Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Update #5

Hello everybody. Welcome to your fast-approaching weekend. It's week number 6 on Divinity Bullshittery part 3. And here's another breakdown on progress.

• 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.

So this week has been one of emails, thinking and photoshop cutting. For I've paused at the 13th minute in order to prepare work for a small stable of commissioned artists who are kind enough to help with with the cutaway gags.

As a result, this weeks timeline looks a bit like this. Identifying the parts the artists are needed. And giving them decent visual guides:

This involves any situation that would be funnier as a picture, rather than simple text.

On that front, I've been going into photoshop and trying to provide examples (usually cut from stock images) to best explain what I need insofar as pose. And then the artists can go and create a few sketches and we liaise back and forth:

In theory by the time I'm entering the quality assurance phase, the artists should be coming back with the completed drawings. And I can just slot them into the bullshittery as I normally do. In time for the final renders.

So the one exception to this work is the transition between the near end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2. Because as with many things in Divinity II, it has a cutscene.

In my opinion however it's just...poorly made.

It's a cutscene alright. But it consists of a papyrus letter, with the camera panning down, and writing appearing as the narrator (the actress for Wendigo) speaks.

But not only is a piece of paper visually uninspiring, it has particle effects over it, the handwriting isn't even in sync with the narrator voice, and there's duplicate subtitles at the base of the screen. Which are also not in sync with the narrators voice.

God damn Larian. What? Was it Friday afternoon when you did that one?! God damn.

That...won't do. That won't do at all.

I've been drafting a short alternative cutscene for the trip to The Lady Vengeance - the warship the party take over for the duration of the game (the equivalent of the Ebon Hawk from KOTOR).

This cutscene simply involves a rowboat trip out to the waiting Lady. With waves crashing at the base of the screen. And the party members having a short conversation about the meaning behind the narrators words. I'm also going to once again asked Amelia Tyler (Malady's voice actress) to voice it.

As such, the later part of the week involved drafting a previsualisation guide for the assets I'd need. And crudely animating it so it's clear what I'd need.

So with that task out of the way, I can now return to the main editing. From the 13th minutes to the 22nd. Probably working backwards a little bit. Because the final parts are a bit more mechanically straight-forward.

The editing continues. But fairly soon, quality assurance of what's been done. As I start to pull the threads of the video together into a coherent whole.