After two years
of sound and video editing on a weekly basis, I thought I knew my way around
editing. I’d learned the basics the hard way, as usual. No surprises there. I’d
set up my boardgame/roleplaying YouTube channel to handle gameplay videos. But
I had to learn basic video editing before I combined that skill with table
management.
Table management is the big thing in running
boardgames with many moving parts, especially when the management is on behalf
of players on other continents. And so…
Four-part scan of the game board, achieved at great risk. I do all my own publicity stunts.
Week in, week out, I stuck to my cardboard
guns and made videos about whatever the hell I wanted to say that week. I stole
that idea from this blog. No one is coming to arrest me for stealing from
myself.
The virus is here. And it’s the worst time
for a lot of things. Where’s the positivity? For a boardgamer, it’s the best
time to game online. I’ve been gaming online with people for weeks on end. And
I filmed most of those games, just to pick up hints and tips from myself on how
the hell not to do things.
It’s not all technical. Just feels that way.
Finally, press-ganging Canadian author K. Woodward into proceedings, I
embarked on an epic saga into the depths of madness. We filmed a game for
general consumption.
Then I edited the hell out of it. Editing
stole my time. We played PANDEMIC HOT
ZONE: NORTH AMERICA . This is a short experience.
It’s a smaller version of the main PANDEMIC
game.
Why choose that smaller one? It arrived on
my doorstep and demanded to be played. A smaller shorter game generates
computer files that aren’t mega-bulky when that game is filmed. (No, come on,
stop laughing. If you aren’t laughing, I have shares in a paperless office to
sell you.)
The mystic calculation involves the square
root of the R in the month, but I use
a machine for that. Take a short game. Add two authors. Play game with many a
diversion into non-game topics: boozy tea, hamster equipment, supervillains…
You
know the drill.
We came for the banter and banter ate all
the cake. More to the point, we enjoyed our daft musings. Well, someone has to
enjoy daft musings by law. We had permission, written in crayon on toilet roll.
Seemed legit.
It’s a half-hour game. We spent two hours on
that. Then editing stole my time. I broke the video into eight sections, and
edited one slice each day. After a shade over a week, I’d cut roughly fifteen
minutes from the movie.
What went?
Example of reference cards scanned and beamed to intergalactic players.
There are things I shouldn’t do when making
videos. If I gesture without talking, and delay speaking my thoughts on the
original footage until my hand leaves the screen, do I leave the isolated gesture
in…or cut it completely?
It doesn’t matter which version of STAR WARS is out there. I don’t think George
Lucas ever fixed a sonic blooper involving Vader and Tarkin. We discover that
the Princess lied about the location of the rebel base.
Pay close attention to Vader’s speech and
his gestures in that scene. We’re an hour and three minutes in on the COMPLETE SAGA Blu-ray. Vader’s hand
should accompany his speech – very useful when there’s no expression coming at
you from the mask. But the movement goes nowhere and achieves nothing.
It’s tricky to shift the audio around. But I
found new ways to do that. Hand gesture and spoken thoughts go together, and you
wouldn’t know any different.
This
is about boardgames. If I get a rule wrong and spot it, I leave that in. When
two collaborators talk over each other…
You go first.
No, you go first.
I
insist.
No, I insist.
In the space of no time at all, serving no
end, cross-talk dies a death on the editing sword’s keen blade. If I mess up
badly and don’t spot a blunder, I am required (by Canadian law) to add a video
explanation long after the event.
What else did I learn? Don’t bump into the
camera while talking. If I bump into the camera while making a silent move, I
can cut that bump out and delete the silence along with it. There were so many
cheeky and tricky sound/vision edits that I lost count.
I count at least 40 editing moves in this small section of gameplay footage. Something tells me there are a few more.
Part
six dragged on in editing. This is after most of a week spent creating an
editing machine that moved at a fair clip. I learned lots of new ways to edit.
Sometimes I created a blurry transition and just left it in for the hell of it.
I kept one comedy pause in place for the
effect…
She and I both listened to radio
programmes and learned the golden rule. Thirty seconds of silence on radio is
punishable by removal from radio. I softened a lot of sharp visual cuts, and
that led to snipping away at the silence.
Rarely, I cut audio altogether and left a
blank space for a tiny amount of time, letting microphone-generated sound drop
away completely. This is an editing sin if performed to excess.
I explained in the blurb what was going on,
but not too spoilery. Episode seven was particularly annoying to watch, as I
burbled nonsense the whole time. I thought I was playing the full game of PANDEMIC and not the shorter version.
Basic gaming rule: apply the rules of the game you are playing. It’s easier on
all parties concerned.
Yes, lots of room for improvement in
managing the table and the camera. At least future sessions will have better
film quality. Zoom is not the great fix for our time. It is simply there. And
it records a meeting in audio-visual, with an extra separate audio track. I
find that useful, true.
But the video size shrinks on Zoom. You’d
think with a name like that, you’d see more and not less. But I had to zoom in
on the footage when editing, to make it fit a YouTube video format. Ah, so that’s why it’s called Zoom.
The answer, in future, is to film locally
and share my screen intergalactically.
Editing took up my time, and then some. I
dropped loads of extra snippets in there to liven up the awkward visuals, and
to improve the quality of footage.
There was no point trying to make it
perfect. I stumbled over a few difficult editing moments, but mostly I just
rattled through in an effort to get the job done. I’d say we’re on the right
track. We go in thinking it’ll be smooth sailing. Look at the pretty storm clouds.
As I built up to a finished series, the Canadian dropped in to remind me that perfect
is the enemy of finished. We’d
created a sloppy mess of gameplay that made us laugh, and that was enough…
My great enemy is autofocus.
We meet again, at last. When I left, I was but the learner. Now, I just
ignore you and get on with it.
The camera resets focus after every move.
Oh, yes, the camera moves. It’s on a rail system that allows it to move forward
and back, left and right, up and down…with some adjustment I’ll set the camera
to film a few of those rare portrait game boards sideways when needed.
Game designers. Landscape boards only. See
to it.
That gripe’s not just about the awkwardness
of filming portrait boards. When introducing a game to new players, it’s
customary for the introducer to sit on one side of the table with the board
upside-down. (And if it's a really tedious game, face-down.) When you know the game front to back and back again, you put up
with the inconvenience and make the board as easy to understand as possible for
the new players on the other side of the board.
This method is far easier to employ with
landscape game boards than it is when using portrait ones. My gaming gripes are
always the same. Don’t put your game in a tin. Use black text in your
rulebooks, and not white. Put a reference guide on the last page of the rules for ease of use.
No portrait game boards. Never get them wet. Don’t feed them after midnight.
Banter intrudes. Let it leap in.
I could switch autofocus off, but that leads
to other difficulties and it’s easier to put up with the beastie as is. It’s
easy enough to edit static autofocus glitches away. Trickier to do that if the
camera is on the move. It can be done. Or, at least, the glitch may be
lessened.
Why move the camera at all? For variety. A
change of scenery every once in a while does the video some good. I scanned all
the game cards and dropped those scans into static shots to waylay the monotony
of a static camera.
Infection cards. Coded symbolically, to reduce difficulties with colour blindness.
Also, I had to keep moving the camera over
to the side to show off other areas away from the game board. I could do that
with multiple cameras trained on various locations around the table, but the
camera is on a rail and I use the rail.
Game board. Cards on card holders. A display
for keeping track of just who the hell goes next. It pays to move the camera selectively.
For games behind the scenes, not filmed, I found throwing the camera around
offered seasickness to the audience.
What did I learn from the gameplay video?
That I over-corrected the seasickness issue. Here and there, I should’ve moved
the camera over to the cards more often, especially when talking about the
cards.
I’d have noticed a massive game blunder in
episode seven. Despite my participation, we won the game anyway. Fun was the
thing, and the thing was fun. As far as filming gameplay goes, I hope I learned
enough filming the first one to make filming and editing the second one far
less painful.
No. Stop laughing. Come on.
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