Divinity: Original Sin 2 Bullshittery - Update #2

A potentially confusing update due to a drastic change in editing direction in the midweek. But here's how Divinity is going and welcome to the weekend folks:

A TL;DR update:

• After scrubbing/clearing about 11 hours of stream footage from the first Divinity playthrough (which is about 80 hours total), I'd managed to prepare roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes of useful clips.
• Rather than continuing on as I'd originally planned, I've decided to reverse course and delve directly into the cutting of Divinity bullshittery part 1 (and maybe 2 if there's time).
• About 19 minutes of bullshittery footage has been cut from the first hour of useful clips. And it's rapidly approaching the point where text and keyframing can start in earnest.

A more in-depth update.

So over the course of the week I've been watching through each of the initial Divinity streams from the first playthrough only. Cutting large multi-minute segments when something interesting occurred.

It turns out the first 5 hours (ish) of footage concerns just me and Quebec, in the form of some trial streams before Digby and Messy joined in (and before Divinity had sold us on its overall quality). So those are streams I can discount as not being very useful. 

One of the greatest challenges of this edit is preserving the "interconnecting tissue". In that, if thse were disconnected clips, a lot of it wouldn't make any sense because the bones of the story are missing. And Divinity does have an excellent story to showcase. Therefore the best course of action was to 'cut wide' and save things onto timelines to cherry pick through later.

In addition to this though, there's a rather unique challenge that I've never encountered before.

This cooperative RPG allows each of the players to head off in independent directions and their quest logs update remotely as they go. Not knowing this...our initial sessions had us racing off in different directions....very quickly turning our quest log into a jumbled mess. We got better in later streams and started moving together as a unit. But initially it was quite chaotic.

To contextualise the problem, there are important quests in the first few streams where I never met the NPC that provided it. And if you're an editor trying to make a story flow - that's a major issue.

Imagine watching The Fellowship of the Ring, but it starts from Merry and Pippin's POV in Farmer Maggot's field. Without seeing any of the prior scenes. It would be an awkward start.

There's also a mechanical issue where the dialogue of an NPC is completely muted for the people not starting the conversation. Presumably to avoid spamming teammates. But it means that almost every first sentence is functionally unrecorded. A frustrating problem for any editor.

To solve these twin issues, I've been streaming a single player Divinity playthrough for the sole purpose of recording "B Roll" , dressing up my player character to look the same as my original character. And I plan to try and cut the new footage into the old in such a way that most people don't notice. And in Adobe After Effects I'll try to overlay the original classic conversation interface over the definitive edition, to further hide the seams.

So I'm doing something I've never done before. I'm effectively hiding clips from a newer playthrough in the original stream for the sake of exposition - like recording reshoots, but for NPC conversations only. A lot of front-heavy editing in the cutting phase.

So here's the drastic change I mentioned. Rather than power through and keep rough-cutting the entire 80 hours of footage, I decided to stop and just get to editing part 1.

This is because the numbers of highlights continued to grow and I was very confident that there's at least 2 full episodes in Fort Joy alone (the first area). And the further I'd go into the scrubbing the more I'd forget the structure that was forming in my head.

I think that later on, perhaps past chapters 2 and 3, scrubbing all remaining footage would be appropriate. But for chapter 1 I think it's best if I get working on the bullshittery.

So the broad cut timeline has been trimmed down to this:

This forms much of part 1. Which contains a lot of introduction and exposition that the later entries won't. Which also leads me on to the next challenge - cinematic introductions.

My plan in later episodes (notably the end credits) is to have custom animations that shows the fate of all the player characters in an amusing fashion. But I'm considering just replacing all cinematics with commissioned artwork and voicework.

Divinity cinematics use static images, animated and warped, with a lot of parallax. And they're very pretty, but collectively have a slight flaw - in that they're a bit high-concept with vague dialogue. And make much more sense on a second playthrough.

For example, the very first in game cutscene focuses on a tertiary antagonist of debatable relevance and doesn't explain who the player characters are or why they're on boat. And we're in no position to explain it, we're still learning the controls and dropping barrels into each other's inventories for giggles.

Therefore if I can control the animation and voice work, provided I don't go overboard, I can bookend each entry with a brief explanation of what is going on, etc. Maybe have the narrator take some mocking jabs at our party for comedic sake. I'll give it some thought.

Heck, this is something I could even just save for the end and just stick a placeholder there whilst working out the complexities.

Anyway, so the plan for the moment is to ensure that parts 1 and 2 are structured and flowing properly. And then start moving things into Adobe After Effects to do the text and animations. Which starts soon.

The project continues.