Information
- Member: doughboy
- Studio: Spooner St Studios
- Title: VG3 Project Track 42 (Goldeneye)
- Premiered: 2005-09-24
- Categories:
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Song:
- JobeGDG Flight From Arkangel
- Anime:
- Participation:
-
Comments:
**Note: this video contains the anime L/R but also has clips used from the Goldeneye game and movie.**
General:
For the VG3 Project, I decided sign on for a Goldeneye track since the game was an extremely important part of my high school social environment. I can't count the number of times I played it, the various settings war was waged, and how many times I absolutely loved picking up this game. It was quite a shame to eventually tire of it, but such is the case with video games losing their muster when the systems are surpassed by the newest hotness.
I chose the anime L/R prior to actually seeing the show, which turned out to be a near death sentence. I had seen a trailer on various Geneon DVDs that made it look like a really slick spy show, and knew I could probably pull off parallels between the 2 spies from the anime and 007/006 from the movie. The show actually turned out to be quite charming, but most of action ended up being completely irrelevant to my concept, involving characters that I really didn't want to include since they'd throw off the content of the video. I did however have some choice clips here and there of the 2 spies, and used them appropriately. The movie footage was essential to not only pick up some slack, but to further illustrate their partner relationship.
I had envisioned this video to be somewhat of an action sploogefest, but without the proper footage behind it I decided to instead make something quirky and simplistic. The flow of the song and beats available didn't really end up providing much in the way of heavy editing thanks to my frustrating source. It's not a terribly impressive execution, but certainly adequate enough to not get cut from the project. ;)
Conceptual:
The movie and game of Goldeneye are what I refer to as "a buddy movie gone bad," so it was that description that lead me to shape the video into what can be seen here. The only real objectives I had in terms of content was to 1) establish the relationship of 007 and 006, 2) give them a mission, 3) fail that mission, 4) segway into 2 Player VS footage. Since most of the movie/game is spent with the 2 of them fighting, it was tough to save the VS portions for the last 30 sec and fill in the beginning.
Technical:
Everything seen on screen was passed though After Effects in the end. The footage itself was prepped and exported out of Premiere for timing and flow, then the clips reloaded into AE and positioned best to blend the full and widescreen aspects as best as possible without changing them up ferociously.
Programs used:
After Effects 6.5
Premiere 6.0
Photoshop 7.0
The most difficult hurdle in preparing this video was having different aspect ratios to comprehend. The game footage was full frame and nothing could change that. The anime and film were both widescreen, and I really didn't want to chop those down into full frame for the anxiety of losing their original compostions The film was actually at a tighter widescreen than the anime, but I sloppily cropped out portions and resized it to match.
I created the "microfilm" border for the widescreen footage as a means of blending these 2 sources, but ended up not going back and forth between them as frequently as anticipated. The actual Background is just menus from the game with their actual menu text digitally painted out. I wish I could have better arranged it all compositionally so the menus stood out better, but I didn't want people to squint to have to see the actual footage so it had to be a certain size regardless of how well it fit within the full-screen image.
I decided to throw out the aspect ratio concept during the 2 Player portions not only cause I felt it would look better, but because I was outo f time and really need to output and submit to the coordinators. The widescreen footage was handled inthe same manner within Premiere, but I just decided to slap it into After Effects without making any adjustments to it's ratio, so that's why it looks close to anime/movie and game footage blending together in full-frame.
I think the only actual "heavy effects" shot I pulled off is the one involving the 2 spies pointing their guns sideways at each other just before the VS footage pops in. There was a great shot in the show of a sniper on the top portion of the split screen and "006" on the bottom. All I did was find some appropriate footage in the show I could use for "007" in the top portion and cover over the sniper as if he never existed. This didn't invlove too much work, just some matte painting in Photoshop and quite a bit of thought in getting After Effects set up to use those mattes. I really like that I got that shot to work, and didn't have much trouble getting it "final enough that no one will notice it's a composite."
Thoughts:
I think it turned out decent enough for something that I spent far too much time on in my head, but only a few weeks of actual editing. It only came together in the last 3-4 days, anything prior to that was just conceptual segments that didn't flow into each other and a ton of black gaps. I had many conceptual realizations while actually trying to fall asleep every night, and without that time spent processing it all internally, I probably never would have been able to fake this video as I had. I did the best I could with what I had, but making sense of it all and providing a cohesive narrative proved far too daunting.
I cut the music track down to 2 min thinking that would save me a lot of grief, but I think I ended up cutting it a tad bit too short. There just wasn't enough time to transition from certain ideas to the next, so that's why parts of it may seem a tad bit rushed. If I had kept an extra 20-30 sec in the song, I honestly don't know what I would have done with it, but I can see in hindsight the assumed benefit of more music to work with.