Haruspex Production Update 2

Hey ya'll, hope all's well!!

Also hope you've had time to enjoy the preview of Days 1-3!

Personally, I couldn't be happier with how it's coming together. I cannot remember the last time I've been this excited for a project. I've been getting early updates from the animators, artists and actors have been getting me the ingredients I need to cook, and I'm finding more and more ways to speed up the entire process.

Weird to say, but thus far this project has been a bit of a triumph of efficiency for me above all else so far. I feel like it's not only coming together quickly, but also allowing me to make the end product better by being able to update, replace, and polish individual bits a lot faster that I was on the previous Patho vids.

This is for a lot reasons: I'm a flatly better/faster editor these days, the de facto format for this project is locked down, I am much better at working with Pathologic 1 than most games, aforementioned good spirits, etc. The biggest thing, however, is some changes I've made to how I collect and replace footage.

See, the way I generally grabbed footage during the Bachelor videos is probably what you'd expect: I would play through a day in a relatively passive way, and then comb through that to find something relevant to what I was saying and drop it in. A reasonable approach, as well as basically the standard approach for every gaming video essayist I know.

I have not done that for this video.

(Yes my work drive is named Aerith, all my drives are named after Final Fantasy women and all my computers are named after FF men, its been like this since high school, i am a nerd as we know, let's not get distracted)

Rather, I've been recording much more bespoke game footage: Footage captured by opening the script on my second monitor, looking at what it calls for, thinking about what the best visual for it might be, and then recording game footage that included everything I could want from that specific bit.

I started doing this a lot more during The Marble Nest video, but TMN was ill-suited to doing it too often cause Patho2 (affectionately) runs like utter ass especially with OBS. Patho1, however, is so lightweight that I can run that, Premiere, OBS and Google Docs at the same time quite easily. There's been some b-roll in the mix too, of course, but overall I'd say about 90-95% of the footage in the Haruspex video was shot and recorded specifically for the exact moment it is being played at.

Admittedly, this means recording can take a bit longer, but also means that I'm no longer spending the odd hour or two trying to find justtttttt the right shot. Instead, if I realize there's a shot I want but don't have, can't find, or am just unsatisfied with, I'll just simply take 5 minutes, boot up the game, record, and import. This also means that making major changes is a lot easier; I'm less likely to REALLY want to hold on to a subpar clip if it only took me 5 minutes to capture and will take 5 minutes to place.

In practice, it not only means that I save a lot of time and tedious busy work, but I think it also results in better visuals since everything is much more precisely suited to what's there. If the visuals have had a bit of a different vibe to them this time around, that's probably what you're picking up on: Nearly every shot is bespoke.

Which does mean, at this point, I think I am technically making machinima. As someone who grew up more than a little obsessed with Red vs Blue, this feels like it's been somewhat inevitable for me.

All the same, in conjunction with everything else, it's serving to make everything come together faster and better! It will also likely how I approach any game centered projects in future, cause I really do feel like this might be the best way to approach this given the style I've land on.

That said though, there are two important things I should give ya'll a heads up on:

First, Day 4 is substantially shorter than most other days for plot reasons that will become clear when you see it. It's easily the shortest day in the whole script, to such an extent that I was briefly worried it'd be long enough to even truly count as a day. Was able to work around it to make it substantial, but I still expect it to only run a round 15-20 minutes. Given these previews have been running 30+, figured it was worth mentioning.

Secondly, I'm going to be spending much of this month and part of the next in Scotland, hanging out with SulMatul! The stars have aligned and we have a chance to spend some time together, so we're taking it. Consequently though, I'm not going to be putting in quite as many hours as I have been.

All this to say that while this past month was exceedingly productive, I expect this one to be a bit slower, and the next preview to be a less bulky.

I'll still be putting in plenty of work; Hayley has her own day job and a computer that can handle editing, we mayyyy film/write some stuff while we're there, and also I'm having a lot of fun at this stage of production so I'm eager to keep at it. This will also give me a chance to wrap up my last bit of research and nail down the final handful of things in the script which I'm still not quite satisfied with.

All the same though, I do want to temper expectations: There will be other months I show up with a huge amount of new progress, but June will not be one of them. Rather, my goal for the rest of the month after getting Day 4 locked down and getting the first 'act' of this in some kind of polished order so that the first third of this is in really good shape. Wanna make a good first impression for people who sign up to see it ; )

Anddd I believe that covers where we're at overall! Things are coming together well, I'm finding ways to work faster and better, and while things might be a little slow this month, I'm confident about the overall project coming together on pace! My goal for this is still to have it ready for October and I'm feeling like that is exceptionally doable. Hope you're as hype as I am~

Thank you as always for the support, looking forward to seeing ya'll again real soon,

Ruby <33