Oh well, it sure has been a few years. I just spent a bit of time browsing through this topic for old times sake and get back into them.
Both the release of WT! and WT2! were my most special moments during my activity on the GTAS scene. Not because of the (controversial) impact they had, but rather because i was working on each a special project with somebody who became one of the most important friends in my life. It's always nice to look back at them.
Every time i do read up on them, and with advancing time more and more, i realize that people either love or hate the editings i came up with, but there's barely ever anybody with a neutral stance about them (kinda same for the stunting, but that's a different story, lel).
Now about WT1! i can't really say much. To be perfectly honest, i barely had any idea of what i was doing at the time. It just came out as it did and it well mostly well-received.
WT2! however, had an underlaying theme, a concept - which hopefully serves as an explanation for what people were complaining about in this topic partially.
I was trying to build the entire video/watching experience into something rather "hypnotic". That's why i tried by very best to keep up a good pace without too many stale moments (for example grind sections that feel slow). It's also the reason for why i picked rather dreamy colors. Surely the pink color corrections were noticable. Same goes for the occasional blur etc. and last but not least: the progressive music. Somebody posted that listening to the song felt like "listening to a 4 second loop over and over" (quote may vary) and why yes, that's exactly what it is. It's called progressive music which only evolves slowly, and it was supposed to do exactly that and only unfold itself in the end of the video, to peak at the very last stunt.
Oh boy did some people hate the shaky cam angles that were mixed into the video.
They do have a purpose though and in the end i wouldn't wanna see the video without them. The first purpose of them being to give the video a feeling of watching an amateur record some friend of his doing some tricks in a skatepark. That stuff makes 100 % sense to me, because i always considered stunting to be something like skateboarding in a video game... with motocycles and cars instead. The video starts out with the handheld shaky cam angles because of that, because i wanted to try and immerse the viewer into the idea right away. Afterwards i just tried to get a good mix between the former and "regular cams".
The second puporse was *drumroll* ... to put myself into the video. In the video's outro, i'm listed under "guest appearance" because the idea was that i am physically present in game world, to record my mate taz doing his stunts with my purposely shitty camera handling skills. (don't blame taz for this, that was purely my idea x) Further than that, the "guest appearance" thing was also supposed to be small joke/reference to WT1!, since i did have an actual guest stunt in that video.
Well that was a lot of text. It's nice to get this off my back, hope somebody finds this to be somewhat interesting of a read.
Cheers everybody.
