Random Space Engineers Bullshittery - Update #2

Good afternoon folks. and happy Friday to you all. Welcome to the weekend.

Short version of the update: Editing of the latest bullshittery is 10 days in of an expected 30. Roughly 5 minutes complete of an expected 20. Work is well underway.

Full version: So it's the end of the second week of work on the latest bullshittery and the first week of the text and animations phase. Last week I was able to complete most of the cutting (at least in a rough form) and most of the scenes are at least where they're supposed to be, with some space left for extras.

So regarding that decision whether to split the episode up into pieces, I think the best course of action is to make one big chonky bullshittery rather than put in a break between parts 4 and 5. My reasoning here is that there are three notable 'scrapheap challenge style' sequences in which we build fighter craft and battle them on the lunar surface. And it would be wise to put these together for the sake of overall continuity. 

This in turn leads to a nice flow in the episode, in-line with my usual style. In which multiple long-form segments are bookended by quicker cuts of comedy. Except in this case the long sequences are literal fights in which we take to the skies with custom-built ships of exotic designs.

These "Space Engineer duels" actually present an interesting challenge from an editing perspective. With two notable problems:

• How does the viewer know what the ships can do? 
• Can they follow the action? Especially from the restrictive view of the cockpit.

Solving those challenges is leading to some interesting experimentation.

On the former I'm playing with the idea of having short (10-15 seconds) cutaway intros for each of the fighters. Adding some technical readouts being narrated by a volunteer voice actress whilst showing a model of the ship. As though an A.I. is briefing the viewer with information the pilots did not have.

And on the latter, damage notifications. In which the spoken dialogue is entirely ignored in order to draw the viewers eyes to specifically what has been hit during the fight. And how bad the damage being done is. A moment-by-moment breakdown.

On that front I think it's wise to keep the notifications themselves static, whilst using white strokes (lines) to mark the point of interest. A little trick from the video-essays, with the little anthropomorphised game icons. The fighters are bouncing around so much that I worry it'll be tricky to read otherwise.

I'll likely leave these fight sequences towards the end of the editing effort, in order to properly experiment with what works and what doesn't.

So for now the editing continues just fine. Though this one looks like another biggy. I hope you have a lovely weekend :)