The Making of the Calendar
I
can't draw, so
all the pictures are screenshots except for April's, made by Unkreativ,
who CAN draw. Boy, can she draw. :-)
Many of the pictures are of screenshots that don't ordinarily appear in
the game. To get those screenshots, I made tiny modules, set
up
cutscenes, ran the cutscenes in the game, and took screenshots of
them. If I were going for wow factor, I could have made
cooler
shots, but I wasn't trying for the most visually interesting pictures
but rather for pictures that would remind Petra of important
times
in the game. For a lot of those important times,
Geralt
isn't in the picture, since we're seeing it through his eyes, but I
wanted Geralt in the picture, which is why I had to make cutscenes,
even though this is all stuff that actually happened.
I had pictures in my head that I wanted, and it turned out that the
pictures in my head mostly didn't exist. If you play the
game,
you'll see that you don't actually SEE Geralt's face when he plunges
the sword into Jacques de Aldersberg, for example. So I had
to
move the camera to get that shot. And in a lot of the
cutscenes,
you'd see this picture and that one, and the composite would be a cool
image, but if I took screenshots, there was no moment actually present
in the cutscene where the cool image was present. They often
cut
off the tops of people's heads and stuff like that. It works
in
the cutscene, because you remember seeing the image that came right
before it, but as a single still shot, there was nothing that
worked. So first I tore my hair out, and then I dusted off my
hands and got busy. ;)
When I first planned to make the calendar, I thought it would take me
an hour or two to get the screen shots I wanted ... it ended up taking
more like twenty hours, because I had to alter a lot of things or even
make a lot of things from scratch.
January:
This is a
striking image from the intro. I didn't need to do anything
for
this one but snap the picture. I love this image.
February:
February's
picture isn't all that interesting, visually, but I wanted a shot of
the whole gang, so this is from one of the just-for-Petra cutscenes I
made, so that they'd all be in one place at the same time, while also
showing more of Kaer Morhen than just a tiny piece of wall.
Even
at that, it doesn't show as much of Kaer Morhen as I wanted, but if I
showed a lot of Kaer Morhen, the people were tiny....
March:
This picture is
directly from one of CDPR's cutscenes; I think the picture of The Beast
striding out of the flames, framed by Geralt's spread legs, is
inspired. Whoever made that cutscene created a wow of an
image!
April:
I
wanted something different for the month that contains April
Fool's Day, and I've loved that picture of Unkreativ's since I first
saw it. I wish she were selling prints of it on Deviant Art;
I'd
definitely buy one! You can see the original of this picture
--
along with a lot more of Unkreativ's great work -- at her gallery
at Deviant Art.
May:
The
cutscene for the golem coming to life was very, very cool ...
but it didn't include Geralt and the golem in the same frame, so I made
a new cutscene from scratch to get this picture for Petra.
June: This
was
another new cutscene, since the autopsy isn't a cutscene in the game,
but I thought it was a good summary of solving the mystery in Chapter
2. I moved things around to get a shot where you could
actually
see everything, which you couldn't, really, in-game.
July:
It's so dark in the
kickimore queen's cave that I never got that good of a look at
her. But in Photoshop, all things are possible. ;D
So
THAT'S what she looks like. Ewww. :P
August:
This is one of
the pictures that I took from a regular cutscene. That
cutscene
was SO gorgeous that I had to get a picture of it, though again, there
was no single shot that captured the awesomeness of the cutscene as a
whole. That cutscene was so pretty, I could watch it twenty
times!
Choosing a good shot from this cutscene was hard, not because there
were so few good shots but because there were so many. I
dithered
for awhile over this one; I second-guessed myself a lot before finally
choosing this one. I think the shot where she's walking
towards
Geralt, and we see her and him and the surroundings is probably the
most visually interesting, but I thought the moment when he was
actually knighted was more emotionally impactful. It's a
calendar, so maybe I should have gone for visual ... but given a
choice, I'll almost always pick the emotionally impactful one. ;D
September:
This is from
another of the special cutscenes made just for Petra, since there's no
Koshchay cutscene in the game. It's a BIG bug, and I couldn't
get
an arrangement I liked of the bug AND Javed AND Geralt, all in the same
shot; I finally held my nose and went with this one.
October:
I bet you all
think you've seen a picture exactly like that in the game. We
all
remember that shot, right? Well, as it turns out, in the
game,
the shot only includes Geralt from the waist down; the top half of him
is cut off.
I don't know why they only included the bottom half of
Geralt. I
don't know if they wanted the focus to be on the GM and no one else or
if they thought it would be too violent of an image if you could see
all of Geralt or if the facial animations aren't good enough for
Geralt's face to show what they wanted it to show, so they left his
face out. Or what. But a lot of things were like
that --
I'd think I'd seen something, go looking for it in the game, and find
that I'd never seen that at all. (This is why eyewitness
testimony is notoriously unreliable. People will testify --
completely in good faith, and not lying at all -- that they've seen
things that they have not, in fact, seen. Memory is a
slippery
beast.)
Anyway, this was one of the easier ones, since I didn't have to make an
entirely new cutscene to get the shot I wanted, I just had to move the
camera. (Well, given how terrible I am with the cutscene
maker, I
had to move the camera, watch the cutscene, move the camera some more,
watch it again, move the camera a third time, watch it
AGAIN...
:-[ )
November:
Of course this
is from the outro, and I didn't need to do anything special to get a
good shot here, just snap it. The people who made the intro
and
outro did fabulous work.
I hadn't realized until just this minute that I have Geralt standing
over a dead body two months in a row. But well, it is the end
of
the game. We stand over dead bodies a lot during the endgame.
:D
How DOES the calendar finish? November's picture was from the
outro, the last piece of the game, so The Witcher is all done, yet we
have a whole month left.
You can guess, can't you? ;D
December:
Of course it's
from The Witcher 2!
The resolution is low, because it's my screenshot of a leaked video, so
we're not talking tons of pixels here. Still, it's an
exciting
caption, don't you think? ;D