometimes repeated actions using an expression. And often parented to each other so they inherit movement, without having to do them all individually

And some areas of the cinematic utilize Turbulent Displace. Which is a great way to make static pictures look like they're moving in the wind, such as flags.

The Turbulent Displace effect is looking at a reference layer of blacks and whites. And is moving based on the darkness shown. And you can move that around to provide motion.

Malady's cloak for example. With the fabric sections being moved by the turbulent displacement and the pauldrons held static, I can replicate a breeze.

A few little blobs added to mimic individual gusts at opportune moments. And the scene overall has a bit more life. And is hopefully a little more interesting to watch than a scroll with some writing on it.

Once again I asked the voice actress Amelia Tyler to narrate the cutscene. Who voiced the character of Malady in the actual game.  You can see her here as part of a motion capture training course - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo4Y3zaIHCk 

Like many voice actors/actresses, she was available to hire. And I took the opportunity to queue up some additional lines for much later in the series as her character repeatedly appears. As the party discover what "path to Divinity" actually means and why Voidwoken are bursting through into this world.

Additionally the artists NervousHawk and TwistieZ were kind enough to provide their talents with various cutaway gags. Many thanks to them both.

For the moment I'm going to take a short break. Then crack on with the next bullshittery. Expect to see polls for that soon, as this time it's the audience's choice. And you can tell me what you're like me to do.

Thank you kindly all :)