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.

Editing update

Firstly for the update of what we've been doing, we've been editing well and encountered few problems. My laptop was restored. I delegated most of the things we wanted to include to the editing stage, so now that we're here the film has changed drastically, so much even that I asked for scene 3.1 (or 2.2, Jonny has the storyboards) to be re-shot because we're going to add a new model from Gmod. I know this'll be the third time we'll have re-shot the same scene but that's how we're working at the moment. Having started with a storyboard, script, scouted out various locations in-game, and Jonny's research, we then made the first film which I suppose would be the draft, then I re-shot the scenes and that would be the 2nd draft, what we're working on now is far from the final piece, we still have some things to sort out:

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].