ladies and gentlemen! the winner of the short film contest 2016! for the second time in a row! it's "lanaya is mine" by maxofs2d, give it up! [applause]
dota team, hello, and welcome to my behind-the-scenesvideo on my dota 2 international 2016 short film contest entry, "lanaya is mine". which, coincidentally, won first place. and man, like, it's really hard toknow where to begin, but...
i mean... i wasn't expecting to win first place at all,and i am incredibly humbled and thankful and grateful for your support, and it means so much to me. i thought i was gonna get 3rd, you know? maybe 2nd if i was really lucky. because there were so manyincredible entries this year. and at the same time, it's kind of a shamethere are only 10 winners. but i'm gonna get on my soapbox for valve later. in a couple minutes actually.
but anyway. much like last year, i'm making a video thatexplains some stuff about the movie. this year, i will talk less about technical stuffbecause that's kind of the beaten path already. source filmmaker 2, i've covered all the bases,the differences, the little tips & tricks, last year already. this year, i really wanna stress the importanceof fitting your scenario in 60 seconds, because i noticed that's somethinga lot of entries struggled with. and i wanna share as many tips and thoughtsas i can to help people make even better short films in source filmmaker.
or live action or whatever. just... i really wanna see more cool dota short films,because it's a really cool and deep universe even though some people may only care aboutthe game. but there is a really cool universe behindit and i really think it deserves to be explored, and there's so much untapped potential behind it. and i really wanna help people make bettershort films... or just films at all, based on dota, really... and in source filmmaker. but anyway, you get the point.
first i'm gonna get on my soapbox, and broadcastmy thoughts about how the short film contest was handled this year, in the hopes that maybe somebody at valvemay be watching this video, and maybe they might relay the feedback to the dota team, or whoever was handlingthe short film contest this year. well. last year, there were five winners, and eachof those winners got $20,000. so, no particular order of winners, there'sno first place, second place, everybody was on equal footing, with a total prize poolof $100,000.
this year, there's ten winners, and the firstplace gets $25,000, the second place gets $10,000, the third place gets $5,000, andeveryone else gets a measly $500. and when you know how many good entries therewere this year, and, how amazing some of them were, $500 just seems...inadequate, completely inadequate... and only ten winners... it's not enough, in my opinion. i think fifteen would be a really good startingpoint, 'cause then you'd have as many finalists as the cosplay contest, of which the firstedition happened at ti6, this year. but maybe twenty-five winners really wouldbe the perfect number. i mean.
yeah. like, 'cos then, you could be like, you could be airing the top 25 in order, eachday, and then on friday, like it happened this year, you would get the top 5 and itwould be kinda cool, and you could make it a daily, fixed occurence,throughout the broadcast of the tournament. so, that's how i would handle it if i werevalve, i mean, scheduling-wise. now, prizepool-wise, it's kind of a shamethat, i mean... it's stupid that there's twice as many winners with half as much money. because on paper, that's four times worse.
and believe me, for me, it's not about themoney! because, come on, i mean... i've made couriers like faceless rex... i don't need the money. in fact, i've given most of it away to thepeople who helped me make the film, and in music licensing. but... as much as i don't wanna spit on thegift that people have given me by voting for my entry... it's hard to not feel like i've "stolen" thefirst place from... like...
i dunno, "the vision", because like, i wasreally expecting to lose to that entry! and, i'm not, i really don't mean to poursalt in the wound, but it's like, i really feel like the rewards are inadequate, and... long story short, basically, i know it's veryoptimistic to basically say, "valve, please more dedicate more time and more money topeople who are making fan art of your game", but i really think it needs to happen, becausevalve has its roots in the modding community after all, and i think it's, it'd really be... i mean... completely fitting to do something like this. and if you ask me, for the prize pool distribution,i would make it a lot less top-heavy.
maybe something like... actually you could probably do something like... 25, 20, 15, 10, and then 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4,3, 2, 1, and then the bottom ten gets $500. but then, since you have so many entries andfinalists, maybe the bottom ten would actually deserve $500. it's just a thought, but anyway. to sum it up: more finalists, at least 15,that's the starting point. and please, don't make the prize pool so top-heavy. please reward everybody with as much moneyas they deserve, and not just the top 3.
right! so! i'm gonna get down from my soapbox now, andwe're actually gonna start talking about how the movie was made. and first, we have a whole 40 minutes of storydiscussion with erick, erick who helped me write the movie. and after that we'll actually be talking aboutthe technical stuff. so now i'm with my friend erick. hello erick.
hello! erick, uh, well... i could introduce him, but you know, that'skind of boring. so erick, tell us about yourself. hello, my name is erick wright, but you probablyknow me as... actually wait no, you'll know me as erick wright, that's... that's my namewith my youtube channel and all that. i make funny internet videos on the internet. there's a youtube link, i'm assuming it'sgonna appear right... now. click on it!
dota videos. i make all random, i make guides called "theonly way to play", maybe you've seen them. i've made some good videos, i've made like,two or three. i've also made many more videos. right. so erick makes really funny videos and he'sreally good at coming up with funny ideas, unlike myself. and, uh, i'm basically gonna be talking aboutthe story with him. so the thing is, with ideas is, they're paradoxically,simultaneously worthless and yet, everything,
at least when it comes to doing stuff for60 second films. ideas are worthless because everybody cancome up with an amazing idea, but execution is everything, and it's just really weird. and one thing me and erick noticed when wewere looking at competitors, is that... i really don't mean to trashtalk, i mean...it's really coming from a good place, because, believe me, i want to see really cool videos,i want to see more good dota sfms. and, one thing i noticed, that we noticed,that people don't know how to do, is fit their idea within 60 seconds. you have to trim down things, you have tocondense things.
and me and erick found out the hard way. what we have going for us in the final version,sort of came after a good thousand, maybe two thousand, maybe i'm exaggerating a bit, but, we had a few drafts that were absolutely overthe limit, by, like, minutes, actual minutes. yeah, that's true. we're gonna talk about how we got to 60 seconds. you'll notice a lot of the time, the jokesthat are happening in the short film now bounce off of each other in a really natural waythat is pretty much the only way that we could manage to get it under 60 seconds.
yeah, the art of getting everything into 60seconds, you have to condense jokes into like, three things, you have to make them all happenin a single shot, or find a way to integrate one of them into another, it's just really weird. it's not a science, it's an art, or so to speak. we'll get into more of that a little lateron, with like, actual specifics. there are specifically a few jokes that iwanna point out. but we'll get to them in a bit. for instance, in the first place, we thoughtthat the beginning shot where sven is chasing templar assassin is gonna last 10 seconds.
in the final version, it's like 3.5 + 3 seconds,so 6.5 seconds... and it's actually all kinds of weird, because the timing also has to bedictated by the music. i'll get more into the music later, that'sanother subject entirely. and, yeah, like... i said all of this last year, this reallycuts into things i said last year again, but i really wanna stress it even more this year,because... all of the technical stuff, it was more ofa discovery last year, but now it's really about how the hell do you condense as manyideas and things as you can into 60 seconds. especially considering this was a complexset of jokes that had to be set up and paid
off in enough time to make them funny, butalso, like, you know, fast enough to get them into 60 seconds. do you wanna start right off the bat withthe title, and what it was going to be? so, the title, it's all you erick. why are you laughing? (this title is pure gold) okay so, i'm laughing,because, the title you pressured me for, and this is actually completely true, i'mnot even kidding, this is not something we're making up, uh, erick wanted me to title thefilm "an adsventure". it was the most terrible pun ever, and thenwhen i said no, he came up with an even more
terrible pun, "lanaya is mine", you know, she's mine, i'm gonna get her, that'swhy there's the bounty poster at the beginning, and she's mine, she's actually a mine, techies' mine. in the original draft, we did not have theposter, which is the thing that kicks off everything, is actually one of the last thingsthat we wrote in, specifically to reference the title, for the bounty. it actually came mid-way, because yesterday,i was doing a re-render of every single day, and yeah, the poster came up half-way, june16 or 17, i can't remember but yeah, it came in half-way.
the story was pretty much 95% set in stonehalf-way through the actual production. the intro was just so long that we needed to sum it up. also because the music had a fixed durationand i can't change that, and the start of the music needs to happen at a certain time,like 15 seconds, and it needs to end at 57 seconds when it goes like, dun dun boom. and then at the last beat, that's when thetechies mines are revealed, and another beat later, 'cos it's nicer if it's in beats, there'sthe techies explosion. so, fixed duration for the music. and, because of that, the intro needs to betrimmed down to a very specific time.
so we had to find a way to really narrativelymake it flow better. originally, we were calling it "juked". ah yeah, "juked", was my, like, if i can'tthink of any title, ever, that's what i'm gonna use. it was pretty much the working title thatwe used, because we came up with the script, so long before we actually came up with anactual title to call it, which meant that we were going into it hopingfor some divine inspiration later on with the title later on, (and you found it!) yeah, i wouldn't really call it divine, itcame from somewhere, but not from a good place.
it's also really hard to say who came up withwhat, because it was such a back-and-forth process. you and i, we just sat in a skype call, like,almost every day of working on the movie, like, all day long, we were sitting in theskype call, cos you were working on your own entry too, and we were just like, hey, whatif this happened, what if i did this to make it work better, yeah. it was a really back-and-forth process, so,everything is really shared story-wise. max and i both woke up, ate breakfast, gotonto skype, shared screens, and then pretty much did that until we couldn't do it anymoreand fell asleep.
and we did that for a week and a bit... twoweeks? it was a long time. twelve days. i mean, yeah. i worked on it for twelve days and i thinkyou started a couple days after i did, your movie was made in an even shorter time than me. but anyway, yes, so, you know what? let's read the initial script that we did...we did that outline the first day, i believe, over steam.
before that, do you wanna talk about the ideasthat got us to our idea that we have now? because we started off with a crazy, a veritablecornucopia of insane ideas that we got from literally just looking at the dota heroessplash screen. i can't remember them but maybe you do. okay, i'll tell the story then. so the exact first thing that we did was,max and i decided on this, we got ready, we got onto a call, we had no ideas right off the bat, i had a few ideas from last year that i didn'tget around to doing and i pitched those, max had a few ideas, he pitched them to me,
and then we sat there, not really being okaywith the ideas that we were coming up with, because, they mostly would just be eitherpunchlines with no actual story, or stories with no actual end, which is pretty much trueof all of them, right? i think i have a few of them, and, we satthere, looking at the dota 2 heroes web page, it's literally dota2.com/heroes, which hasevery single hero just there, and we're looking at the pictures, we're goingthrough them all, and going, what if that did that with x and y. i remember one i came up with, it was likea rivalry between sven and juggernaut. i mean, it's also already kind of in-game,this was like, "sven.
sven. can't you see how mad i am?" "no." and he just, sven, i mean, sorry, juggernautjust draws angry eyebrows onto his mask. it's like, you know, these little scenes,five second ideas that i get in my head, that are like, based off existing dota lore. it's like, can i find out a way to flesh thatout into a bigger concept, that's like the one i remember the most for some reason. i remember one too!
we also had you immediately coming up with,"i can do a sven voice, can we have sven in there?". oh yeah. because max is very proud of his sven voice,he's very very proud of many of the voices in dota that he can do, he can do naga siren, he can do enigma, hewon a bit of money from doing enigma, i think, (that's true), a year or two ago? so right off the bat, we had a confirmed voiceactor which is a really really powerful tool in making these short films, because voiceacting is very very hard to come by, especially within a week, and specifically for dota charactersthat have nuances and all that.
you'd have to have a voice actor who's alsosort of a dota player. a few of the original ideas that we had, iremember a few of them 'cos i have them written down, like... these are just literally one-linejokes, and we take that one line, and we go with it. i have, "heroes decide to rebel against theplayers because the players are arguing over top and the heroes are friendly with eachother and don't like it", (i remember that one), and it was gonna be an animator vs.animation sort of pastiche. but we only had to like, remember that, atthis point, it was two weeks before the deadline, and i actually have a really nasty habit ofparticipating to every single valve movie
contest that i participated in, it was twoweeks before the deadline. except "the wishmaker", my first one, it wasthree days. four days actually. three days and a half, whatever. but yeah. whatever. gotta find an idea that's fitting all thecriteria for being a good idea, but that you can also do in two weeks with the means thatyou have at your disposal. which is to say, one animator, a bit of amotion capture suit, and, the voice actors
you have, and whatever. and that was a massive thing with a lot ofthe entries, uh, and a lot of the ideas that we had. they were so ambitious, there were going tobe crazy fight scenes, there were gonna be crazy special effects and all that, and alot of ideas had to cut right off the bat because... two weeks, two animators... one and a halfanimators, i was off doing other stuff... so... ultimately we ended up with the sven/tathing. (i think the...) i think the craziest idea you had was a liveaction one, something that was gonna be partially
live action. i'm not sure if we wanna say it out loud,because that's something we might wanna do next year, but remember what i told you, ideasare worthless and it doesn't matter because it's all in execution. so i'm gonna tell it anyway: it's about bristlebackand tusk, in a bar, but you don't find that out 'till the end. and basically people are like, "so you justsneezed on him? that doesn't make sense, right!". i guess, in a way, the joke is just, "dota skills!
they're a little bit silly", basically. that's basically the joke. you gotta look at your idea and find whatit abstracts onto at the base level... so yeah. and, the joke, that is the joke, i can saythe joke right now, and that's not 60 seconds. actually, when you think about it, there wasa live action entry, the shopkeeper one, it was like, you know, the shopkeeper calls twointerns (the interns, yup!), and it's like... yeah, "the interns"! just google it, search it on youtube, it'sreally good, i really loved it. but if you don't wanna watch it for whateverreason, basically, the shopkeeper calls interns,
he's like, "oh yeah, there's gonna be a herocoming in, he's called axe, and you need to sell him axes" "but wait, why" "oh, he mightalso need the axe that turns you into three axes", you know, the manta style. but whatever, it's really good, you shouldwatch it. exactly. but that was an idea of, "things in dota don'tmake sense", and that was a completely different idea to the ones that we had, which is theexact same joke. the same joke gets us in two different directionsbecause of execution. we didn't do that one, but if we had doneit, it would be the same joke but be a completely
different tone and style to "the interns". what other really weird ideas did we get? we had a new hero... i remember that one... oh yeah, the cs:go crossover! yeah, we were gonna do a crossover... well,we weren't going to do it, that was one idea that i think we sat on for about ten seconds. i had a few of my own, which is like, thefinal 58 seconds of a 5 hour game, and it would be a 24-style countdown with like tick-tock(oh yeah!), and it's like,
this game ends when this timer hits, but,there's absolutely no way for it to happen, and it unravels, how does the game finish? that was an idea, but, that would take, thatwould be a really stylistic short film to make that we didn't really have time or theenergy to really craft. because, it is a bunch of things happening,in time, in sync with a bunch of other things happening, and every single thing is a chainof events that causes the end. that sort of thing takes a bit of time. and the thing with a 60 second short filmis that you need to make everything super clear to the audience right off the bat.
i said this like 20 times in the last behind-the-scenesvideo last year, that you need to make the joke super clear, but at the same time, withoutlike, making it obvious, you don't wanna explain the joke, 'cos that makes it unfunny. you just wanna make it really obvious andreadable and understandable... just making it not confusing. and you also wanna avoid outside references,that's the 24 idea was like... bad, inherently bad, because... referencing a tv show, like... this is the international short film contest,it's international, and, for this reason, jokes that are entirely within the contextof the game are going to work a lot better
than references to outside stuff. if you're gonna reference something that'soutside the game, it needs to be really universal, and even that is really rare to come by. i remember in the portal 2 dev commentary,they said that, they tried to find a really universal joke at one point and the one thatreally came up was smooth jazz. you remember, at the part that was like, "we'regonna play smooth jazz in 3, 2, 1", like that's the joke everybody throughout all culturesfound funny. but that's the only one they found. max right here is bringing up a massive pointthat i completely forgot about until this
exact point, that crafted a lot of the ideasthat went into "lanaya is mine". there is very very little dialogue becausedialogue is inherently... it separates cultures and all that. because... it would be completely in english. we tried to avoid that, we tried to have aslittle dialogue as possible. if you write dialogue in english, too: simplewords, simple sentences, because not everybody has a good grasp of english, and that's fine,that's just how it works. and, the thing is, it doesn't really matterbecause the judging happens on steam, this year it happened on steam, and i made surethat i had youtube subtitles in all the big languages
the dota community needs. russian, spanish, there was also turkish andmalaysian, south-east asia stuff. but when it gets broadcasted on the air, thereare no subtitles. valve doesn't include them. it's nice to stick to simple english wordsand not make the joke rely on the dialogue. the dialogue is here to supplement the thing,it's not here as the butt of the joke. yeah, it's a little bit of flavor and all that. i remember one line which is "by the shattered helm! does nobody have money for sentry wards?".
really really simple. the only bit of complex writing there is "shatteredhelm", which is a complete and direct reference to a line that everybody would hear a thousandtimes in just a typical sven game. so, that line was good, we had "sentry wards"which everybody understands, we have "shattered helm", and we have everything else reallysimple between those two things. and you! if you're watching right now, you're like,"man, they're really overthinking the dialogue". no! we're not.
you really gotta "overthink" so many thingsto get it right, it's part of the process. when you're working in a creative field, youreally need to overthink, overthink, overthink. it's really part of the normal process. now i'm gonna read the initial script, theoutline we wrote on the first day. so. first, sven & templar assassin chase, sventurns around the corner, sees nothing, walks forwards, bumps into nothing. then there's a thought bubble about how tacan use meld. sven then calls over the team, one team memberwhines about how they need to get back to farming.
the whole team then uses their skills on thepart where they think ta is there. and sven's like, "i can't believe nobody hasdust of appearance", crystal maiden says, "hey, i do!", sven's like "what". as in, why didn't she use it sooner. cm uses the dust, nothing appears, exceptthere's a riki behind cm, he was about to backstab her. that's just a background joke. but like, then, he just goes away. but everybody's turned towards the spot whereta is there, so, they don't see riki.
that's just an additional joke. sven then kicks the area where they stillthink templar assassin's supposed to be, there's a clink. "she's here somehow, please bring somethingbetter, bring sentry wards". there's a shot of the courier flying towardsthem, then crystal maiden grabs the sentries. sven readies his sword to hit ta, all angry-lookinglike, and he actually uses his ult, you know, he turns red, then there's the sound of thesentry being planted, and then there's a visible stance shift in sven's pose, and he turnsback into blue immediately, like, "oh shit", and then the camera pulls away and it's thetechies mines.
and then boom. and all of that would actually fit about...probably a hundred seconds of footage if you really condensed it without actually cuttingall of these ideas. yeah, yeah, that was, that was a three hourepic odyssey right there. and that was the initial script! we added things to that! for more jokes, 'cos we were like, we gotplenty of time! but we did that in a way that allowed us tocondense things. so what was cut?
the dust part, i'm really sad about that. the dust part, i really wish i could've hadthat, 'cos it would've been pretty funny. then sven using his ult at the end, too. there's also a lot of... i don't have them in that text document andi forgot a lot of them. okay so we're cutting out the dust completely. but how do we make the sentry part funny? and it's like, nobody has money for it. why do they have no money?
because they all have shiny items. crystal maiden's like, i have the arcana dress,right... ok so... i actually gave her that loadout 'cos it'smy favourite loadout, and i think the default cm is stupidly designed. i mean she's an ice princess, why is she half naked? so, like, the loadout i gave her is in myopinion the best thing you can have on her. but whatever. that's just a tangent. anyway.
so, she has the arcana dress so no money. skywrath has, like, the golden immortal, so no money. queen of pain has like, what does she have,i dunno, like, 20 golden couriers? so no money. and what does pudge have? the dragonclaw hooks. and that's the only thing that stayed! yeah, that's the only thing that stayed, ahuge pile of dragonclaw hooks. 'cos like, it didn't really make sense.
it felt like there was no way to really conveythat the others were floating in golden items. it was way too on-the-nose. and then, why didn't they have them before? whereas if there's only one character, pudge,that has all these expensive items, it's a lot easier to accept it as being a cartoony joke. the whole "characters being rich" thing, wedidn't come up with that just naturally. it formed by the fact that you wanted thearcana cm, and i was like "why would she be in arcana cm?" so the joke formed by the fact that the arcanaversion of crystal maiden was already animated
at this point, and we're like, "what if she is in this state because shespent all her money and therefore she wouldn't have the ability to buy wards?" and then, even after that, i was like, okay,cm buys the sentry anyway somehow, but since pudge was the last character going from rightto left, it didn't make sense. so sven buys it 'cos he's the only one withgold, but "carries aren't supposed to do that". 5k players will tell you otherwise, erickis a 5k player... the fact sven buys it is a more subtle joke,you could say, 'cos "carries don't buy sentries" usually, whatever.
so, like, it just adds insult to injury. and immediately after that, we follow it upwith the shot of the sentries and the coins being swapped. in fact, the sentries aren't shown being given,we just show the coins being handed, (it's too complicated to animate!), and you caninfer that sentries are being given because of that. everything is concise! we had the potential to animate both of thosethings happening, but they would have added a few milliseconds we could absolutely havenot worked with.
and then we get to a shot where sven is nowholding sentries, talking, and readying his sword. now, he does three things at the exact sametime, specifically to cut out more time. he places the sentries, looks away to talk,readies his sword and then turns around, right into the pose now that the sentry's down. all of this is pretty much simplified versionof the god's strength thing, and he drops his sword. originally i motion captured the picking-upof the sword, and then i realized, if it was planted into the ground, and hereaches for the sword, but then he notices,
and then "fuck it, whatever, there's no point". i was pretty happy with that idea, i thinkit really works well. hey max— man, i'm actually kinda sad that i didn'tthink of filming the motion capture footage. max, i want to bring up something that i completelyforgot to mention. you know when you were doing the mocap andyou were sharing screen and i could see you do the mocap and all that. i filmed (oh god, i see where this is going),i filmed a lot of it. i would like... okay, i'm gonna give you thefootage, if it's not too embarassing, would
you mind showing the good people out there. i will, i will! that's actually nice, thank you; it doesn'tmatter because i don't care about looking silly in a mocap suit, it's fine. thank you! ... if you just sort of forget the fact thatsven is animated by this french man just running around in his room. much like last year, this year, my entry featuredtechies, this time, more as a general plotline, you could say, than a one-off gag.
and the problem, in a way, is that this year,i'm not the only entry that went with techies in the spotlight. and although, in a way, you could almost arguethat... ... that my entry could be the only one thatreally did it well instead of being a cop-out. 'cos like, other entries, there's a few otherentries that i saw that, just, were like, i don't know how to end my entry so i'm justgonna put techies mines and everything explodes. it's the typical (and that's just a cop-out),it's the typical "it was all a dream" (yeah) whereas your one had it part of the plot. that's basically the equivalent of "it wasonly a dream" in dota style.
although, but, i mean... mine, it wasbuilding up to that moment. so like, it's... yeah. but the thing is, you could say, to the generalpublic, it doesn't matter, because they just see techies and techies is this one generalcategory of gags. and even though, and i'm gonna say, even though,i think mine almost had the best implementation of techies as a plot device, it's still techies! and next year, i will want to not use techies. definitely. the goal next year is to not use techies.
at all. techies, being the de-facto clowny hero ofthe game, means that he's basically the easy joke to make. they're the easy joke to make. i will want to avoid them in the future. 'cos they can come off as being cheap no matterhow well you integrate them within your story. on that point, there's actually a lot of recurringthemes throughout a lot of the short films. pinging was another one. what's your opinion on pinging?
because pinging is a joke in and out of itself. just the concept of pinging. you had it in the video that we did. why? well, you know, for me pinging was like, okay,sven needs to call the team over, but how to make that funny? repeated pinging. at first, normal pinging, and then you playwith the contrast, and then he just spams ping like a 2k russian player or whatever.
but the thing with pinging, pinging is souniversal, everybody's lived through it, and it's not really obnoxious because it's a gamemechanic. it doesn't have that same feeling as, "ohit's an overused plot device" as techies. so i think it's fine. but, the thing is, 60 seconds is so short,that, i wouldn't be surprised if you had a lot of the same jokes next year as there werethis year. it's just gonna take so much originality tocome up with... original gags that don't repeat themselves. do you mind if i jump in with a bit of conspiracytheory here?
now, original jokes have to be set up beforethey get to be paid off, because they're original jokes, right? so, pinging is a really really fast way ofgetting a joke out there that keeps the plot moving along. because pinging doesn't have to be set up. pinging. the sound. just the sound. and the effect.
yeah! it's a, it's a— it's probably one of the fastest jokes thatyou can do. it's ingrained into every player's mind! it's a pavlovian reaction. and same thing with techies. if you really want. just, the idea of hearing the sound is... every single one of the entries, nearly everysingle one of the top 10 had bipedal characters
that were easily animatable and had big faces. do you think, if someone had made a broodmothervideo and tried to pass that off as like, an actual comedy, where broodmother is expressingand all that, it wouldn't be as well received, because she's got a face that's not really appealing. it would be a lot harder to make and you wouldbe restricted to certain categories of humor. but you're forgetting one thing: sven. and sven doesn't have a face! so, how did we tackle that? so, the reason,sven didn't have a face actually,was... well, i mean, not really because, i
said the primary motivation for sven is thati could do the voice, but the other side benefit of having svenis that i can upgrade the model without breaking stuff; and i'm gonna talk about that a bit later. the second reason is that... no face animation. so you get to do everything in body languageand you don't have to mess with facial animation. no lip-syncing! no lip-syncing, max! what an amazing hero sven is! well, it doesn't really matterbecause lip-syncing is easy.
the other reason not having facial animationis good is because dota models... ... they're pretty bad. i mean, they're pretty bad for close-ups and such. and... the one... i mean, it's not really even about the textureresolution, it's more about the polygon count, and especially, the eyes. the eyes are the window to the soul, and (doyou want—) that and the eyebrows, really (are you about to talk about the fact that)hang on (the eyes aren't actually eyes, they're just painted on bits of skin?)
and when you move them left and right, it'sactually just the skin moving left and right, instead of the eyeball turning? yeah, 'cos they don't have eyeballs. i'd like to talk about that a lot. go ahead. this is something that's... probably the hardestthing to cope with as an animator in source filmmaker with the dota characters. they can't move left and right, at all! because, if you're doing a closeup and they'relooking left and right, their eyes don't really...
turn? actually, for some heroes, it's actually fine. i mean, you, yourself will notice as you squishthe controls around that it's terrible. but one thing that i've definitely noticedwatching a lot of other entries is that it's actually fine! it's actually not that bad in most heroes,as long as you take care of doing the motion just within acceptable bounds. it just really isn't that bad. but!
with some heroes, the eyes barely move leftand right. so it's not really about the fact that itlooks bad, it's that you don't have freedom, you don't have the range of motion neededto actually express something. crystal maiden's eyes, on her arcana model,have that issue. and a bunch of other heroes do. how many close-ups did you have in this film? zero. more or less. i mean, there's close-ups, and then there'sclose-ups close-ups, where all you see is
the face, but i think i only ever stoppedat mid-chest-to-shoulders high. because if you go any closer... (instead ofreally zooming on the face.) i could have actually zoomed in on sven'shelmet because once again, i upgraded the helmet, but there wasn't much point to doing that. (exactly.) we needed to establish right off the bat thatlanaya was being chased by sven, because, in the original thing, it could be read thatthey were chasing, (oh, teammates! yeah) ... they were both chasing something else. so you added in her looking back and a bitof sound of anguish—
at first, the looking back was already therefrom the ground up, but, i felt like, it might not be clear enough. and i remember, at first the camera wasn'tshaking enough, but making the camera a lot shakier, like, it really gave off more ofa chase vibe, and she actually turns back, angry-looking,and there's the "huh!" sound, in disdain. and, in a way, it almost says, "oh yeah, i'mabout to juke the hell out of you, buddy". but the wanted poster, which, also, alexandrakern did, she drew lanaya's head on it... i mean, it's kind of a shame because you onlyhave one second to read it, and, i guess the only thing you really can read if you don'tpause the video is that you just see "wanted"
and hopefully you have enough time for youreyeballs to pick up the fact that it's templar assassin's portrait on here. actually, fun fact: that wanted poster comesfrom somewhere else. and i will tell you because i want peopleto actually see this. it comes from the very first dota comic,"are we heroes yet?". and it's actually the same layout. it's changed, of course, but it's very similar. i really like to have those little throwbacksto lore and the bigger world outside of dota matches. the lore of dota is really sparse and stufflike that, but i feel like, for many people,
lore, little story details, story bits & pieces,to me, it really enhances the enjoyment of a game. just imagine if dota was just like, the samegame except you didn't have any story details and all the heroes were a lot more generic. sure, you would have all the same heroes,same gameplay mechanics, but like, i feel it'd be a much more boring game, if like,all the heroes were mute and had very generic designs and whatever. the atmosphere of a game, in my opinion, issomething extremely valuable, and that's also why i strive to recreate a really nice atmospherein my movies as well.
i really want to give this sense of biggerscale, this sort of integration into... story, in a way... i really like to play with the sense of scale,just make it feel like the movie is not a standalone piece, it's like... it's really hard to explain my feelings aboutthis, man. it's hard to say it into words. but i really hope you will see what i mean. we forgot to say earlier, about the shopkeeperand pudge being there. so pudge is buying all these dragonclaw hooksand that's why he doesn't have money for sentry
wards, right. the way... i think this is a really good example of...this is the prime example of condensing several jokes into one. okay so you go from right to left, all heroessaying "no i don't have money for sentry wards and then pudge is there. okay, so... we needed a way for them to buy the sentrywards, but, if pudge is buying the dragonclaw hooks, okay, the shopkeeper needs to be there.
so then we don't have to waste time on actuallycalling the courier, 'cos the shopkeeper just happens to be there, because, i dunno. there doesn't need to be a reason why theshopkeeper is there. not explicitly stated, that is. it doesn't need to be a reason that's statedin-your-face. why is the shopkeeper there? 'cos pudge called him, i guess. or maybe this specific part outside the dotamap happens to be where the shopkeeper is. it doesn't matter.
all that matters is that, we managed to, like,by condensing those jokes, we segwayed into the shopkeeper just being there, and thereyou have the source for the sentry wards. oh man, yeah, far out, max. that was going to be... dust? and then the courier. and the courier going all from the fountainall the way to where they are... i really like the fact that the shopkeeper'sjust there. i find that really really funny. because clearly, he's not in the dota map!
he's just, you know, when he's not in a dotagame, what else would he do? he's a traveling salesman! he sells things to travelers! so he just happens to be there! that's fine! but does that mean the shopkeeper died too? did the shopkeeper die at the end? well, he's not there in the last shot so heprobably scurried away. i mean, you know, i feel like it's kinda impliedthat the shopkeeper is like... not a normal
person, he definitely has powers of some kind, like... yeah, you just read the comic, "are we heroesyet?", and it's definitely implied that, there's definitely a lot of magic at play,not regular magic either. do you think he's actually icefrog? he could be a graphical representation of icefrog. i kinda feel like it's implied he's a demigodor something like that? but the shopkeeper's there, with a bunch ofitems... he also just happens to be stocking sentries on this trip. oh man!
you know what i should have had next to him? his pet, the... greevil? you know, the rhinoceros-looking creature? oh yeah! and at the time, i remember actually thinkingthat, but at the time i didn't remember that that it was actually a ti1, 2 or 3 courier? they actually made the creature into a courier. which is nice.
lore. guys! i hope, really, that, all this story discussion,if you've managed to watch... like... so far we've shot an hour's worthof footage, i dunno if i'm gonna condense it down to 40 minutes or whatever, but anyway. if you watched it through, i really hope thathearing about our story process and thoughts, it's been helpful to you. and i really want to see, basically, storiesin dota sfms that flow better. and i really hope it's a valuable resource,everything we've just said.
and, you know. really hope it's been valuable. so yeah, that's pretty much it. i like being able to do this, because, it'sa lot about discipline, and understanding that some jokes aren't quite that... funny,they're more just referring to other things that are funny. it's just a thing that you need to... getpractice with, i guess! and there's just... every little thing that you put into yourmovie has like... implications, it can call
back to another thing, which calls back intoanother thing. everything is interconnected, that's my point. and now, we're gonna move into the technicalside of things. one thing you may have noticed is that sven'smodel is not the same as usual. its textures are using the original workshopart sources, which are higher resolution by a factor of four. i also edited those textures and made a newmaterial so that the saturation & automatic rim lighting would not be as strong; a visuallook which is desirable from the in-game top-down perspective, but looks like ass otherwise.
i would have liked to have snow sticking onhim after he got back up, but i didn't have the time to look into it. i could also have rerigged him more extensively,like giving him actual fingers, but i figured it was time better spent on other things. one thing that i do regret is not lookingmore into how to make his metal parts feel a lot more metallic. i also took the opportunity of making someof the weightmaps less... terrible. half of the dota heroes suffer from rushedart one way or another, as valve had to get a lot of heroes out of the door in a timelymanner when the game was starting out.
sven is not as bad as other heroes like templarassassin, but there were spots which absolutely needed fixing, like his forearms. given that he does not have a face, beingable to have hand motions that deform the mesh properly is nice. the way source 2 works makes it, as far asi'm aware, impossible to edit the game's base content. if i want to edit a model, i have to re-importit from scratch. and, as you might remember from last year, someengine features are tied to valve's internal tools. and as far as characters are concerned, thebiggest of these would be facial blend shapes.
they exist in the old workshop art sourcefiles, but not in a way that preserved the hierarchical rules that govern how all thesemorphs interact with each other. but sven doesn't have a face, so it doesn't matter! unfortunately, valve's latest workshop artsource packages not only include the game-sized textures, but also omit the morphs. two steps backwards. maybe it would be nice to have an "ultra"texture setting, much like how an "ultra" shadow quality was introduced. i voiced enigma last year, i'm doing sventhis time around!
it's a much easier voice to pull off, anddoesn't require fancy filtering; the helmet muffling is done with eq and convoluted reverb. sven's original voice has an accent that'ssomewhere between german and vaguely-nordic. i tried my best to imitate that, and whilei personally think i got the accent right, some people thought it sounded a little french,and i can't really blame them for thinking that! but what really matters is... you don't haveto sound like the original performance. it's nearly impossible to reach that bar anyway. listen to my impression and the original side-by-sideand it's super obvious that the two are far apart. what you gotta aim for is sounding like whatpeople remember of the original performance.
you need to sound like their memory of thevoice; and as long as you meet that requirement, you're good to go. i decided to set my movie in a wintery nightbecause i figured it had a greater chance of visually standing out like that. i had also done two workshop promo videosin that setting, so i was familiar with it. snow falling is also "cheap" atmospheric detailthat doesn't require a lot of set-up. i could have probably gone with a darker night,but having it this bright is perhaps not that unnatural; after all, it's a full moon upona mystical land, and snow does reflect light quite a bit.
as we talked about earlier with erick, i triedto make the setting feel like it wasn't in the dota map, but some other region outside of it. for originality, to expand the universe further,for the audience to not wonder, "hey, are they in the radiant jungle or the offlane",that sort of stuff. but i'm gonna let you in on a secret; it'sactually the radiant jungle, near the bottom tier 2 tower. it's a really good spot for movies. the limitations i talked about a year agoare still there; the "ultra" shadow quality setting does help, but much less than you'd think.
even though it doubles the shadow map resolution,it does not double the acceptable farz distance, especially when the light's angle is closeto the horizon. it also does not help with the precision ofthe shadows; something you can spot a little here. and also in the opening shot to a certaindegree; the camera barely moves before pulling away from the poster, or the shadow would do this. i wanted to have a more noticeable pan, buti had to tinker until the 3 or so "jumps" in the shadow map projection were not noticeable. i'm still using a sky dome for the background,but this time around there's about a dozen background cards.
they were drawn by the amazing alexandra kern,and you should definitely go check out more of her work. she also drew the imaginary lanaya, her portraiton the wanted poster, and sven's map. pictures are worth a thousand words, especiallymoving pictures, so here's how it actually works. because i can't extend the farz clipping planepast a reasonable distance, there is some forced perspective at play. the cards have to move with the camera, somecompletely, some only partially. this creates the illusion of much greaterdistance than can be normally achieved.
the cards also change from shot to shot andare not super consistent; you can notice it, feel that something is slightly off, but thevisual gain is huge so i believe it's worth it. instead of using camera-based fog, i wententirely through volumetric lights. volumetric lights can only be additive, though,but it doesn't matter that much. just a little bit of "ground fog" makes abig difference and really seals the deal on winter. if there's a way for camera-based fog to notaffect certain models or materials, i don't know about it. and that kind of fog would affect the skydome, and that would be awful, because the light from the stars is already way weakerthan it should be (partially caused by the
lack of hdr, once again). this is a lot more acceptable in daytime scenesif you plan your dome's texture ahead. in order to gain a huge amount of time, iset out to have a lot of flexibility with my cards. i rigged them to have a control that couldstretch or squash them vertically, as well as curve them in any direction i wish. that curve control can be used to warp themiddle of the card towards the side, which is really useful to balance the backgroundcomposition more nicely. the torch is made using four lights, sometimesmore if i want to fake a nicer angle on characters.
it's got a bit of noise on position and intensityto make it feel more alive. it's also the only other source of lightingand a really good frame of reference, which is definitely one of the stronger points ofthe film as far as scene layout goes. because of all the perspective trickery, movingthe camera around was inherently discouraging. so in the majority of the shots, the camera'sposition does not change and it only rotates. this definitely makes the film feel less dynamic,but it made other things easier. it made using fill lights a lot easier, andi've got a lot of those because i didn't want some parts to look almost like crushed blacksbefore i even started doing the color grading. i think this shot has some of the nicer filllights, but they're present throughout every
single shot. there are two songs in the film; the first oneis from the ti5 music pack by jeremy & julian soule. that was the easy part. i had no idea what to do for the rest; i lookedthrough some stock music libraries, but there was nothing that could even remotely qualify. i resorted to looking through my personalmusic library and the magic of shuffle mode made me end up with pentimento, by kettel& secede, from their album "when can", released in 2012. it's one of my favourite albums ever and ireally recommend you check it out.
thankfully, they allowed me to license thesong, and though it was a bit costly, it was such a natural fit that i don't think a custom-tailoredsong would have been any better, especially given the small time frame that a composerwould've had to make one. i had to adjust the timing of shots so thatthe music would sync up nicely, both in rhythm and intensity. to demonstrate, allow me to play the filmwith everything muted besides the music. the tricky part is that pentimento lasts afixed duration from the point where it starts to the dun dun dun part, about 43 seconds. so everything before that had to be shortenedto 12 seconds, when it was originally 16,
because the final shot with the explosionneeds time. at 30 seconds, the song also increases inintensity when everyone is using their ults; this is the part where i cut into the songand fade to a later part. the explosion happens in rhythm, too. all of this was a careful act of balancingeach shot so that it could play out with the necessary time, while being able to timeeverything against the music. i'm so glad the music ended up fitting sonicely on all aspects: rhythm, atmosphere, instrumentation and mood. if you didn't know better, you could almostthink it was made for this film.
now i'm gonna go through each shot and commenton the more general things that i didn't touch on in the previous sections. i'll also tell you what i would have donedifferently, thanks to the power of 20/20 hindsight and nitpicking. here, i would have liked to go with a higherresolution tree, but i can't modify the base assets. other than that i don't have much to say aboutthe first two shots. this rimlight on the trees is really exaggeratedyet just feels super natural. and with the torch light coming from the right,it gives a lot of depth to the trunks. i feel like i could have probably made thecamera turn towards the torch faster here.
in this shot, the parallax is really cool,but it could have been even better, a couple of the cards needed to move a tad faster. this one... i messed up the color grading a little, butthat's not too bad. i'm not happy with how the stumble looks,it's not a very good animation, but it meets the baseline level of believability, so whatever. i'm super happy about how the imaginary lanayacame out, though; not only is the animated drawing perfect at conveying it, but the wayit fades in sort of feels like how her refraction ability would look.
this is actually some stock after effectssimulated effect thing, with some parameters driven way up. the colors in this shot really annoy me. i talked about this last year; the way dota'shero shader works is weird, there's no proper overbrightening, etc. and this is one of theworst instances. you could not guess the fire's orange lightis shining on sven's back. it just looks blue. it's terrible. you can see it showing on the map, and a tinybit in the specular, but this is, visually,
one of the weaker shots. i was also debating having sven say "team!"when he turned his head, but both erick and i thought it was funnier without it, and theintent is clear regardless. fun fact: in this shot, crystal maiden isrendered entirely separately, the old-fashioned way, and chroma-keyed in. the procedural clothing animation. like a few other things, and by a few otherthings, i mostly mean particles, it's not properly aware of time as source filmmakerknows it. so the longer it takes to render a frame,the weirder things get.
and short of disabling the system and animatingthe clothing bits yourself, the best workaround is to just reduce the time it takesto render a frame. so she's just rendered separately, and withmuch fewer progressive refinement samples. you can tell; the shadow filtering is noisy,the motion blur isn't smooth, and she's got a bit of a green outline here and there. and even though that workaround doesn't fullymake the clothing behave like it really should, it's still a massive improvement over it completelyspazzing out, being stiff as hell, or taking a few hours to re-animate. the overhead shot...
i wanted to make it clear where sven was pointing,at the ground; my edit of the map also has the snow missing at that spot. it could have been something more excitingor dynamic, though... not much to say about the ult shots; i'm reallyhappy that people have noticed the little details, cm covering her nose when pudge isrotting, everyone holding their ears when queen of pain is screaming,and sven/cm being the otp. another fun fact; the mystic flare doesn'tfade out gracefully, it just completely vanishes out of existence in a frame. this is why this light keeps up a bit intothe next shot then fades out.
aw man, i forgot to make him grip his staff better. having cm interact with skywrath directlywas tricky animation-wise and i had a hard time making it look natural. it could still look better, obviously, but,as i've said before, sometimes you gotta accept it's "good enough" and move on. chasing perfection is a bad habit. anyway, there's something you might have noticedby now; the use of item sets... i picked the ones that really enhanced thevisuals and pushed the characters further. with the exception of sven, because to meit feels like default sven is really really
good. anyway, that's why crystal maiden has herarcana dress and more armor; not only because it makes sense for an ice lady, but becauseit sort of "links" her with sven. skywrath mage wears the red manticore setso he looks nicer against the predominantly blue environment, and it's also a really goodset no matter what. queen of pain wears what i think is the mostbadass set for her, and pudge... pudge is default too, because like sven, hisdefault appearance feels a lot more iconic than any of his sets. the pile of dragonclaw hooks was simulatedin 3ds max by just dropping a ton of them
inside a tube, with some manual editing afterthat. with more time, i would have liked to makeit collapse after pudge turns around, or having some of the hooks fall out. i should have probably have had sven onlyreach for the sentries once he had said his line, because the deformation looks pretty awful. i hadn't accounted for that ahead of time;if you recall my conversation with erick, at first, i was gonna have cm plant the sentrieswhile sven went berserk with god's strength; only for him to instantly turn back blue inan "oh shit" way. after we figured out an equally good endingthat was shorter, i immediately went to mocap
it and didn't do any takes where i didn'tinstantly reach over my shoulder. having another kind of motion with the rightarm, you know, the "i got this" reassuring kind of gesture would have been better. the left arm is hand animated here... andto be precise, it's not the left arm that's animated, but the sword! the left hand's ik target is parented to it,and i parent the sword to a dummy control on the ground to have a proper pivot point. then i animated that in time with sven's bodymotion to make him look like his left arm was holding the sword, preventing it fromfalling over, until he actually does let go.
the hitchcock zoom here really does conveythat "oh shit" feeling you often get when you're about to get blown up by a stack ofremote mines, and i actually didn't expect it to work so well. i'm super satisfied with it. at first i thought i would have some timeto show the landscape before the distant explosion in the last shot, but it didn't work timingwise, so the explosion happens immediately on the shot change. i wish i could have had the trees sway backfrom the explosion, more reactiveness overall, but that would have easily taken up a day'sworth of time.
i really dig the composition and the lightingon the pillars though so that's okay. i really think i should have made lanaya sittingthere a lot more visually obvious. this behind-the-scenes video comes to a close,and i hope it's been informative, educational, maybe even a little bit entertaining. but above all else, if you've been thinkingof creating your own stories in the dota universe, whether it's through source filmmaker, oranimated drawings, or live action, or i don't know what, if you've been thinking of creating your ownfan work based on dota, i really hope this has been encouraging you to do so,
and that it's going to be like the other behind-the-scenesvideo that i've released, that it's a resource to you. and, you know, like... i'm repeating myself at this point, but dota! dota. it's... it's a good game. i would know, because... i play way too much of it. but it's also a very nice universe, and alot, a lot, so much untapped potential to
create cool stories of your own within it. and once again, thank you so much for support. because i am extremely grateful for it; itis really validating as an artist to, you know, receive so much praise for your work. and... despite that... i don't want you to forget that this is notall about me. far from that! and i want you— please, go support artiststhat are making that sort of stuff. not just me!
other artists, whether they're big, or small. in fact, especially small, because you gottaencourage people that are just starting. and you gotta try to give them tools to grow,to get better, and, in a way, i hope that's what i'm doing here, i hope this has been a resource for peoplewho are trying to get better at dota filmmaking, or, you know, whatever! but anyway, yeah. uh... in the meantime, i mean... i will probably participate next year,
i mean, maybe i will make valve count to 3,maybe i will get 3 wins in a row, who knows? and, in the meantime, yeah. i am working on the system shock remake bynightdive studios, so you might want to check that out if thosewords i just uttered, "system shock remake", sound appealing to you. you should definitely check it out. i mean, i think we're doing pretty cool stuff. but, other than that... i'm trying to get a project out of the door,dota-related, it's gonna be a dota video,
and i've been wanting to do it since ti5,and hopefully, hopefully, i will get that done before ti7. so yeah! anyway, once again, thank you so much foryour support, people. i really appreciate it. and please. try to be a positive force in the community. and try to support people. be as kind as you can.
and you know... keep kicking ass. keep kicking ass in all the ways you know how to. and... i bid you farewell until next time!
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