TMM 024: VFX & Flour Cannons

Hey! New video!

Now I'm working on the next in the series about authenticity and the focus is on art for Arcane Ugly. This will coincide with the release of the next update.

Sadly my walking 3D house model is stuck in the mail somewhere, so hopefully it will come soon.

My latest video, Problem Solving Episode 1: When A Project Goes Wrong.

I'm really happy with the excitement from the comments about the production on this episode. I really got to flex some creative muscles visually and narratively and there's no way I'm slowing down for the next one.

The overhead rig built by Zane and I (mostly Zane) worked great, that was the first time I got to use it so I’m really happy.

This first episode took many forms as a script before being incorporated into this Fairy Lantern project. The final script was about 16 minutes long before being cut down to 8 minutes in the edit. It was difficult to pick and choose the most important parts to leave in and what to cut, but I just kept asking myself: Is this scene answering the question of “What do you do when a project goes wrong?” and if it didn't, I cut it.

The climax of the video is meant to be very fast paced, with some very… sort of anxiety inducing music to show what it's like in my brain while I work quickly to problem solve. Originally the first script was quite dense at the start but I ended up cutting out a lot of the script to add lots of airiness or dead air between thoughts instead. That way the start and end of the video would have lots of contrast.

The Problem Solving title music is from my friend Eddie, aka Bengfang and the rest of the video’s music is from music licensing websites, the one that stood out to me is the final track by SVDKO, which you can listen to here.

I was really excited to start the Problem Solving episode as an opportunity to use some animation and digital effects in my story telling. I use animation mostly where an explanation is important but I don't have engaging footage for it.

I use a mixture of graphic programs like Blender and Photoshop for this, but Adobe After Effects does most of the heavy lifting.

Before making YouTube videos, I did design and VFX as a job so I have a big library of assets to pull from to make stuff with. It's a bit like kitbashing.

This animation explaining where my project went wrong was made using some scanned vintage line illustrations I bought about eight years ago in a bundle. There's websites where you can buy bulk commercial free assets for a limited time for very cheap and when I see a good deal I buy them for my collection.

Using photoshop, I merged this sponge and brain graphic to make this hand holding a brain… for a pointer-finger graphic to poke.

The graphics on the screen here are hand drawn by me on a scrap bit of paper that I scan in.

The VHS and old timey effects are plugins from Red Giant Universe and I use them as a visual cue so the audience knows when I'm showing projects that aren't related to the current one I'm making in the present time. It doesn’t feel very genuine using VHS filters on non-VHS footage so I like to acknowledge that by showing it's just a filter in my edit. These filters really hide a lot of rough edges in my work and turn laziness into charm.

Rachel did the Problem Solving graphic in Procreate and I adorned it with this skeleton animation I made a few years ago. Fun fact - I made the skeleton animation for Mike Diva for a project with Filthy Frank, which got canned when he transitioned to music persona Joji. I have a whole bunch of assets from that project I want to use in future Problem Solving episodes.

Working when you don’t want to work!

My friend Danny taught me this, and I’ve been doing it with a friend while we both work on some of the more tedious parts of our projects we find trouble focusing on. We call them accountability meetings but there might be a real name for it.

But two people with work to do have a video call, you both declare your goals you want to achieve in an hour, you work for an hour and then at the end of the hour you talk about how you went. Then you do another hour if you both want and repeat.

Okay I just googled it, there's a service called Focusmate that sets you up with a stranger… I don’t use it, I just follow the same steps with a friend via Discord.

This kind of working has helped a lot, keeping me on track.

I fixed up the soundbooth a bit for Episode 1 of Problem Solving. I replaced some of the decayed 30 year old sound foam and added some more carpet and sound absorbing decor. It's pretty funky looking but the sound booth was a little echoey and the chairs and rugs help a lot. I’m not even sure this was originally a recording booth, maybe just a place to monitor sound?

Zane also made a great little adjustable platform for the mic stand as well and my phone holder I made for art things turns out to be really useful for script reading too.

Zane is currently making a platform for the tablesaw using old server racks we found here and also gifted me this box for the wood burner (that broke about half an hour after receiving this box) and a mallet.

Here’s the original video of making the flour cannon I edited into this episode of Problem Solving, this is one of my first dabbles into video making. I think this video was mostly shot on phones and a go-pro. My friend Patrick is the other face in this video and he also lent me all my video making gear at the time. He might be responsible for what I’m doing now! We got up to all sorts of mischief shortly after finishing school. I loved making things with Patrick because he’d always say “yes, let's do it” and no matter the time we’d be making it the very same day. There's a whole bunch of videos like this one which maybe I’ll use in the future problem solving episodes.

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