Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Update #7

Good evening all. Welcome once again to the weekend. Another progress update on the latest bullshittery. Now in the gruelling 9th week, I'm afraid. Sorry that it's taking so long.

Last week I said I was working on the final "segment" that required keyframing. And that process has been completed successfully.

As of Monday, the fully-edited video entered quality assurance - the process of polishing the video as a coherent whole. Fixing problems that may arise with each test render and rewatch.

• Week 1 - Pre-production work. Trying to plan a decent comedic structure by watching the vods and taking notes.
• Week 2 - Principle cutting. Producing a 25 minute rough cut from those notes.
• Week 3 - The first week of animation work. Getting from 0 to 5 minutes with text and animations.
• Week 4 - More animation work. Getting from 5 to 8 minutes. Then I became stuck!
• Week 5 - Rebuilding a horrible broken (and crucially important) dialogue scene from the single player. Animating it from 8 to 13 minutes.
• Week 6 - Queuing up all artwork for commissioned artists so they have time to do their work before the end of the project.
• Week 7 - Editing the 17th minute to the 22nd.
• Week 8 - Completion of all major keyframing. At least to a draft form (with the cutscenes)
• Week 9 - Quality assurance process from 0:00 to 5:22

Frustratingly, that process really hasn't been a speedy one. Reaching only 5 minutes and 22 seconds out of 20 minutes and 22 seconds. Feeling doubly so because of the videos increased duration.

Alas, it definitely feels like one of those videos where viewing the "woods through the trees" yields many more problems than usual. And those problems have mostly been in continuity of eyeline from scene to scene.

Divinity has quite a bit of camera movement going on, particularly on scaling and rotation. And since my party members are a lot more present then they have been in the prior chapters, I'm often finding that my keyframing is sending the eyeline all over the place. With a simple rotation of the camera potentially spiralling the text to the edges of the frame.

So what I'm generally finding is that fixes are not just minor things like spelling corrections. But lots of re-keyframing work of text to be smoother from scene to scene. Meaning that the quality assurance fixing times are swinging wildly from 10 minutes per task, to an hour and 10 minutes per task. It's quite annoying.

I also decided to walk back a creative decision I'd made, in which I used scaling to zoom into important things in the scene. On my first watch through I realised I'd overdone it, because I couldn't follow what was going on.

I went so far as to recut the whole opening 2 minutes to be calmer. Costing Monday and Tuesday. But now it's much easier on the eyes.

Here's a shot of the current timeline:

My heart sinks a bit. Because that logically tells me it's going to take another 3 weeks of work. I was expecting to have finished way more. And perhaps it will speed up as time goes on.

But for now I'm afraid the status is that quality assurance polishing is ongoing. With iterations of rendering, watching for errors, and fixing them in batches. Looking to get it ready for you as soon as I can.

Have a lovely weekend everybody. And thank you very much for your patience.