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For those of you just joining us, the plan is to work on a 50 Ways to Die in Elden Ring video until late February, then make another smaller video for March, so I spent January recording and editing Elden Ring clips. In the first half of the month, I finished seven of them, then I spent the rest of the month working on the big climax scene at the end. I think I’m close to finishing it. It’ll be about a minute and a half long and 48 seconds of it is done, but the slowest part of the process has been figuring out the coordinates of where I want to place the camera for each shot, and of the twenty different camera angles that I needed coordinates for in the big climax scene, I only have one left to get. Once I get them, all that will be left will be recording 11 more shots and editing. It shouldn’t take more than a week.
One might be concerned about the fact that, after spending an entire month recording and editing clips, I only have seven to show for it so far, but there’s two reasons I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to improve my production rate going forward. This first is that the more experience I get making Elden Ring machinima, the better I get at doing everything right the first time. There were a lot of tricks to modding and hacking Elden Ring that would have saved me a lot of trouble if I’d known them when I started that I won’t have to relearn, which should make things go more smoothly now that I know them.
And the second reason I’m optimistic about my future productivity is that I think some of the scenes I finished this month (or almost finished in the case of the climax) will turn out to be the most time-consuming parts of production. Most of the scenes I’m planning for this video will be made of just one shot, but two of the scenes I worked on this month have many more than that. So instead of describing my progress so far as 7 scenes finished out of 61, it would probably be more accurate to describe it as 19 shots out of 88, with the prep work already finished for 11 more.
I’m going to keep working on 50 Ways to Die in Elden Ring until late February, at which point I’ll switch over to production on what will probably be a 50 Ways to Live in Minecraft video. I have no idea what it’s going to be about yet.