256,502 views since Nov 26, 2023

I was listening to the Soundtrack of a new game called Warhammer 40k Darktide a little over a week ago and came across a music video with same soundtrack and series. I had never seen or heard of the Angels of Death animation, created by Warhammer Storyforge and only heard of the Warhammer universe from a Henry Cavill interview.

Reading a few wiki posts, the amount of lore surrounding Warhammer is staggering. And despite perhaps not being well known to a lot of people, I think it's safe to say that the Warhammer fan base is a strong one.

https://warhammertv.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@officialwarh...

More Warhammer 40k:    • Warhammer 40k - Angels of Death ft.  ...  
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I overlapped the soundtrack with the music playing in the background (Blood Debt) during the elevator scene. As in the series it's played at a rather low volume and having louder music helps make the transition to different scenes more seamless.

This was a painstaking and time consuming endeavor to finally get the timing almost right. Even though I had done it before. Gave up several times and finally used the 3rd horn in the track as a reference point.

With a 5 sec fade in the soundtrack fully kicks in right before it says [ominous music] - 1:00 - so in the end it worked out. Even when listening to it on high volume with headphones on.

This is as close to it as I was able to manage it on Shotcut. It's less than one frame difference compared to the previous placement. (And that was already the 4th attempt.) But when hearing two tracks playing at the same time, a very minor difference ruins it completely - even if you're partially deaf in one ear like me.

Surprisingly, the fade in duration of the soundtrack was also very important despite the timing being fairly right. I imagine 'cause the soundtrack plays at a higher volume so I needed it to kick in right before the 3rd horn sounds. Fading it in shorter or longer also bungled it up and instead of the horn, they overlap at the drums which sounded horrible.

I also tried continuing the light flicker until after Orpheo's close up. Not sure how I feel about that. I tried to copy and replicate the timing but Orpheo's scene ends in darkness, whereas in the prelude to the ambush it had to end in light. It's not the same. And when you edit these clips, watching every little bit at least a few dozen times, I imagine you look at things differently as opposed to watching it for the first time.

A fellow editor will recognize it immediately though. Maybe a steady brightness increase would've been better to make the scene transition.

Overlapping Blood Debt with Path of Trust went really well so I decided to keep that track. I think it worked out and (growing up with stories of King Arthur & The Sword in the Stone) I especially like the ending.
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The Philosophy of the 'Life-Giving Sword' was perhaps first introduced by Yagyu Munenori and though it might sound counter intuitive, a very brief explanation of this Philosophy can be found in Hagakure: ''He argued, maintenance of a benevolent military government was vital for the well being of the realm. “At times because of one man’s evil, ten thousand people suffer. So if you kill that one man to let the tens of thousands live. Here, truly, the blade that deals death becomes the sword that saves lives.” In other words, the way of war was also seen as the way of peace.''

You often hear perhaps a comparable reasoning or justification in the military today. I.e. by taking the life of one enemy you end up saving many lives on your side.
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This series embodies brotherhood and selfless action very well and it has quickly become one of my all time favorites. It's not perfect and some mistakes were made but the general feel and the voice actors are second to none.

A few cuts were made during the ambush to remove dialogue and insert my own. Problem was the volume of the shooting sound effects dip just before a cut, when one of the angels is forced on his knees, giving you the impression it's me doing it and making it less seamless.

To compensate a little for this I increased the general volume of Path of Trust, while lowering the combat sounds. I also added the 'Let Fury Be Our Voice' dialogue just before the combat volume picks up again to hopefully draw attention away from it a little.

Finally I upscaled the 720 quality to 1080.

I'm not a professional and I think regardless of someone's skill or bag of tricks, at some point we need to take a step back. This took me exactly a week to create and it was definitely one of the more difficult ones. It certainly belongs on the list of clips I'm most proud of. I hope you like it!

Music:

[00:00] Entering Throneside - Darktide Soundtrack - Jesper Kyd
[00:54] Blood Debt - Angels of Death Soundtrack - Jonathan Hartman
[02:11] Path of Trust - Darktide Soundtrack - Jesper Kyd