Video-essay fiddling - Update #03

Good evening everybody. I hope you're having a nice start to the week. On this end, I'm starting the third week of work on this video-essay segment.

I'm afraid I can't quantify precisely how far through I am as I'm sort of working piecemeal through the video one segment at a time. Mostly cruising around the middle of the edit.

At the moment though, the timeline looks like this:

So out of 11 segments, 4, 5, 6 and 8 have been getting a lot of work. Mostly lots of survival game footage showing mechanics I'm describing.

What I have been doing though, on and off throughout the week, is working on a couple of "hero" animated sequences in Adobe After Effects. These are tarted up versions of those hexagon diagrams I showed in the DayZ video-essays, showing the relationship between Classic, Basebuilding and PvP focused survival games.

My intention here is to visually show that a lot of survival games "group up", likely being inspired by one another, and use very similar tones, camera angles and mechanics.

As a result, there are some pretty big gaps left untouched by developers in the survival market. Which is part of the point I'll be making in this video-essay. The Isle is doing something that seems so obvious, and appears to be the first, because developers are lacking imagination.

Technically speaking, that's been quite fun. As I've been creating about 80+ icons and have them floating with slight "wiggle" expressions, making them quietly move. With line shapes, taking the start and end position of an invisible square, called a Null Object, that's secretly following each bubble.

As a result, I can move the bubbles anywhere I want and the lines will all automatically adjust to follow.

Whilst it doesn't melt my PC, it does take aaaaages to render though. Which is a problem if I want to do quick test renders. Hence why I'm piecemeal jumping across the edit around these parts. With a plan to do those last, if possible.

Additionally, I've been doing some simpler overhead diagrams, somewhat inspired by the work of BazBattles on Youtube. Taking maps (or commissioning them) and then moving icons that represent survival game players. Using them to demonstrate concepts mentioned in other DayZ video-essays, such as PvE requirements. And how they force players together.

Lastly, section 2 was a little naff on the audio front. So I spent some time rescripting and revoicing it. That's now been cut today and is ready for visuals.

So at the moment, the visual editing work continues. No problems thus far. Will get you some better time estimates once I'm further through.

Hope you all have a lovely week.