Divinity: Original Sin 2 - Update #4

Good evening everybody. Hope you're all doing great. The weather in the UK is beautiful at the moment.

Here's another update on editing progress. So it's week number 5 (more like week 4, insofar as editing is concerned) on Divinity Bullshittery part 3.

Here's a breakdown of the time:

• Week 1 - Pre-production work. Trying to plan a decent comedic structure.
• Week 2 - Principle cutting. Producing a 25 minute rough cut.
• Week 3 - The first week of animation work. Getting from 0 to 5 minutes
• Week 4 - Animation work. Getting from 5 to 8 minutes.
• Week 5 - Working on something custom and tricky. Which continues up until the 17th minute.

Here's a basic overview of the timeline:

And here's a more detailed breakdown.

Note that the white text indicates areas of the bullshittery that are mechanically straightforward. Bullshittery keyframing. The standard "add text and animate it smoothly".

So what I'd like to talk about is the blue section called Divinity Discovery. 

Divinity Discovery

So at this point in the storyline, something important is shown to the player.

On touching an inert statue in a crypt, the player is flung into a meeting with one of the Seven Gods of Rivellon (one for each species/race). And there, your god explains that the player has been selected as their divine champion, or "godwoken", with the express purpose of racing the others to some unspecified prize.

This means that the party members are placed in direct competition with each other. Which becomes extremely relevant in the later parts of the series. Contextualising the whole finale.

Without that context, the viewer is going to be confused as hell.

The problem is, just like Judge Orivand right at the start of the playthrough...I botched the recording without realising during the livestream. Clicking the statue and being whisked away when some of the others were on a loo break. And subsequently skipping all the important plot dialogue to rush back. Thinking it would be rude not to.

I genuinely thought it was some pointless side quest.

But it gets worse. In the livestreams we took an extremely circuitous route across the Chapter 1 island. Visiting some locations multiple times. And only 2 of us clicked the statue, with the other 2 doing it weeks later.

So I not only failed to record the extremely crucial dialogue. We never really discussed it as a party. Or what it meant.

As an editor, that's a nightmare.

I need to deliver the key bits of story information within a few short minutes (or seconds). And that simply never happened in the footage I have.

Meaning that what I'm doing now is do precisely what I did with the Judge Orivand scene. Carefully re-record the dialogue in a solo game, and cutting it into the edit in such a way that it seems natural.

If I choose not to do that, then the audience isn't going to understand what a "Godwoken" is in the dozens of times it's going to be mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3.

Also, this section sees the payoff to the earlier setup with those seven source coloured orbs at the start. Hopefully making it expressly clear that it was the gods that intervened to save the party. And that there are lots of them!

So this is why the edit slows down and gets more complicated. As I need to do the bullshittery keyframing, yes. But first I need to structure newly recorded footage from the game, because what happened in the live-streams was a mess.

I'm also tempted to speed through a playthrough with a lizard and a dwarf. Just to capture the dialogue for those specific gods. To juxtapose the dialogue to make it crystal clear we're in direct competition.

So for this week, work is underway on constructing that blue section. And properly keyframing it so hopefully it all makes sense. A crucial bit of narrative that the series will need going forward :)