(video uploaded on 6/5/2022)

The Ivern Solokill Montage is a video that I made back in summer of 2022 from a bunch of clips that I had saved playing Ivern mid and top. It was my first time editing League of Legends footage, so there’s A LOT that could’ve been improved. Let’s break it down:

Video Structure

The creation of this video started with the novel idea of making every single clip link to eachother by using camera keyframes. After each clip, I would make the camera move towards the starting coordinates of the next one, and fading in the middle for a seamless transition. As it turns out, this is an incredibly laborious process.

To start things off, I first had to watch every clip and map out their positions. If you look at the image, each red line represents a clip with an arrow pointing from where it starts to where it ends. The intent is to organize the clips into an order where there’s the perfect amount of distance between them. If I didn’t sort them this way, there would be awkward transitions where the camera has to quickly scroll across the map or ones where there’s no scrolling at all.

After I decided on the order, I had to set camera routes for each clip and set them up to transition between eachother. I then recorded them and was ready for editing.

Structural Drawbacks

This smooth-transition format was very good at making the montage flow well. Flow is generally one of the strengths of my editing style, so the camera scroll transitions were a good fit and it made the video stand out amongst other League montages. However, this format had many unforeseen drawbacks that make it nearly unusable.

The main issue with my approach is inflexibility. Once I’ve recorded everything, there’s too many elements that just become unchangeable. There are 3 main ways that the format is inflexible:

• Inflexible Order of Clips – Once all of the clips are keyframed and recorded, it would take a lot of work to modify the order or even just remove a clip. To move 1 clip, I would need to adjust and re-record 5 different clips, making it highly impractical to tinker with. This is made even worse by the fact that order must be decided very early on, since so much of the montage must be built on top of that foundation.
  
• Inflexible Transitions – Since every clip is formatted to move from the previous and to the next, I’ve basically locked myself into using the same transition 16 times in a row. Transitions are a place where montages can really get creative, especially when they match the music, but I basically locked that space off from the beginning.
  
• Inflexible Length/Timing of Clips – A staple of montage editing is syncing stuff to the music. The most common way to do this is to slightly trim or lengthen the start of a clip in order to line it up with the parts you’re syncing to. Since each of my clips have the transition camera already included, trimming the clip to modify the timing is not an option. Something you might have noticed is that almost nothing syncs with the music, and this inflexibility is the main reason why.

If I were to make this video again, I would have the seamless camera transition be just one of many transition types instead of 16/16 of them. When only a few clips are bound together by their transition, all 3 of the types of inflexibility that I listed become non-issues. As much as it was fun mapping out and planning all of the camera routes, I would not recommend trying to use this transition 16 times in a row.

Other Weaknesses

• Intro is too long – The intro takes 12 seconds (2 pieces of text at 6 seconds each). For a video that’s only text, it’s pretty excessive. This is especially true when you consider that the text being shown takes much less than 6 seconds to read.
  
• Stagnant intensity – None of the clips are edited to have extra flair or suspense to them, which makes the intensity the same level at all times. This was partially due to the constraints imposed by the rigid structure I set, but could still have been done with things like slowing parts of the footage down or editing effects like screen flashes, shakes, etc. When everything is on the same level of intensity, it means that there’s no anticipation, buildup, excitement, memorable moments, etc.
  
  If you followed me during my Tetris days, this is is a problem that I’d refer to as “always 100%”.
  
• Too many clips – After all of the clips were put together (transitions included), the video totaled out to around 9 minutes long. I had originally aimed for around 7 minutes (which is still a bit long), but the transitions ended up adding a lot more time than I expected. By the time I realized, I already had everything recorded and couldn’t remove anything to get the video length lower.

Player Cards

So with all the negative stuff about structural nightmares and inflexibility aside, let’s talk about something that I felt worked well: the info cards at the bottom of the screen.

I originally thought of them because people don’t really know how much damage Ivern is supposed to deal. Because of this, it might be easy to mistake some of the clips for me being ahead enough to kill someone (when in reality I just know Ivern’s limits/windows very well). The ranks were also included to show that I’m not just farming clips from low elo. I really wanted to make it clear that these are ordinary things that happen in ordinary games.

The card change between scenes was also something that I paid specific attention to. I experimented with a lot of different animations, but the one I ended up going with was a simple windup/overshoot. I wanted to make it kinda like loading a memory card into a push-push slot (if you ever owned a Nintendo DS, that’s what it is). I don’t have any particular reasoning for it, it just seemed right.

If I ever make another League montage, I’d like to expand more on this card thing. On the more simple side, adding things like gold or KDA could be nice. For bigger changes, the cards could also have an expanded version that takes up a larger part of the screen during the transition, before shrinking down to the bottom. There’s a lot of dramatic stuff that could be done with these, so I’m looking forward to seeing what I’d be able to cook up next time.

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If you read my previous post on the animation video, the creation of this video was similar to me. Part of the reason why I’m so infrequent with videos is because every time that I make one, I’m forced to grapple with the fact that I’m not actually that good at making them. I can’t speak for all perfectionists, but a large part of my perfectionism has been being delusional about how good I am, and then trying to forcibly will my delusions into reality.

A big part of why I’ve started making these self-critiques is because I want to be able to move forward with making videos/art/etc. I don’t want to run away anymore.

Anyways, thanks for reading as always! I’ve also added in a comment section, so I’d love to hear your own critiques of the Ivern montage or your thoughts on what I’ve written. Hardly anyone knows about this site, so if you throw me a comment I’ll 100% respond.