Behind the scenes - Ratio Videos

Whenever I said that the ratio videos were hell to make, I meant it man. I wasn't exaggerating when I said that it was a 3 month process that started as a filler video. 

Most of that time was spent trying to make sure that I knew about most major examples of media with weird ratios, and trying to figure out what the point of any of it was. I knew that I felt strongly about creator intent, and I knew that I thought experimentation was sick, but beyond that I had no idea what the through-line was. 

I had to make multiple flow charts, it got bad

I like how you can kinda see me start to figure out what I wanted to say by gauging how organized these are/aren't

Eventually it dawned on me that if I could separate different takeaways into different videos instead of trying to cover everything at once, it would allow me to focus solely on the media that was both interesting and relevant to my thesis, which is why the cardboard filler is basically a slideshow of cool things I had to cut from the main vid. 

While trying to sort out the writing, I was also teaching myself blender! It started off as a hobby, but I've been saying that I wanted to make a video in VR for years, and once the script started to take shape I became obsessed with how cool it'd be if I could make viewers actually FEEL like they're in a theater, rather than just describe it to them. 

After some (a lot of) help (and a base model) from Eli/Coal Bones, I was able to set up, sculpt, and rig a base model that I was pretty happy with. From there, all I had to make before starting to animate was a dark theater, an empty void, and a relatively accurate 3d model of the house I keep blowing up. Surprisingly simple! Very time consuming.

I was very surprised to find that once I got the hang of the program, animating in 3D was actually super easy, since all the same principles of 2D still applied. I figured there'd be more to learn, but I guess not? idk

As if using a program I hardly know to make a 20 minute long VR video wasn't enough, I also wanted the entire thing to be stereoscopic, which basically means that there are two separate videos played in sync (one for each eye), that when viewed with a VR headset create depth perception. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be a massive pain in the ass.

Long story short, blender has 2 main rendering modes, and only 1 of them supports VR. However, grease pencil (the tool I used to draw faces on top of 3d models) only works in the other rendering mode. I had to employ a workaround made by one guy that isn't being updated anymore and freezes blender every time I hit render. Nightmare!

It was 100% worth it in the end, though.

I didn't realize this until I had nearly finished animating, but it turned out to be the perfect video for VR, because the fact that almost nobody actually viewed it the "right" way due to inaccessibility is exactly the same as the inaccessibility of true IMAX. If you were frustrated and felt like you were kinda missing out, you were, and that became the point.

I wish I was smart enough to have thought of that before I started, lol

Aside from those speedbumps, this was a pretty straight-forward set of videos to put out! I was really worried people woudn't watch a video entirely in VR due to how shit youtube's player is, but thankfully the novelty/subject matter seems to have kept most of y'all engaged. 

A few stray thoughts on the cardboard follow-up;

This video was really fun to make because it was the first one where I actually tried to show you more of the world outside the house in Real. There's a lot of forced perspective and color grading going on to mask what the set actually looked like

Also the crackermilk cameo was tons of fun to put together. Connor floated the idea my way of them fucking with the cardboard Man somehow, and I suggested they interrupt a video out of nowhere as a total flashbang to the viewer. 

I drew a bunch of faces for them to use and scanned them over. They printed them all out on cardstock, cut them out, and glued them to popsicle sticks. I was shocked by how good their print-outs looked on camera- I may as well have mailed them puppets I made by hand

They filmed a bunch of takes of them fucking around and saying weird shit, sent it over to me, and we put our heads together to figure out the funniest way to edit the joke together. I'm very happy with how it came out, them crackermilk boys are real funny :)

That's all I can think of, but if you have any questions about either Ratio videos drop a question in the comments and I'll answer it as best I can. Thanks again for your support.