Talion and Celebrimbor have crafted a new ring of power to defeat Sauron, but they must first gather their army. This is the story of the game Middle Earth: Shadow of War, edited into a movie. This video has been optimized to look the best in HDR for devices that support that, but I have put in the work to make sure it looks great in SDR as well.

If you aren't familiar with my work, my goal is to take a game's story, and edit it into a format where anybody can enjoy and understand the story, whether they play games or not. For those who have played the game, I find that rewatching the story in this more compact form can add a lot to the experience, because the full story will stay more fresh in your mind the entire time, rather than being split across several gameplay sessions filled with a lot of moments that aren't entirely crucial to the story. Then obviously, for those who don't play games, I'm bringing them a story they might not have ever been able to experience otherwise.

Because I want this to feel as close to a real movie experience as possible, I try to remove as many gameplay distractions as I can. Thankfully, this game has a no HUD mode, which allows me to disable just about everything that appears on screen. In most movies in the past, I've needed to use some VFX to remove some of the HUD elements that are left, but in this case, I didn't need any of that. However, in this movie I've also edited the footage to fit an ultrawide aspect ratio. In order to do that, I'm acting as a virtual camera man, animating the camera up and down throughout every single shot of the movie, often times requiring dozens of animation keyframes for longer shots.


Chapters:

0:00:00 - Prologue
0:09:29 - Fellowship
0:17:54 - The Seeing Stone
0:24:30 - The Arena
0:31:10 - Before Dawn
0:36:51 - Shadows of the Past
0:40:25 - The Fall
0:48:46 - The Blade of Galadriel
0:57:14 - Ring of Power
1:07:16 - The Siege of Sharkhburz
1:14:51 - The Tower of Sorcery
1:23:04 - The Siege of Khargukôr
1:31:34 - Fire and Fury
1:41:18 - Gravewalkers
1:46:30 - The Siege of Ghâshgôr
1:55:43 - The Bright Lord
2:12:54 - The Shadow Wars
2:29:11 - Credits

If you want to support my work, liking, subscribing, commenting, and sharing are the easiest ways to do so, and Youtube Premium helps too, but I also have a Patreon which helps the most:

  / andygilleand  

Every supporter will gain access to a blog post for each project that I update every day with details of what I did that day, and projections for when I expect the project to be done and be released. People who spend a bit more can gain access to full quality downloads of my movies, without all the compression youtube adds to them, and supporters at the highest tier can even gain access to see early cuts of my movie, as well as HDR downloads.

As always, if you've enjoyed this story, make sure to support the developers by buying the game if you can. While I try my best to represent the game's story, my movies are not a full game walkthrough. There are always plenty of aspects of a game my movies will never cover. In the case of Shadow of War, my movie actually only represents about half of all of the missions in the game, so there's still a lot to experience in the game that my movie doesn't cover.


#MiddleEarth #ShadowOfWar #LordOfTheRings #VideoGameMovie