CREEPY COMISSIONS - FIRST LOOK (Patreon)

A new video, for the esteemed members of the Patreon Guild. Lords and Ladies, Gentle Gremlins and Cantankerous Kobolds, we do hope you enjoy this new video created by one of our new editors, Density. Density has gone out of his way to provide a unique in depth review and guide of the video process! A link to the written portion has been provided to paid members.

The following has been written by the editor, Density, please enjoy.

"Hey HFH Patrons,

I’m Density, a new editor at Heretical Fun House. I thought it might be fun to give you guys a quick look behind the scenes as to how I created one of our videos, Creepy Commissions!

Although the final video is relatively short, the entire edit took many, mannnnnnnnny hours to cobble together. This is in part thanks to the 2.5D animation throughout. Whenever you see fog rolling in the background or Lilani twirling to change the way she’s facing, it’s actually a 2D image being manipulated in 3D space. This utilisation of 2.5D can be incredibly helpful in some cases and downright infuriating in others. Let me show you an example of both…

Lilani and Bart admire their handywork.

One good thing about 2.5D is that it allows for more realistic depth of field. While maybe not immediately obvious in the later sections of the video, you can see during the introduction that the log, bushes, rocks, summoning circle and characters are each set back from each other by varying amounts. 

An incredible mess.

This means that the sheet of fog I used can be physically positioned in front of the trees, but behind the foreground objects. Were this to be done on a 2D timeline, things would end up looking a bit flat.

The tangle of wires you don’t see.

HOWEVER. Because everything is staged within 3D space, it means that my computer would keep threatening to off itself and take my entire building's electricity with it. It’s a lot more intensive on both the hardware itself and Davinci Resolve, which meant I had to find a work around. Enter: Epic Rap Battles Of History. It was through them that I learned to render the background (in this case the forest, dirt, grass, fog and summoning circle) down to a single MP4 file, allowing everything to run a lot smoother. 

The flattened forest.

It’s the difference between carrying a backpack full of rocks and carrying a backpack with a photo of rocks inside. Far more compact and light weight, not to mention easier to layer on top of.

The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter what the back end looks like, as long as the end product is enjoyable. A good example would be 52 seconds in where I zoom in on Bart whilst he’s talking. I had originally planned to have the frame show both of them talking to each other, but Lilani kept jolting to the left no matter how I altered her animations. 

Pre-zoom framing.

Final edit zoom.

It was a solid hour of fidgeting before I eventually cut my losses and added the zoom, and you know what? You wouldn’t even know about it if I weren’t here shooting myself in the foot. 

All in all, I hope you enjoyed our latest video! It was super fun to work on and I can’t wait to jump right into the next edit. If you’ve got any questions you’d like to ask, feel free to comment and I’ll be sure to respond to them best I can. Maybe if you guys enjoy this little post they’ll let me have a turn on the keyboard again for my next project too!

Thanks for supporting!

Density "

Density 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tVCA10W3yVcAA4pTMyhstBY5wivt_GeOTFQGY4PJLLs/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to read through the above document which details the amazingly extensive process Density went through for this video!