You’ll notice right away that this video is NOT shots taken of the outdoors. COVID was spreading around in my family, so I didn’t have a lot of chances to leave my room at decent times during the day, and I originally wanted to film some really cool VR shots with my friends and I- but the footage ultimately got corrupted and unusable. I then decided to film a game that I put most of my time into every day, which is called Final Fantasy XIV (14). I wanted to show off all of my favorite areas inside the game- I’m a very huge fan of 3d modelling, and despite the fact that the game tries it’s best to be optimized overall, the design of it manages to be aesthetically pleasing and has a lot of care put into each area- and I wished to show that in this video. I treated this similar to my aquarium video- filming things I found interesting and pleasing. It’s like going on a hike and taking pictures of places, but instead it’s all just in a game.

Final Fantasy XIV is a MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online videogame). You can party up with your friends, explore the open world, fight off monsters, and participate in the incredibly rich story the game offers to all it’s players. It’s genuinely a very comforting game for myself, and helps me connect with other people in a meaningful and friendly way. It’s basically like an interactable book or movie.

The software I used to record my desktop is called OBS. It was challenging to take most of these shots because I had to position my mouse in a way where the cursor wasn’t visible while also retaining the angle I wanted. There’s an in-game camera that I’m able to manipulate manually, but the characters were “locked” in place and couldn’t move through the environment whenever I would use said camera. There was also a lot of delay between when I would tell my friend to walk/run, and when his character would ACTUALLY walk/run due to server issues- but we solved this by just having him run outright in a specific direction while I played catch up at the right time.

For every new area, I had to physically move there in-game and move my camera into place, hoping not to bump against any walls or have any unwanted animals or objects somehow get into frame. I have a lot of raw footage of things just getting in the way, or even strangers just doing silly things in the background of the shots I took. I genuinely wouldn’t say that it was better OR worse than filming in real life- I had almost the same problems someone would have doing this somewhere outside with a real camera alongside some negative and more positive quirks that are specific to this game.

For my editing process, I actually wanted to try to make seamless transitions from area to area. My original plan was to mask in and out objects to create this transition, but I could only pull off ONE proper masking sequence before realizing it was WAY too time consuming and stressful. Instead, so I used a repeating animation to do these transitions more smoothly. I learned a lot more about the editing software I usually use, and am happy to say that I will be using what I learned a lot more in the future.

If you’re curious, this was actually heavily inspired by This video. I heavily recommend watching it if you’d like to see more zones and areas and see just how involved the community is.

CREDITS:

Song: “Looking Up” prod. jody & kingtheta

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