In hindsight
A day has passed since I finally managed to create the final encode for Black Sun, and slowly, my psychological veil will deteriorate and I will return to the way I was a few months past. The deep recess I had forced myself into to produce this project, to endure the hardships of its final week, will diminish and I will become somewhat human again.
I look back upon Black Sun with the same ever-merciless, judgmental gaze I bear upon all aspects of creation, and though I have already gone through much of the project's creation and the struggles and shortcomings related, I wish to point out many things I wish I could have done better.
Plot
Black Sun: Salvation, as a conceptual novel, is the second novel in the Black Sun saga. Salvation focuses entirely on what in the video is the act 2 section. But both novels have a tremendous amount of history, mechanics, characters, and other related content that were created for them over the years. Almost none of this makes it into the video, but instead elements of some relation were bastardized in their place.
I chose this path for several reasons. The first and foremost was because I had absolutely no way to represent any of the other elements. Not being a character modeler, I can't model any of the characters or simulate any interactions. Adashim and the Fear's interactions, charactized simply as darkness and the red eye in the video, are hugely butchered to fit the bill of the video. While I thought I was being clever at the time, I couldn't build the video around this example.
The memory sequence shortly before Act 2 begins is the most lore-heavy aspect of the entire video and one of the only parts that uses true to canon elements. It was also one of the first segments to ever be finalized in terms of content. Is it not clear how I let slip the quality from there on? It should be.
While I initially intended to project to have many more character-related elements in it, especially for Adashim, I never attempted any. I had no means to do so. What was I going to show for Adashim? A ship? Please. There's no mention of Haktish at all in the video, who is the lead Anahn character, a blood-son and the grand admiral of the Royal fleet. I couldn't voice act him and knew no one who could pull a convincing choice. The entire relationship of the Prince, the Vice, and the Fear is entirely lost on the whole production and will never be experienced by any viewers. A huge element of the story's psychological impact is completely neglected.
I feel this is a tremendously wounding blow to the production on a lore standpoint, because although Black Sun has a lot of scale and a lot of space warfare to it, at its heart it's about a few select characters as they seek to control the events of the future. The Fear, whose name is only spoken by Xul`Amon near the end of the video, is left entirely out of context for the whole production and whose only presence is shown as a voice and the red eye. This makes sense from a writing production because in a writing production you can make such a thing so simple and pull it off very, very well. As a stand-alone video, this is suicide.
The name Xul`Amon is never mentioned in the video, and the name Xy`Kranasha is only given once. When I laid out the dialogue for this video as I did, I intentionally chose to start avoiding plot elements as much as possible. While Black Sun as a video maintains a tiny excuse of a "plot", it was designed as a stand-alone, "inspired by" Black Sun as opposed to actually forge an effort of telling Black Sun's story. I consciously abandoned the prospect of telling Black Sun's story after I had made the memory sequence, because I knew I'd be looking at a multi-hour video demanding years upon years of CGI work I had no possible way to make.
This decision has the balance in that the video will never make sense to anyone but me and maybe Killer 11 and that's literally it. I can't even properly quantify how other people would perceive it, much less in the mental state I was/am in. I had become so enormously desensitized to the entire video that I think I completely lost sight of whatever the hell it was I was originally aiming for. I struggle to consider that I even had a real goal in mind, other than building from Episode 0 but with dialogue.
But, that's the thing, you see. This was basically Episode 0, but with Xy`Kranasha. Maybe the first pitfall was choosing to include ANY dialogue elements. I was encouraged to do so by Killer 11, under the premise that even if they didn't make sense, they would add at least some character to the video. This played on my shoulders two challenges;
- Making the dialogue flow into the video without breaking the pace and motion.
- Voicing that dialogue in a believable manner.
The first was attained by the aforementioned balance. I chose a more subtle way of telling the video's "plot" rather than a direct approach. If you read the dialogue out very carefully, place it together, take a few things literally, you'll probably see what it was I tried to do. Or maybe not, because I don't know if people can see things the way I do. But by doing this almost no one would get it the first time even if they're really bright and partly familiar with the writing. This was doubly suicidal because no one in my audience is even slightly familiar.
I accepted this defeat knowingly and wittingly, in the knowledge that the video would come off as another "video about ships shooting each other for no reason". In such an instance, I accept that its purpose is more or less a demonstration of my content I created for Sins of a Solar Empire, in which I feel the video can stand on its own in achieving. If you try to look at it as a story or a movie, it won't hold up even for a second.
This is where the second element, the voice acting, and the presentation, will fail.
My decision to keep the damaging segments like the UD hell segment preluding Feast was made in error. I thought I could recover those parts and make them fit with the video despite the limitations of my abilities, but in hindsight this was not a good idea. I think the smarter choice would have been to embrace the concept of a "mod" video more than a "movie" video. By having the video associate with some plot elements but not enough to make due, I introduced an expectation and an obligation that was not filled, even in the video's conclusion.
The voice acting, which rested almost entirely on my shoulders, came as a burden, and a challenge. I welcomed the challenge, but I think I met the limits of my acting potential very soon. In trying to voice every Anahn character, members of a gruff and brutal race whose voices I had very hard times even imagining, I was setting myself up for major fail. I think that while any given voice, except for maybe the odd English screwup I let slide, can stand on their own in some manner, as a whole they mesh together too much. My choice to make due with edits and filterings to tell them apart made sense to me in my state of mind, where it was easy for me to decipher. But, in the presentation to an unfamiliar individual, it's not likely to make much difference.
I foresaw this particular flaw in my plan ahead of time but consciously chose to go with it anyways for the simple fact I had no choice. What was I going to do, not voice the characters? I didn't know anyone who could even come close to the level of emotion I had, and with the way my writing was changing all the time, I had to have voices on the spot and immediately available for change in the likely circumstance the dialogue was altered, so I could hear them alongside the music and shift accordingly.
What all of this equates to is that I personally feel the plot aspect of Black Sun: Salvation, as a video, is the greatest failure of the entire thing. It is a greater failure than the limitations of sins or my abilities as a modeler. I don't feel that it's a failure because I made errors in my execution, but rather because the execution itself was fundamentally flawed. I acknowledge that the choices I made were made in the knowledge I would ridicule the shit out of them immediately after, and that I would be very mad at myself for making those choices. I also acknowledge that these decisions were made in a time of great mental strife and immense stress, and that looking back and second-guessing those decisions is easy now only because I am on the other side of the fence.
Composition
I think I would have done a much better job if I had chosen to try to structure the fights. My recordings are a mix of staged events and recordings of skirmishes. While this is perfectly fine for a "mod" video, if we take into context my inclusion of dialogue and half-assed cinematics, one would conclude that choosing random battle footage to accompany them was a colossally bad idea, because it would only serve to skew the information motion that much further.
While I would love to blame myself for this failure I can only partly blame myself, because the difficulties in recording forced me into a challenging corner and I doubt many could have crawled out of it in similar circumstances. Still, it was my decision to move forward with what I had, and I didn't have the patience to keep recording until I got something similar to what I really wanted. I ultimately let the video slide with subpar recordings, especially in Act 1 and the first half of act 2. The Fortress and Emperor segments are in my eyes amongst the best in the entire production and only because they are structured, while the remainder are very random and unstructured.
It seems to me that I aimed for a "mod video" with a combination of dialogue and plot presentations while still trying to remain distant and un-obligated for providing a foundation for any scrutiny into these subjects. Thus, I see a split in feedback much as I predicted I would. A general consensus of confusion is reached and my predictions resound to the letter. However, I wish I did not foresee such a thing, because in doing so I consciously allowed my quality control to slip and I did not deliver what it is I wanted to deliver.
While Black Sun's completion means a lot to me as an action, an action that proves to myself I can fight a horrible battle unto the end, the lengths I had to take to bring it to completion terrify me, frankly. I don't mean the physical actions I took, but rather the amount of content I allowed myself to totally ignore and how completely de-sensitized to my work I became.
Sure, I'm one guy, and people always tell me about how one guy can only do so much, but I know I could have done better if only I was a little bit stronger, a little bit more patient, and a little bit less stupid.
At the same time, though, Black Sun was a venture into otherwise completely foreign waters. While I'm not inexperienced with game design, modding, or making videos, the effort of mashing all of this into a video production on the level I wanted to produce was completely new territory. All of these elements entered the arena but didn't quite meet each other in the middle, and I lost sight of my goals with the project. I do not plan to attempt anything of a similar nature ever again.
