It has been a while since I have done any kind of editing whether audio or video. Time, poor internet, and real life situations have played a factor in the lack of content over the past year. However, I have been trying to get back into the swing of things. Though I didn’t think I would start by creating a “film” using GTA RP gameplay footage.
While I was getting some work done, I was watching a Twitch streamer with the online handle Vader. He was roleplaying as a character named Tuong, in GTA RP on the No Pixel server, and had stumbled across another group of roleplayers who had started a storyline. But once Vader had logged off for the night, I started switching between other streamers as the events of this storyline unfolded which gave me the idea for this particular project.
As I was watching things play out, I had started writing down a timeline of the events occuring and envisioning it in a different way..I wanted to see this as a video with multiple perspectives. Problem is, up to this point, I had no experience editing footage with multiple viewpoints in mind. Those of you who have watched my YouTube content have noticed that it is usually just from one point of view. The closest I had come to doing anything complicated were side-by-side comparisons of gameplay footage when I was a news writer for Maximum PC.
For this to work, I would be unable to use Windows Movie Maker since it is very limited in what it can do. This meant I would have to re-familiarize myself with a program called Shotcut which I had started to use shortly before I stopped creating content.
So I spent several hours viewing and recording gameplay footage of various streamers who had been involved with the event. This meant pulling up the stream and using a program called OBS to record the footage. Because I did it this way, the footage being recorded was at 720p. I would have preferred to have recorded at 1080p, but my internet isn’t that great and I am using a10-year-old PC to do all of this with.
As I was going through streams and figuring out which perspectives I would use, I decided that I would focus on the criminal perspective more and have the Chang character, Lord_Kebun, be the main focus. From there, it was just selecting streamers and the footage I thought would contribute best.
This presented some interesting challenges when it came time to edit. While editors normally have multiple takes and shots of a scene to pick and choose from of actors playing their roles, streamers have to juggle things. There were a lot of potential great moments left on the floor because a streamer broke character, or would acknowledge their viewers, or even play music in the background. In fact, for the characters of Tuong and Angel (KylieBitkin), I keep hoping that the background music they played is innocuous enough so that the video doesn’t get flagged for copyright violation (but the music they were playing really went well with their scenes). Which is why I focused on the Chang character as much as I did. The streamer didn’t break character very often and didn’t really play any background music in his stream.
Because I wanted to try and make a “film” I tried to make transitions between the various perspectives make sense and follow the timeline of the story. I think I succeeded in that department for two-thirds of the video and kind of gunked it up for the final act of the story. But that was because there was so much going on that I was trying to show it all.
Which brings up editing multiple perspectives. I’m sure there is a way to do it correctly, but I was simply taking portions of each perspective for each act and throwing them on the video’s timeline. Then I would bounce back and forth re-watching the scenes, splicing out the parts I wanted to use, and putting them into the main storyline.
What i would have done differently, if i knew how to do it while making this video, would have been to do a picture-in-picture kind of thing. For the prison transport section, I would have had Chang’s perspective be the main view with a window in the corner showing Vinny (Shotz) and Tyrone’s (Zombie_Barricades) perspectives when they started firing. I’m not sure if this is possible in Shotcut, but it is something I will have to look up.
Audio is another thing I should have worked on. Aside from my concern of the background music used in some streamers’ footage, I could have exported the audio to Audacity and made sure to try and level it all out. I could have also added in some music to give the video more life and character. However, that would have taken even more time.
Suffice to say, it took at least ten hours of viewing, recording, and editing the footage to turn it into a 95-minute video. So when i was done splicing everything together, I was already tired and really didn’t want to spend several more hours on audio. Though I might revisit it and re-edit the film.
I’m just glad that my PC didn’t burn out while it was exporting the video so I could upload it to YouTube. Having done this, I would like to do more projects similar to this one. Though I don’t want it to be so time-consuming.
Of course, the props go to the amazing streamers who made this story a lot of fun to watch. It is amazing how great and addicting GTA RP has become over the years as a lot of veteran streamers have been honing their voice-acting talents. The ebb and flow of this story, with the random elements, all coalesced together to make a great storyline. I just hope I did justice to it. It especially helped as the stakes kept getting higher so that there ended being a great, action-packed finale.
But feel free to check out the fruits of my labor. I did have fun doing it and found it quite a challenge. I do wish the video resolution could have been better though.
The Quest for Smoked Bacon (and the Mental Degradation of Park Ranger Clarkson)
