This week we take a look at Micro Drones, the bite-sized equivalent of Zap Drones. They’re not too smart, but they’re fast as heck, and purvey a new flavour of Drone Blindness, which has been known to affect even the best players. Check ‘em out in the video:

https://vimeo.com/metanetsoftware/microdrone

And let’s hear what Richard has to say about how this video was made!

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So, Micro Drones - they’re plentiful, fast and deadly. Having played a recent build of N++ I can honestly say these things are way more wicked than their slight stature might imply. It’s this sense of motion, ‘swarminess’, danger, and the skill required to evade them that we wanted to capture in this vignette.

In order to do that I really wanted to emphasize the motion of the both the player and the micro drones. As a result this vignette has some of the most pans, zooms and general camera motion of the set. While lots of camera tricks are fun and exciting it’s important for the visual information to not become overwhelming, and that’s where some playful mograph and visual anchoring come into play (a bit like the editing of the Rocket video).

The mograph transitions allow us to set up a more playful scene transition, along with directly referencing the behavior of the entity (and each mograph transition is color coded to the incoming clip). You’ll also notice that despite the radically different scenes, I keep components familiar across each cut. In the above example, the Ninja’s position transitions smoothly between each scene. In the example below I am anchoring the clip on a shared floor plane while keeping a similar momentum between the two death clips.

In this final example below the Ninja’s position between clips remains relatively similar horizontally, but a sense of vertical motion is shared across all three clips. This keep things legible, plus combined with the zooms makes things pretty exciting.



Another component present in each vignette is what we internally termed as 'bookending’. Not only does each vignette start and end with the same color palette but with the same clip too (and always a brutal death). While it’s certainly open for debate, I felt like this choice led to vignettes that felt more holistic and contained than earlier iterations that didn’t use the technique. Further, this allowed us to create a new variation of each intro mograph, wrapping each video up nice and neatly.

Cheers till next week!

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thanks Richard! If you like his style, follow him here: http://richardeflanagan.tumblr.com/

The music in this video is smooth, interesting and by our own Raigan Burns: https://soundcloud.com/search/people?q=operator%20operator&filter.place=toronto



Keep an eye on our twitter (@metanetsoftware) for the next videos as they roll out – you will NOT want to miss the next one! And don’t forget to come back here next week for a closer look behind-the-scenes.