HTML5 & Ogg video

Last year Ms. Kate mentioned we'd have to display our practical coursework on a custom website, and that the deisgn of the website could form part of the coursework. As before I'm still enthusiastic about open standards and I've tried a few experiments in implementing them. If the IT department doesn't allow us hosting it might be quite difficult, that's something we can come to later.

Motion Capture

I remember at the start of these holidays I said I'd try to do some motion capture to see if we could use it in a coursework piece, I carried out the test two weeks ago with the help of Matty. As expected there were some problems (but this is why we do tests, so that problems can be anticipated for later):

posting from ScribeFire

I'm writing this post from within Google Chrome with an extension called ScribeFire.
And now that I'm here I might as well keep on updating what's going on.

The radical film archive project is in it's baby steps, I have a page up with a list of all the films to acquire.

Motion capture is still going to happen. Probably.

Jonny is away in the US, Matty is in hospital. Currently undergoing surgery, I wish him a painless recovery.

The new teacher we have, Mr. Gray, knows about RSS feeds and has hosted servers somewhere (I think). This is good news as it allows me much more flexibility in blogging.

And tonight is #oxtuttle again.

Facebook experiment conclusion

Over the last few weeks 17 days I've been running a Facebook advertising campaign pointing to this blog, now that it's over and I've run out of advertising credit I can go over the final statistics.

Hello Facebook!

I'm testing out Facebook ads at the moment, and I'm seeing what can be done to them, currently there's an advert pointing towards this blog. So if you're coming in from Facebook, firstly welcome, and secondly I'll set up Google Analytics some time this week so I can measure the incoming traffic from this end.
Also now Facebook has my credit card details. I am not happy about this, given their past record on privacy I don't trust them at all.

EDIT: Just noticed that the ad is 'pending review', because I targeted it at under 18s. Whoops. Still it just shows the power of Social Media advertising; I can specify the exact location, gender and age of my target audience, that's pretty nifty.

EDIT 02: Checked now and the ad is live. Success!

for Peace and Socialism!

Last week I did Journalism at the Morning Star.
I'm working at the foreign desk, here's a list of stories I've covered there:

Revision and filming

Firstly I've done the basic storyboard and some early filming for that Modern Warfare machinima I've been talking about for a long time.

how to find your blog

I've got lots of free time on this study leave so I've been busy messing around in HTML5 video, and while doing that I somehow managed to stumble across the Blogger API in Google code labs. And I found something to fix a common problem: that a teacher can't find the URL for a student's blog.

#Voicetweetup

Yesterday evening I went to #voicetweetup at the Jam Factory, I was going to liveblog the event, I was all prepared with my netbook fully charged, and then it failed to find the Jam Factory's Wi-Fi network. Forced to use traditional methods of pen and paper here are my notes:

Machinima in Modern Warfare 2

Here's how to do it on the Xbox:
1. Start a Hardcore match. This gets rid of most of the Heads-Up-Display.
2. Make sure your actors have the 'Cold Blooded Pro' perk enabled. This means their username doesn't come up when seen by the player designated as the cameraman.
3. The cameraman should equip a flashbang and hold down the left button. This pulls back the character's arm in the motion of throwing it, but as long as you don't relese the left button the character remains in that position without releasing their projectile. This leaves the screen completely empty and ready for filming.

I discovered step three when wandering aimlessly with Matthieu around Overgrown, and it's essential. It's also useful to note that very different from Halo you'd need a minimum of 2 Xboxes either conected locally or over Xbox LIVE. All the filming takes place in real-time so you can't rewind time to re-shoot the same events again and again.
You also have very little control over the costume of your character.

Despite all that it's not impossible so people will definitely attempt it sometime in the future.

we broke the rules

There was one shot which we thought had violated the 180 degree rule so I went back to the saved scene, viewed it from above and marked on our camera positions.

In conclusion we did break the 180 degree rule, but nobody watching the film actually noticed.
To justify the breaking of the rule it was the only way that shot could have been set up, otherwise the second monitor would have gotten in the way. The shot was also necessary to break up the conversation by viewing it from another angle.

Storyboards

Storyboards are avaliable on Jonny's blog, cross-posted here:
All the images are hosted on Jonny's blog so if they go down it's his fault.

Final task complete.

Jonny came round yesterday and went over the changes I made, he didn't like the running scene and I wasn't entirely happy with it myself so we re-shot it again with our protagonist running slower and with different camera angles (that's a temporary whiteboard in my office, ignore the writing on the top left). We saw that we might have broken the 180 degree rule during the conversation between Nick and the cosmonaut, so thought it best to add in a previous shot for no other purpose than to ease the 'flow' of the conversation and stop the audience getting all confused.

Machinima setup

I was looking through my camcorder and found a picture of Jonny recording some machinima in my kitchen:

It shows what our machinima setup looks like. Also some good news is that the final render worked and I'm uploading it to an external server right now. From there Jonny will review the film and make comments. I joined his Xbox LIVE Party last night and he said he'd be free next week, then we'll go through what would be the 'final  edit'. In the meantime I might try a machinima montage in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Matthieu seems incredibly keen on trying it.

Editing update 02

I 'animated' the Gmod models, it took a while and I had to make a few attempts before I got the perspective right.
The timeline now looks like this:

A noise filter has been added to every individual clip, video track 5 contains an overlaid border, I've even started adding some text for the credits. I asked lutragem nicely whether we could use her music and she accepted. And I downloaded some sound effects from freesound (it was me who got them because I have an account there).

How are we making machinima?

Last lesson Ms. Parish said something like 'I like what you've done but I have no idea how you've done it'. Here I'll try to put that right by explaining what machinima is and how to use it as a film technique. If you look at the URL of the last post you'll see that was what I originally intended to slip it in there, I decided it's worth a full post. I'll also try my best not to be patronising.

Moar research

If you must know I'm doing this now instead of my film because my laptop died, it's currently sitting on the kitchen table while I back up the hard drive, and it will be on the kitchen table for the next 6 hours or so. In the meantime I re-recorded the shots we needed (and added some more) in compressed MotionJPEG format. We now have 24 shots and they're coming out slightly sharp and pixelated but apart from that they're much easier to work with than before.

Filming update

On Friday lunchtime (when everyone else was doing Sport Relief) we set up a bluescreen in the drama department and began filming the first bit of footage, there was some problem because our actor was busy (at Sport Relief, probably) but I stepped in and acted instead:

Script for sci-fi main film task.

Our film begins with a long establishing shot of space. Our narrator speaks.
"In the year 2058 Human Civilisation developed the ability to travel among the stars".
Then we have a grand orchestral score as a hornet floats across the top of the screen [reference to beginning of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope].
"They didn't like what they found."
The hornet is hit by a lazer [reduce the damage enough to make it insignificant].

Research for main task.

I should explain this post to start off with, during today's lesson Jonny voted that we try a science-fiction black and white silent machinima, I agreed. After the lesson we both met on Xbox LIVE and messed around on the Forge for about 45 minutes. We played on the maps we would use and messed around with the inbuilt filters. You must understand that this is great because it includes actually playing through video games... for educational purposes! I settled on the map Orbital and forged it with an inbuilt colour filter (that means the filter you're seeing in these screenshots was added in real-time as part of the Bungie game engine). I should probably mention here that the Orbital map is only available as part of the Mythic Map Pack 2 as included in the Multiplayer disk with Halo 3: ODST (you have no idea how much I'm enjoying this). Without further ado, here's the research: