Earlier this week, we had the opportunity to catch a few words from expert Fragmovie maker, paperC. He elaborates on the appreciation of the fan side as well as the creative side of making excellent Fragmovies.

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How did you get into making fragmovies?

I've played CS since I was 12-13. Fragmovies and moviemaking were huge back then. With no Reddit to post stream-clips, it was the way you showcased the frags of not only you and your friends to the rest of the community but also many of the official pro matches.

I made tons of short clips which can still be seen on my channel before I eventually made a short community fragmovie called "AlogyrthM" starring me and my friends. Part one of my moviemaking adventure ended with "Power to the People", a fragmovie with pro players. It was well received by the community with a nice rating on TheMovieVault, the main platform for fragmovies then. I felt I had proved myself in a way, and at that stage, the community was dwindling. A lot of people quit. A rumor of a new version of CS was on the horizon. I was also entering my final years of high school, which I wanted to take seriously, and I decided to sell my PC and quit like so many others. 

This was 2011-ish. Since then, I've had a taste of the adult life. Education, a fantastic full-time job as store manager in a bookstore, some part-time jobs that were less fun but had to have to pay rent for a place I didn't really enjoy living, etc. The good ol’ rat race.  Last summer, I decided to be stricter with myself, to do only work I wanted to or go the schools I wanted to. I am young and have the privilege to do so, living in Norway in 2017 and having a family and girlfriend who would support any healthy endeavour of mine. I had also lurked the CS:GO scene since 2015 and I was baffled by how big it had become. I wanted to return to moviemaking more and more.

I saw people who actually could make some money on it (like Tweeday, whom I used to know in the Source-days), and after quitting my job last summer, I decided to spend my remaining savings on a new computer to try and do this moviemaking thing again. If I didn’t I would go the rest of my life thinking “what if”, and if esports continues to grow at the pace it does at the moment, I would have cursed myself for not jumping back in now. Having applied for schools this upcoming fall I have this year to experiment, and even if I begin school in August, I will still be making fragmovies on the side. At 24, I've moved in with my father again to avoid having to pay rent, making me able to focus primarily on moviemaking, writing, and figuring out what I want to do this fall.

It was tough the first few months. I was constantly unsure if I was wasting my time by getting back to gaming after 6 years off, having had a full-time job, renting an apartment, etc. I was stressed and fluctuated from thinking I was a loser for doing so, that I was deceiving myself and just being lazy, not wanting to work and just play video games, to thinking I was brave to take the chance, expose myself to potential social stigma from living at home again for a period, unemployment etc. But I am very happy now that I did. Things are going great with many opportunities presenting themselves; lots of freelance projects going on at the moment. And I’ve realized just how much I’ve missed being a part of the gaming community.

When I was younger, gaming and esports still weren’t as big, the nerds hadn't taken over the world yet, and being a gamer wasn't really cool. Things are changing now, and I'm so glad I'm back in the culture. Video games were such a big and happy part of my life in my teenage years, and now, I actually regret giving it up in the first place, at least fully. As an adult now, I am happy to be a gamer, which I couldn’t imagine being when I was 16. There was always that element of shame. I realize now it will always be a part of my life, and I am happier person because of it!

What is your process for gathering the clips that we see on screen? Especially for a player’s movie, I couldn’t imagine how long that would take or how much work that would involve. Do you mark them down as you watch them live or is there something else that you do?’

HLTV is an amazing resource where anyone can filter through nearly all official matches by player, team, etc., so that's what I primarily use. The match pages have highlights posted, and before Livecap went down a few months ago and made them all unavailable, unfortunately, every match page older than December or so had clips from stream for each highlight. So I could just watch them, note the round number and download the GOTV-demo found on the same page. Even though the videos don’t play anymore, the description of the highlights are still there, so when I find frags now for my Best of 2016-player fragmovies I still base it upon the highlights listed but have to manually scroll through console to find them. That process can be a bit tedious, but I have no delusions that the process should be easy. Then everybody would do it, as they say.

Big shout out to Dominik Tugend (@dtugend), the creater of HLAE, a program every moviemaker needs these days to have the process be manageable and the result look good. He’s a blessing, even though I only use it for the practical reason and not nearly to it’s full potential (creating depth of fields etc.). I also try to look through some demos that don’t have highlights posted to see if I can find some lost gems.

There are also those videos on YouTube where someone has gathered clipped highlights into videos, but I find that they’re often inaccurate, many not from the year listed, etc. I watch them at the end of the gathering process to see if there’s something I might have missed. For my Katowice fragmovie I watched several of the matches live with a notebook in front of me, and I wrote down stuff I suspected the HLTV highlights might not catch. For example, FaZe played a match on Nuke, and as they were pushing inner, the killfeed stacked up, and I saw NiKo getting a deagle headshot. He was outside lurking as the rest of his team pushed, so the observers naturally weren’t on him. Knowing what a god he is with the Deagle, I watched his POV of the round in the demo later, and sure enough, it was a great one shot. I wasn’t able to fit it in, but I try to look for those hidden plays.

Your movies look quite good, much better than some kid piecing together clips of his matchmaking game or something. When I am watching a fragmovie, what am I looking at in terms of the work/study that a moviemaker such as yourself put into it? What road does the aspiring moviemaker have before him?

Thank you! Moviemakers vary in their editing style and what they want to focus on, but speaking for myself, I lean towards the cleaner style of the spectrum. When I’m creating a fragmovie, my main goal is to try and find the appropriate balance between showcasing the frags clearly without taking away from the player’s skill and providing an entertaining edit, hopefully with a sort of old-school feeling without too many effects -- if any.

Banging out a "first cut" of the a new fragmovie is the easiest part, knowing which frags to should go where, finding a certain pace, etc. This goes relatively quickly. 80% of the editing time for me is polishing the cuts and finishing touches. I think this is largely because I do hard cuts rather than crossfades or special transitions, which are inherently less smooth and demands more work than the average viewer might think if they are done correctly. I want the transitions and the hard cuts to be as unnoticeable as possible, like in a regular film. How often do you see a crossfade in a regular film? Maybe in montages and when signaling a passing of time, but very rarely. I want to make every cut perfect, and I might obsess endlessly over a few frames, like “Is a cut to a new frag at a new map smooth enough, or is it too jarring?” or “Does he begin to shoot too quickly in the second frag after the cut so the viewers won’t have time to orient themselves of the new map before the frag even happens, even though the viewer knows the map of course and this will only take a split second?” Those few frames still matter if you want an optimal flow with as few distractions as possible.

Letting no enemies be seen for a few moments in the beginning of a new frag seems like a good rule of thumb, letting the enemy walk into frame or the player peek out. Or if the tempo is fine but the cut still feels rough, for example, between a M4 spraydown on Overpass to a one shot on Inferno, I might look and see if it’s something to do with the movement I’m cutting from to the movement I’m cutting to. Maybe, on Overpass, the guy is in the middle of standing up from a crouch during the spray, and on Inferno he is in the middle of moving left to wide peak a corner at maximum movement velocity. If I let the Overpass-frag last one second longer I might be lucky enough to see that he is walking left as well, to pick up a weapon perhaps, and I would try to cut then instead, so that they both move to the left, and the result will usually be a cleaner cut. Or if it’s jarring even then, maybe it’s because as the spraydown has ended and he’s pulling up his knife walking left, I am cutting away before the knife is fully withdrawn -- before he’s inspecting it.

It might sound really dumb and pretentious, but that “pulling out the knife”-movement is something the average fragmovie-watcher (a.k.a the average CS:GO player) is so used to seeing that cutting it in middle could potentially be jarring. At least it is for me, and I’m barely 1k hours into the game. I love to obsess over super fundamental stuff like that and get it right. It creates a better whole, a smoother experience and I make sure to spend time on every single cut as much as I can before I add a single frame of any effect. And usually by that time, enough days or weeks have gone by that I should release the damn thing. Hence a big reason for my clean style I guess.

How do you choose the music? Do you select it based on what you enjoy, do you try to fit it to the movie, or is it a little bit of both?

I need to like the music first of all, or at least manage it if it’s a commissioned work. If I didn’t I would have gotten a Monstercat License, but there are so few tracks I like on there. I always aim for songs that might not be the most usual in fragmovies, because there is no point in starting out moviemaking these days if you’re only going for the same style as the big names. Why would anyone subscribe to you then when they’re already subscribed to the big guy who has been doing it longer and is better? Why would they watch two s1mple movies with the same frags and the same type of music? I will often try to find music that fits the player I’m making a movie of. The most obvious example being my movie of n0thing, the rapping god of CS:GO, which is edited to Eminem. In my opinion, most fragmovies need a song that has its peaks and lows for it to be an interesting and dynamic fragmovie. And from there, I follow rule of thumbs that are proven to work, such as having the clutches and pistol kills where the song is slow, the big kills with the casters hype where the climaxes are, and then the fast kills and plenty of cinematics to keep the momentum going after that. There are other fragmovies though that can really pull of the calm style, like many of Phinx’s and Athid’s fragmovies, and I enjoy those just as much. They’re just harder to do properly I think.

What I am referencing by cutscenes

How much room is there for a moviemaker to be an artist? Obviously, more than half of the video being cutscenes is too much, but just enough really changes the tone of the movie and the attitude of the viewer. The same can be said about caster commentary or other effects. Would you consider yourself an artist?

You’re right, having the HUDless POV showcase of frags are self-evident, but cinematics/smooths/cams, whatever you want to call them, as well as music is what really makes a fragmovie. Again, the role of cinematics depends on what style you're aiming for. For me personally, I try to limit my cinematics, including them only where they add something concrete, like giving a piece of information relevant to the frag (where an opposing player are during a clutch for example). Or  I use them to show things in a different way, like a cool underhand angle of a boost, which is arguably more interesting seeing in a third-person angle than in the POV of either player and are often a big element of the frags to follow.

Even though you can now see frags on Reddit seconds after they happen on stream, I still hold the perhaps conservative view of fragmovies primarily as a showcase of frags as they were originally needed as. This is my personal taste, of course, completely subjective. But in that context, I feel too many fragmovies these days have too many pointless cinematics, and they last for too long. Many moviemakers seem too much in love with their ability to make a camera fly around a player running from spawn, and if they have any thought behind where they place their camera, it seems exclusively on what’s “cool” looking, trying to close in on an aesthetic they've seen in some other, more famous moviemaker. The whole thing becomes a sort of mindless, endless circle of mimicry.

I guess this is common for any beginner in any creative effort before they find their own "voice" per say, but I am surprised how many never deviate from this meta. Questions that strike me when watching most cinematics in fragmovies are: why are you showing me this? Why are you taking time away from the player’s POV, adding time to the overall length to the fragmovie, just to show me this cinematic? I usually don’t find a meaningful answer, which makes them inherently boring in my opinion, and I think most viewers do too. So when I capture cinematics myself, I always try to make them frag/play-relevant, and many of the frags have none. I think there should be a strong reason or motivation behind most cinematics. Yes, I too indulge myself in the occasional “flying around the player”-smooth as an introduction to a new frag, or a flying corpse after a nice one shot. They certainly have their places, but I try to make sure they are the exception and that they are short. To hold myself accountable, I’ve actually started to record my cinematics with my POV’s, often even before I know what song I will use. Most moviemakers -- as far as I understand -- record their POV’s separately and edit them to the song, leaving black gaps where they imagine the cinematics are going to go, and then record and edit them in last. It’s a smart and organized approach which grants you close to ultimate freedom, and I did so too in the beginning, but it quickly felt too easy in a way. I started doing too many non-telling transition-cinematics, or adding cinematics just because I had a hunch it would fit a certain part of the song by the way I pictured the camera would move or the use of velocity. There were less thoughts behind them and more gut instinct. It didn’t force my creativity as much. I didn’t have to work my brain trying to figure out a way to put together a good fragmovie with the puzzle pieces I had because I could just -- if you can excuse me the pretentious analogy -- 3D-print the puzzle pieces into the shapes I needed, as I needed them.

By having only the frags themselves as reference point when I'm recording, not a song or black gap between frags, I found I was forcing myself to create more interesting cinematics, and now I feel my fragmovies have become better because of it. I don’t think I’m special or better for doing this, it’s all about finding out what work for you and your style, and I am glad I have found mine.

And regarding the artist thing... If I could direct films like Kurosawa or write prose like Knausgaard, I guess I would feel okay using the word “artist” about myself. And yes, I understand there is not an objective definition and that there are many who would say most creative work is artistic. But using creativity in work isn't enough to define someone as an artist in my opinion. Are wage negotiators artists? Maybe. There are those who would say yes, but applying “artist” too broadly makes the word lose much its meaning.

At the same time, using creativity towards a purely aesthetic, expressionistic end...I guess, yeah. Like framing a cinematic to be beautiful to look at and/or for story-telling purposes -- it's hard to argue that's not an artistic choice. Take a look at FGW’s “Team Solomid: Ascend”. A modern classic. I dare believe most CS:GO players and fragmovie appreciators would call that thing a work of art. I sure do. If so, what is FGW then if not the artist? And especially with the heavy editors from the CoD scene primarily, like Barker, Nikky, Enigma etc. Those are often pure, super creative, artistic expressions with no focus on the frags at all. I really love them in small doses, and I think people criticizing them for “over-editing” are being dumb. That’s like criticizing Lord of the Rings for being unrealistic since it has wizards and elves in it. Then, you’re completely missing the point.

But to answer your question: "Would I call myself an artist?": No, because I couldn't stand myself if I did, and I don’t think I regard myself as one either, even in my most pretentious moments. If I and other moviemakers are looked upon as artists by someone else’s definition, then I'm flattered.

There aren’t going to be any HUNDEN fragmovies anytime soon, but what is your process for determining who to make a video of? Also, what is your process/criteria for choosing frags?

It’s mainly of players I like personally. I’m not special, I like the ones most people do, the big names. I like n0thing and wanted to make a movie of him mainly because of that. The idea of incorporating Jordan’s personality came later. With ScreaM, it was around the time it was known he would be left out of the French super-team, and I felt a sting of pity for him. Coldzera was crowned the best player in 2016, and since I was already on a “best of 2016”-player fragmovie roll, it only felt natural.

Device was in many people’s eyes the runner up as MVP of the Major, so I wanted to showcase him during the tournament, same with Kioshima at Starladder. Rain because I wanted to try and make a fragmovie with viking-inspired music, and he’s Norwegian like me! So yeah, I just follow what I would like to do in the moment.  

When it comes to what frags to use it’s pretty straightforward: Most 4k’s who are not anti-eco are always good, all aces, clutches vs three or more etc. You might not see 3k’s in community edits of big YouTubers, but on a professional level, we all know they can be huge and important plays. So especially on projects where I have less frags to choose between, like my Katowice fragmovie, I will include the best triple kills as well.

Do you think the community respects the process of making a fragmovie? Do you get criticized more than you think you should, or are they pretty understanding?

Yes, I think the community respects it very much. Fragmovies have always been such an integrated part of the CS culture since the beginning -- a niche expression in a niche subculture. And everybody who has an interest in watching a CS:GO fragmovie usually knows the game well, probably plays it themselves, and will notice all the little changes a moviemakers does, which makes it all the more potent.

In a regular film you will most likely not notice small VFX, like a subtle change of colour correction to correct for a lighting-change in a different location or a hill in the background having added more snow to create a winter atmosphere more realistic. In CS:GO the viewer will notice all the small things because they know the default look of the game every moviemaker starts with and every change happens from there. Not only the effects, slow motions etc., but they will see the colour correction because that’s not how the colours are in-game. They will see the zoom and motion of the cinematics because flying around the game in third person in a demo has a wide angle look and a more jagged movement. They will see the different skybox because it’s different than the default one. They will see the outline of the deathnotices. Everything. From all these small changes to the big ones, like the glowing blue M4 in Fuze’s “Mind Tree”, which everybody knows is not a real gun in-game and every viewer would instantly appreciate the effort he has put in to create it. CS moviemakers are lucky that way I think because the effort is clearly visible and the appreciation and feedback are direct and immediate through the comment section on YouTube, on forums, etc.  

I have personally had overwhelmingly positive feedback on my work so far, and those who have had issues with my style are mostly mature and make it clear as constructive feedback, which I really, really appreciate. It’s always hard to imagine how the audience will see a fragmovie when I’ve become blind to it myself by watching it countless times before release. Fresh eyes and feedback are crucial for my development.

Is there anyone from the past or present whose fragmovies you enjoy? If so, what is your favorite fragmovie by them?

Most definitely. I’ve tried to dig most of the old ones up on YouTube since I started with CS:GO editing and have created my own playlist with them, which can be seen on my channel. My big idol in the CSS days was k1u, creator of the Jaro series, Killing Entertainment, and many others. He had a mind for creative storytelling and effect usage I have not seen the likes of since. He had just as many effects as the heaviest editors today, but every single frame had some sort of purpose and goal beyond what looked cool. I aspired to be like him, but like I said, I lean more towards the clean look now in CS:GO, which seems to be the general norm but it wasn't back then.

It seems like a small paradox in a way because any frag in a fragmovie now has mostly likely already been seen by the viewer unedited as a clip from a stream posted on Reddit. Yet there is much more complaining now of "over editing" than in CSS or 1.6. Perhaps, it’s because today's audience is so used to the expression of unedited clips and stream highlights and sort of transfer that preference when watching them again in a fragmovie, noticing the editing even more as every little slow motion differs from how they saw the frag the first time. I don't know.  

The one fragmovie I go back to time and time again is “Mousesports 2008 - Ready Willing & Able” and “Oskar” by Athid. Those two are probably my favorite fragmovies. I always try to create fragmovies I want to watch, so I often return to these ones looking to learn. The hard cuts are seamless, the pace is high but the frags shown clearly… two examples of perfectly balanced fragmovies, in my opinion. For current moviemakers (who focus on fragmovies rather than heavy edits) I really enjoy my fellow Norwegian colleagues SiCKO and MarcusW, as well as flaxboi, Calle, Tumba, Molen, Phinx, PANIq, FGW -- to name a few.

What fragmovie are you most proud of and why?

Probably my n0thing-video. It was the one where I had the most ideas in my head, so it felt extra good when the viewers responded the way they did, many calling it their new favorite fragmovie. And it felt like I had pulled it off as well as I could have.

Do you have any future plans or projects coming up that you would like to share?

Sure! I have a few freelance-projects going on, but for my own channel I will post a “Best of Pasha 2016”-fragmovie within the next week or so. This will probably be my final “Best of 2016-”player fragmovie. After that I have planned to make a fragmovie of Ex6teNZ’s entire CS:GO career, a 8min+ cleanly edited playermovie in the vein of Athid’s movies. I don’t plan too many movies in advance, so I don’t know anything beyond that.

Thanks to paperC for the interview. He can be followed on Twitter @paperCSGO and his fragmovies can be found on YouTube at paperC CSGO.

Follow the author for more on Twitter at @Bleda412.