Product

I created a Supercut of conversations that occur throughout the Metal Gear Solid Franchise. Specifically, I compiled what I thought were the dumbest/hammiest questions asked throughout the entire series and edited them together using Adobe Premier.

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At least 3 hours of video that were combed through

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Editing all of the videos together

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Intention

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been seen as an overtly "serious" game, one full of violence, complicated political machinations, and an impenetrable plot which takes itself far too seriously. And while that sentiment is relatively accurate, it doesn't give fair due to the level of camp in the series. While a hefty amount of time is spent on the topics of nuclear disarmament and the brutality of wars, you spend an equal amount of time watching the villains talk about memes unironically and listening to your radio team bungle interpretations of Chinese proverbs.

In this regards, I created this Supercut to highlight the silly side of the Metal Gear Solid series, spinning its narrative as a comedic affair rather than a serious, grim melodrama.

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Context

I initially got the idea to do a Supercut of conversations in the metal gear series from another similar supercut which highlighted all of the times that the main protagonist parroted lines spoken to him.

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However, I found that version less than satisfactory, since it only highlighted moments from the first game and didn't go into the more inane conversations that can happen. In order to improve it, I ended up rifling through footage from all of the mainline games in the series with the goal of getting the increasingly inane questions that are asked in the more obscure conversations in the series.

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Process

In order to finally arrive at my final outcome, I had to search for footage from conversations throughout the entire series. This is a tall order, given that each game has on average 5 hours of dialog and cutscenes. Even though I had a general heuristic for where to find these choice pieces of dialog, I still ended up going through hours of gameplay footage. (below is an example video I had to skim through.)

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In addition to that, once I had the footage and downloaded it, I still had to make a second pass through it to get the exact cuts that I needed to give the video the feeling of a Supercut, that is, the rapid transition between clips.

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Reflection

On a whole, I'm not quite sure I ultimately achieved the quality that I was looking for in this work. Due to the lack of time, I had to pull the footage used from the internet rather than directly recording off of my game console, something which resulted in uneven quality between the clips I used. Furthermore, due to the lack of time, the video is shorter than I would like it to be, since there are many more ridiculous things that happen in the metal gear franchise. I suppose that the product I put out is adequate for the time given, but it definitely could have been made better with more time and resources on hand, since I don't even have a console to play these games on at the moment.