Guild Wars 2

So, this is a video that I made a couple of years ago while the old Lion’s Arch was still intact. It was inspired by the Halloween theme for GW2 composed by Maclaine Diemer. The music made me visualise key points in the story and I was able to build up the rest from those initial ideas, (The opening scene is a prime example of this visualisation, with the Halloween theme and opening titles becoming a key element in the timing.)

Anyway, enjoy.

From initial conception to the finished article it took a year to create the video as much of the inspiration occurred just after GW2’s first Halloween had ended, (I needed to wait until the following year for the halloween décor to be added once again.) But this allowed me to put a script together and record the voices so that it was all ready once the video recording had taken place.
All video recording was done inside a week, and required me to use non-native resolutions as the monitor I was using at the time of recording was not widescreen. I had to use a 1280×720 resolution with a monitor that uses 1280×1024 as its standard, this resulted in distorted images when recording but snapped back to normal once the video was finally compiled and allowed a widescreen format.
Logistics-wise the two biggest headaches involved the Charr chase and the Nightclub scene. Getting together that many players required a lot of co-ordination and I have much to thank my guild for in that regard.
The colour lighting in the nightclub scene took three hours to implement, It involved placing two identical video clips on top of each other with of of them having a certain amount of transparency. Colour filters then had to be painstakingly added to the non-transparent video and timed with the music individually in order to get the nightclub lighting effects. However I am extremely pleased with the end result and it turned the old Crows Nest into a convincing nightclub.
Also bare in mind that this video was created before the implementation of first person views into the game (something that I mentioned and requested during the end credits) I had to use various tricks to ‘remove’ myself from the frame. This usually involved frequent use of Halloween spider tonics, going through several until I had the small black plastic spider that I needed to stay out of scene as much as possible.