Rust - The Battle for Honeypot Hill - Update #5.1

Good evening all. I'm back from the family doo this afternoon. Now I have the time for a proper update post. Thanks for your patience.

The next 15 minutes is ready for you all and can be found here, bringing the total up to about 30 minutes complete and 52 minutes to go.

On the full timeline, this section is represented by the orange batch here. Containing segments 6 to 14, out of 39, on the timeline.

As you can probably tell, the nature of this is very different from the previous 15 minutes, which served as a semi self-contained critique of Rust and its communities pursuit of meta.

This is where I dip into the livestream footage itself. And begin to tell the narrative. The start of the story.

These segments have the following narrative goals:

• Introducing Dinklebeans community server. And how things are a little more chill (no offline raiding for example).

• Establishing the Honeypot Hill base and its geography.

• Establishing the presence of my brothers group, setting up the inevitability of a confrontation.

Secondarily, I also sought to:

• Introduce Birdy and Maja, the Horse Girls, for their appearance later.

• Sprinkle various jokes from the livestreams, so they don't go to waste.

• Showcase any other moments of silliness during this session of livestreams.

The next segments need to do the following for the narrative.

• Establish that a second battle for Honeypot Hill has a fixed incoming date.

• Show how unusually raid resistant Lamram's team are. And how disproportionately experienced they appeared to be.

• Explain what caused us to start scheming and trying to outsmart Lamram's group, with trickery. Trickery that lead to comedy.

As you probably noticed, quite a few of the segments are being left blank for the sake of later filling in. Particularly the instances where I'd need to setup studio lights. On that front, I've managed to get them setup. I've been testing them with the GoPro.

It's a bit of a tight squeeze. But I've installed a corkboard on the wall with screws.

I was hoping to use it as a bit of a prop. Putting a Rust map on the wall and then poking through it with decorative pins and pictures glued to the end.

One of the challenges I'm having with this particular video is trying to be conservative with the keyframing work.

For whilst your typical bullshittery has frame by frame keyframing everywhere, if I go that far with this video it's going to take another year. What with the duration being 1 hour and 22 minutes.

Therefore I'm trying to maintain a goal of keyframing where necessary. But I shouldn't go crazy. Need to save the energy to the parts that matter most. Such as the battle itself.

In the name of efficiency I'm always creating template compositions of repeated words, Null Objects, effects, etc. Things I can quickly transfer onto new comps to speed things up.

With Rust, I'm finding that I'm repeatedly masking the little voice chat icon at the top of the screen. So I quickly masked it and made a template.

Additionally, the shape of the crosshair when looking down a scope.

What you do then is duplicate the footage, move it to the top most layer. Then paste the mask on.

So long as it's at the top then nothing will supersede it. Which means you can change the text to whatever, and the masking job will hold strong. Even if you drastically change the text later

That local Rust server I've made is proving very useful. In the quality assurance phase I'm continually looking for sound effects to bridge the gaps.

Maybe someone was loudly talking during one sequence of my narration. Maybe the Rust soundtrack was playingetc.

But with the presence of a local Rust server where I have admin controls, I'm able to easily spawn examples of different Rust objects and play their sound effects. Pasting them onto my timeline where needed.

Lastly, I have something of a peculiar decision that's not yet determined. During the whole video I was hoping to snap back to a map view. The purpose of that would be to give the viewer the sense of the geography as the battle begins. Who is attacking from where, etc.

My original plan was to use a screenshot of the Rust map and then just animate it with dots, etc.

But I've discovered that the Rust admin tools are powerful. REALLY powerful.

I can spawn objects, near instantly create structures, build replicas of bases, spawn explosions, missile fire. With a couple of volunteers even recreate how things happened.

Rather than cut to a static map in the battle to come, I could just snap to a no clip version of me flying above the battlefield.

A rocket could slam into a wall for example, and the next cut could be a sped up shot from the explosion to a sort of satellite view. Complete with static effects and atmospheric turbulance.

Worth thinking about, at least.

The next step, the next 15 minute segment. I'll get straight to it after a delayed weekend break and maybe a quick fishing trip before the water gets too cold and all the fish go into a torpor.

Thank you all. The work continues.