March 2024 Production Update

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Production on the next two 50 Ways to Die in Minecraft videos is still underway. The first one is going to be based on RL Craft, and the second is going to be based on the Create+ modpack. In previous production updates, I mentioned a new element that I’m planning to add to my 50 Ways videos, which is a new Master of Ceremonies type character who recites funny death-related poems in between the montage portions of the video.

Last month, I explained that I had just finished writing and voicing the poems and modeling and texturing the character, so I spent the first half of February rigging and animating the poem sections of both videos. Once I was mostly finished with them, I started working on the main edit of the RL Craft video. First, I tracked down a bunch of good music to use, ranked the clips I’d made from best to worst to decide which of them to leave out of the final cut, and put them in an order that made sense. Then, I started to sync the edit with the music.

This is always one of the hardest parts of the production of these videos because all the clips each have their own flow and the music has its own flow and it can be hard to get them to align with each other in a way that doesn’t clash. On top of that, music tracks usually have a limited number of potential starting and stopping points and beginning or ending the tracks at any other point will make it sound wrong. So if you want a music track to play over a set of clips that lasts exactly 50 seconds and the music track only sounds right if it stops at either 45 seconds or 55 seconds, you either need to find a different track or figure out how to lose/gain 5 seconds.

Solving this type of problem only gets harder the closer you get to finishing the main edit because, when you’re editing the first segment of the timeline, you can always just take a 5 second clip from some other segment you haven’t edited yet and put it in the first segment, or remove a 5 second clip from the first segment and put it somewhere else. But, when you’re editing the last segment, there’s nowhere to take/dump clips to/from. If you’re editing the last segment and the music doesn’t fit, you need to either use another music track, accept an awkward 5 second pause somewhere in the segment, or start over.

Thankfully, regarding the RL Craft video, I’m already past the hard part. As of just last night, I have two functional rough edits with music synced up the whole way through and I just need to decide which one I like best before making the final edit, so I’m going to start March by finishing the RL Craft edit. Once it's done, I'll post it here on Patreon. After that, I’ll move on to making the Create+ main edit.