Video Essays on film and gaming

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Another part about that that I extra appreciated was what he added in the comment for the video:
Nerdwriter1 said:
One thing I forgot to mention, which makes Baumbach's writing even more impressive, is that there's no improv in his movies. The actors say what we wrote word-for-word.

I love that he opened by talking about the other side of good film dialogue as not being what real human speech is, but what it could be which helps to describe differences in how filmmakers attempt to portray speech between characters very differently, but both have their places in being extremely well done, but that they're different focuses and skillsets.

Fantastic stuff!




X :neo:
 

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
I need to get on PoE but the size of a skill board or whatever it was is daunting :closedmonster:.

Mind you I was sadfeis at running out of stuff to do in D3 back when.

edit: I'm reading finishing it takes anywhere between 6 hours and a year. All righty then :monster:
 

Geostigma

Pro Adventurer
AKA
gabe
Yeah it certainly is. My first play through I attempted to yolo it with a ranger , but just sort of superficially only looked at the skill tree at level up and only looked forward like 5 or so nodes at a time rather then looking at the bigger picture and planning out a build around a skill long term.

I ended up rerolling the next season after that last attempt hit the wall and was just getting destroyed , and I followed a starter build I found on youtube. With said build it took me about 15 hours to complete the story campaign and I was able to push to about tier 10 in maps before calling it quits.

I understand the skill tree a bit better now 2 seasons later, but it's still a bit daunting without a guide near me to double check my preferred route towards certain nodes. The one thing to know that makes it less daunting is that even though theres like 1000 nodes on there, you only really use around like 120-ish , and each class drops you into a specific location in the skill tree sorta like FFX.

So if you wanted to theory craft a build, ideally you look at where each class starts at in the tree, what their "ascended" classes can do and then look at your main skill or skills will do and how that area of the skill tree can compliment it via basic stat nodes and some of the more interesting nodes (there are some really crazy ones, like some that set your HP value to 1 at all times, but gives you a massive boost to damage when on "low" health etc.)


Orrrr you could just be a madman and try out the Forbidden Build

 

Cthulhu

Administrator
AKA
Yop
Yeah that's the thing with games like these, I need someone else to tell me what's best :monster:. The skill tree is intimidating. Grim Dawn's main skill tree is straightforward enough, but it encourages you to train dual class (I read you won't get far if you try going single-class), and there's a "constellation" system of sorts (similar to PoE's thing) where you also need someone to hold your hand to decide what direction to go.

I mean I appreciate big and complicated games where the diehards can go apeshit on, but I'm not that diehard :monster:. At least these games are usually designed that you can do a normal and hard playthrough without having to min / max too much.
 

Strangelove

AI Researcher
AKA
hitoshura
i watched that but then it came to the spoiler bit and i skipped it because i'd like to play the game on my own first

also detention which looks cool, and you can actually buy that still

also, very soothing accent 10/10 narration
 

Strangelove

AI Researcher
AKA
hitoshura
vor95df.jpg
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X





You'll have to forgive the clickbait-y titles, but these guys REALLY get in-depth about a lot of the absolutely insane technical details about the sort of work that goes into realistic VFX in films. On top of just the animation, there are absolutely insane things that you have to consider to make something look like it's REAL that go well above and beyond just the skeletal and muscular structures that drive animations and other performance capture rigs.

I thought of this while talking about the new Lion King film vis-a-vis animation and technical challenges, and wanted to share their commentary on a lot of things, and especially when they cover when things are REALLY good, but still not good enough (Tarkin's facial lighting), and/or little design decisions to trick us into accepting faces (Thanos' stubble).




X :neo:
 

Geostigma

Pro Adventurer
AKA
gabe
Definitely going to watch this later when i get home. I'm generally pretty fine with CGI these days and think it's used way more than people realize so i'm curious to see what they think.

I wonder if they will do an Aquaman episode. I've only seen it in 4k so idk if this sentiment was held for Theater viewers or lower resolution home formats, but I often felt like much of the CGI was missing "something" it definitely wasn't in uncanny valley territory but i certainly recognized it as CGI rather than an immersive medium. Idk if I would go out of my way to call it bad CGI, it was absolutely stunning and pretty in many shots, but none the less I was very aware of it's presence. Maybe I could say it felt "fake"?
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
You'll love these then.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what other things they could potentially cover (I'm personally hoping for the scenes with young!Arnold in Terminator Genisys and also the scenes in young!Hugh in Logan at some point). There are already some really crazy things that I didn't know and there are so, So, SO many details that go into making things work, and there are so many subtle things that we don't at all actively KNOW, but we notice if they're not there just because of the uncanny valley. There's a lot of talk about hue matching, light level differences, lighting changes, sub-surface scattering, pore-stretching, sub-muscle movement, and things where they're even different scene-to-scene and sometimes it's just a bad shot, and other ones where you can tell that the team working on it were pressed for time, and got all of the most important things, but didn't get to go deeper and polish the finer details. It's immeasurably satisfying to watch.

On a similar note, but with a wider ranger of specialists, it's the same reason that I love Wired's "Technique Critique" series which is a bit more of a polished version of this kind of breakdown on a wide number of different things. Here're a few misc ones from the playlist for a taste of this as well (which is the link).




X:neo:
 

Tetsujin

he/they
AKA
Tets





You'll have to forgive the clickbait-y titles, but these guys REALLY get in-depth about a lot of the absolutely insane technical details about the sort of work that goes into realistic VFX in films. On top of just the animation, there are absolutely insane things that you have to consider to make something look like it's REAL that go well above and beyond just the skeletal and muscular structures that drive animations and other performance capture rigs.

I thought of this while talking about the new Lion King film vis-a-vis animation and technical challenges, and wanted to share their commentary on a lot of things, and especially when they cover when things are REALLY good, but still not good enough (Tarkin's facial lighting), and/or little design decisions to trick us into accepting faces (Thanos' stubble).




X:neo:

These are great! Looks like they did more of these:


 

Lulcielid

Eyes of the Lord
AKA
Lulcy

How a game that lacked content and seemed unfinished has endured for over years (and still counting) by sheer power of excellent gameplay & depth alone.
 
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