Rising Storm Vietnam - Update #2

Good evening everybody. I hope you're all having a smooth week. An update on progress for Rising Storm Vietnam Bullshittery.

Thus far progress is going smoothly, if a little difficult to quantify. It's about editing day 9 of a probably 20 to 25 days. And I'm certainly in the middle-ish of the project. Moving between clips a little inconsistently. Here's a shot of the timeline:

The reason for the inconsistency is the blue bit. Because whilst I started the project knowing which clips I wanted for the intro and ending, that middle was mostly undecided. And gave me challenges in two forms:

• Some of the middle segments require artist commissions. So I'll need to decide which ones I need to keep before reaching out to those with the necessary skills. 
• Those blue bits are quick compilations of small moments. Most of which weren't actually noted in my stream notes at the time. As it was only a gag that was funny in hindsight.

As such, I'm having to put the streams in mp3 form and listen to them as I take Lulu for walkies in the morning and evening. Scrubbing carefully over the hours to find the pieces I need.

This means that I'm vacillating on the middle structure. Cutting it, watching it through, cutting it again, etc. In the mean time working on the parts I know are solid. Hence my non-linear progress.

Beyond that, the other challenges are fairly standard for this type of bullshittery. I'm using the same master project file from parts 1 and 2. So all of the same templates are speeding up the process.

I'm also taking some lessons from Space Engineers. And giving some of the explosions extra force with dust visual effects. Or the "Pixel Polly" plugin to make text break into fragments, if too near the explosion shockwave, etc.

On that note, one of the notable challenges is audio related. For Rising Storm: Vietnam is LOUD. With lots of rattling machine guns or booming artillery. And it's all baked into the same audio layer as my team mates voices.

This (like music) makes it absurdly easy to spot cuts at times. And too many in a row make it jarring and over tightened. You've heard it a thousand times in film trailers with careless editors.

A little trick I use is to layer fresh and uninterrupted audio over the clips. Be it an airplane quietly buzzing, or shells falling in the distance. Or in places where the audio cut is particularly ugly, a well-timed grenade explosion, or whizzing bullet, to disguise it. And the results are much smoother on the ears.

Additionally, the keyframing is a bit challenging. There's not a huge amount of auto tracking that's possible. The problem usually being compression artefacts. Where the footage blurs juuuust enough to befuddle the software trying to follow specific pixels. Exacerbated by Rising Storm: Vietnam's abundant foliage.

So the work continues! I need to send out some emails to some potential artists. And really pull that mid section into its final form. Work in progress.

Hope you're all okay this week :)