WARNING: This is going to be a rather serious look at stuff, so don't expect LOLCATS or anything. But if you're interested in my thought process on my original I Suck At Dueling movie, read on!

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=38934

So how did this mess all start?

To be honest, I didn't originally start out thinking to myself "I'm going to create a detailed instructional video". The whole thing really started when I saw an Albis movie a long time ago, and during one warlock fight he detailed his thoughts (somewhat scarcely), and I thought that was just the coolest thing.

You see, I love strategies and mechanics in games, and seeing what other people have come up with. I also play Magic: The Gathering (or used to before I moved, WTB people near me), and seeing all the decks and interactions made me keep coming back for more.

So when I see someone detailing their thoughts in a movie, it becomes a lot more to me than simply "hit frostbolt, win". I figured I wasn't alone, so I set out to create a movie that was entirely like this.

Of course, it turned out to be more instructional very quickly. At the time I was getting very disenchanted with the mage forums. There was so much whining! "Our class is awful!" "A warlock can mash their face on the keyboard and beat me!" Ugh. When something is going wrong, I don't like to whine, I like to do something about it. So in this case, instead of whining about the whining, I set out to change people's minds so hopefully they could have some fun again. The idea of subtitling my thought process combined naturally with this goal.

I Suck At Editing

I had just recently come fresh off "I Suck At Maging", which was a complete travesty (that I will rip apart in another post another time when I'm feeling brave). My editing skills were nil, as I had just recently started using Vegas. All I did for this movie was basically slap some text on the bottom of the screen. Sadly, the contrast between the text and my UI was horrible, making reading difficult. This was one lesson I learned quickly after releasing it, and something I fixed in later movies by adding a black background over the text.

It's kind of interesting to see how a general feel was established in this movie. There's text at the bottom of the screen, there's big walls of text interspersed when I need to cover something more elaborate, and, of course, appropriate cat pictures. This formula doesn't really change all that much throughout the I Suck At Dueling series, which is kind of unfortunate. I ended up breaking this little mold with I Suck At PvP, when I finally started listening to certain criticisms about the text being hard to read and such.

One thing I was really happy with in this movie was how the music went with the action. It had a great "flow", something I tried to keep up in later movies. Transitions and moves seemed to go nicely with the beat. Honestly, I sometimes wonder how this happens, as a lot of it isn't intentional. I'd nudge around timing slightly in some spots, but for the most part I'd just watch the movie over and go "Wow... that lined up nicely". My computer is haunted apparently.

Speaking of music, I totally missed out on providing a music list at the end. Whoops. I'd later discover that most people don't seem to read it though anyway. :(

My intro was also pretty weak from an editing standpoint, but I don't think it looked too horrible. That's something I definitely ended up experimenting with more later on, and I think I've improved as time goes on in that department.

The whole "/duel" ending was set here too. The idea of it was to try and get people to get out there and try it themselves. This wasn't just an end of a movie, it was a transition from seeing the movie to logging into WoW. Duel some people! Try new stuff! Get out there and have fun! People seemed to get the intended feeling from it from those that I asked, so I stuck with it for future movies.

Overall I wasn't exceptionally happy with my editing, but for just starting out really I think I did all right. It was a great learning experience and the feedback I got showed me what I needed to work on. The big target was making the text more readable, which I fixed in the next movie.

I'm going to wrap up Part 1 here, in Part 2 I'm going to take a look at my actual playing in the movie.