On Avatars

This might be kind of obvious because my progress on these ran to a screeching halt, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to write for Ashgar, who is the 4th member of the “adventuring group”.
Ashgar is me, in a lot of senses, so figuring out what to write feels like I’m trying to decide what my own character traits are, what faults I’m okay with a fictional version of myself having, and bragging about the things I’m good at. Introspection is hard, and also it runs into how private I am about my own life.
That said, I do still want to get this project advanced a bit, so I’ll be working on character profiles for my other characters. I’ll get to myself eventually, and hopefully that will also let me address some spots where I have personality type gaps. Fiction doesn’t have to perfectly mirror reality, after all.

On Video Editing

If you missed it, an earworm was inflicted on the Aggrochat crew a little while ago and refuses to go away. The song in question is a remix of Boney M.’s Rasputin, as seen in the following video:

Beyond being super catchy, this is actually a surprising feat of video editing The original song has nothing to do with Rasputin, or Russia, or funk. Love the Way You Move is about ~136 BPM and the music video for it is 3:40 long. The remixed song is closer to 150 BPM, and is also 3:40. But the music video has a lot of parts that match the beat, so just playing one over the other wouldn’t look very good.

As a result, the final version does quite a bit of audio and video editing. The most notable part is that any beat-matched sections are sped up to match the new tempo. This includes the working with tools near the beginning and all dance sequences (including the flashing siren near the end). The tradeoff for this is that most parts that didn’t need to match the beat were slowed down. This means the introduction, most of the middle section, and Putin’s arrival. In order to make this work, a little bit of audio editing was also necessary. Love the Way You Move has a 16-bar chorus, the chorus of Rasputin is only 8 bars. In order to make the end section fit, an extra repetition was added in.

I just thought this was interesting to note.