Picture Lock!

Posted March 28, 2012

As of 6 am this morning, Video Game High School just picture lock! All nine episodes are edited to the best of our ability and, for all intents and purposes, we have no more major editing tweaking going on. The editing process for VGHS was pretty complex – the story cuts back and forth between parallel action and storylines throughout the episodes, and also has some large montage sequences, as well as some editing-dependent visual gags. From the moment of footage ingestion, the editing process has taken three months, with a couple of pickup sessions thrown in there for good measure.

That being said, here’s a short list of things we still need to put in:

Motion graphics elements

We’ve teamed up with the guys at VPVFX in Toronto for visual effects (a lot of those guys worked on the Find Makarov and Operation Kingfish Modern Warfare shorts), and we have some fake TV shows in the world of VGHS. Those show intros and motion graphic elements will necessarily adjust the cut slightly once we put the final versions in there.

Slow motion keyboard inserts

We have some slow mo closeups of players hitting keyboard keys we still need to shoot (for now we have placeholders in the edit). On bigger movies, any time you see a cutaway of like hands loading a gun, or checking a phone, or untying a rope, etc. it’s never the actor they paid boadloads of money to – it’s a double, and it’s usually shot by the second unit (i.e. not the main director and cinematographer). In this case we’re no different – no point wasting valuable production time with our actors shooting just their hands when we can come in later and do it.

A single freaking cutaway of me walking up some stairs

There’s one shot of a character seeing me in my sweet cameo role walking up stairs, and we somehow neglected to get the point of view shot of said character. We’re going to have to sneak back to our location and reshoot that single, 2 second shot. Luckily, I still have the clothes I was wearing that day, but everyone else on the production has informed me that I’m paying for my own gas to and from for this one.

As a whole, the edit really came together in the last couple weeks. Having worked on a number of very bad direct-to-dvd and direct-to-tv movies prior to starting the FreddieW channel, I can honestly say that this is the first time in my life I’ve seen the edit for a longer form project and felt good about it. Usually at this point on previous projects, I’m thinking “what can we do to fix this mess?” but for this one, the thought is “Everything we do from here on out is only making this better.” It’s a bizarre feeling, for sure!