Sure...I've flirted with it. There was for instance an animation I did in Bryce 3D a while back. Hand-painted lightning effects and all. But a slow computer and a seriously small budget made serious video work too frustrating to face.
Now the thing I'm shortest of is time. It's sad, really. I have so many of the skills: I've studied basic shot and structure (whilst trying to learn comic book art...another long story). Did lighting design (for theater) professionally. Recorded voice talent including using a boom pole to do it. Built and rigged 3d models. But I don't have the patience to get into something too terribly elaborate.
I just wanted to finish the joke. As long as I was going to record a "bardic" (Early Instrument) cover of a Skyrim fan song about the memetic Khajiit fondness for shadows, I wanted to do a video that included screen capture of in-game performance of the instruments I was more-or-less simulating in the music I recorded.
And, okay: here's the final product:
After the first attempt, I decided I needed more clarity and more of an arc. The big trick in pulling things together more was to use Breezehome (an in-game purchasable dwelling in Skyrim) as the background to all the live tracks. The other was to use some long in-game sequences in full screen under the other elements, roughly dividing the video into four phases (Riften fly-in and reveal, Breezehome, the road to Riverwood, and outside the shrine in Whiterun).
I walked around Breezehome for a while, freezing in place to take 10-20 seconds of background plate wherever I found an interesting shot. Of course, it was late in the process when I realized many of my recording sessions were seated and a crouched posture would be a better perspective.
Then to live shooting. I didn't have the patience to set up lights or to really play with costumes (I also don't own any...if I do another bardic cover I should really pick up a shirt, though.) Pretty much, I popped open the 5' x 7' chroma-key screen, leaned it against the book-case, lined myself up more-or-less in front of it in my work clothes and faked my way through the parts.
I'd also done a lot of takes and a lot of chopping and adjusting when I recorded, so i would have been too much work to replicate the actual performances for the video. I mimed most of the woodwind parts when taping video. I did use a metronome to try to be somewhat on time, but when I got into the editor the lag was so bad it was too frustrating to try to line up the takes exactly.
That, and there were often artistic reasons to move the take. I slowed a few of them down, duplicated several, even mirror-imaged a couple all to fit the video better.
To take the load on the poor video editor down a little I made a comp of all the live parts and my game-recorded backgrounds. Each track had a good dozen filters on it; besides the chroma-key I had to scale and shift the background elements appropriately, brighten them up a little, and do a bunch of color and contrast adjustment to the live video to try to make it look like it belonged in the same world as the new background.
Then splice those parts into the video. With unfortunately even more tweaking of crop and scale and brightness and so forth. I didn't try to get all the instruments in there -- there are places where I tracked two shawms, four crumhorns, two recorders, ukulele, and bodhran all at the same time -- but I still ended up with almost twenty tracks of video. No wonder poor ShotCut was running slow!
Oh, yes. And the ending of the video is entirely lucky chance. I had switched to animation camera using a console code and that makes the character nearly uncontrollable. My random attempts to walk to a new shot location caused Yakima the camera cat to hide behind Heimskar the Priest. I thought it was funny so I saved it.
No comments:
Post a Comment