This is the second memorial video I have been asked to work on, my first was for Makato, who passed away from cysticfibrosis at the young age of 17.
This video is for one of the members of My Internet Services, Jeff, who passed away in November of Lukemia. MYIS happens to be the ISP which hosts 21st Century Warfare, as well as several other FPS tournaments.
Working with one of the mappers for 21st Century Warfare, PickUp. A modified version of Wake Island 2007 was made. Heavy modifications to the looks of the Aircraft carrier were made - for the reason that the aircraft carrier played a major role and I wanted it to appear more animated/active.
Some of the changes made were to add illumination to lights on the carrier, plus rotating satalite dish, and smoke from the exhaust stacks (yeah, carriers are really nuclear powered now - but it looks great). Asking permission from the development team of Forgotten Hope 2 mod, we imported the Brittish 6-pounders for the 21-gun salute. From the Wake Island competition map, we lifted the skins for the F18's to be the Blue Angles. We also added in a few ships in the ocean w/ the oil rigs on them - this was more for helping the aircraft pilots to line up their aircraft to fly a specific path over the island for the missing man formation.
Our original shooting was in December, we had a great showing of people. While I had primarily planned on people from 21st Century Warfare to show up, a few people from Gamerz Theatre and Blue Entertainment came along too. While we had tested the Battlerecorder earlier in the day, it seemed when we loaded the modified version of Wake Island 1007 the battlerecorder hook file for unix/lynix servers was loaded over the windows server hook file; thus 3 hours of great community work just dissapeared into the cosmos. I was so sad as it looked great - from the aircraft launch sequence to the 21-gun salute. The only thing that was a bit awkward was the exit of the troops to transport helicopters.
A re-shoot was done in January, but while we had great numbers it wasn't the same as we had in December. Mostly, we needed more people for a military lineup for the ceremony.
But, we pressed on. I had wanted to get the video done before Febuary, but due to workload of my job just kept me from getting much done. And what little I did do was lost when I was doing housecleaning of my computer - thinking I had pulled the files over to a network drive, I had deleted all the demo and avi files. Lucky for me, a few members of those who showed up also downloaded the demo files and I got a whole new set and have been working on making avi extracts to edit together.
There are 4 sequences planned for this video - the opening scene is the launching of the Blue Angles from the carrier, the secondary scene is showing of the military group being read the eulogy, the third scene is the missing man formation plus 21-gun salute, the fouth being the playing of taps with a shot of a memorial stone and honor guard. For the closing credits, I plan to do what I did w/ the Makato video, and while the credits are displayed show footage of the troops leaving formation and getting into helicopters and leaving - as well as shots of the Blue Angles flight returning to the carrier.
Right now, I'm pulling footage from the demo files. I'll get some updates soon
what with Infinityloops release of his trailer, I thought I'd talk a bit about some behind-the-scenes about his project.
I have always marvelled at how some groups manage to get large numbers of people to work together in making a machima project. Merchant of Death aka MOD, is like this too, but adds to it.
But, here, with MOD and equal attention to voice actors on a scale of the character actors. Sinve Novemeber '08 I've been helping with filling in of 17 character roles: male, female; from across the US to Scandinavia, to Moscow I've finally gotten all the open roles filled. I don't know the number of roles Infintyloop already had filled, but think of this. How many machinima videos have had upwards of 20+ unique characters with lines?
Another thing is that we had gotten female voice actresses to help reflect the fact that we have women in the armed forces who are in the combat environment beyond the role of nurses or other similar non-combat roles.
We have one scene that still sends a shiver down my spine just based on the quality of the voice actors involved. This is a unique quality that I think will draw people's attention as you get to "know" and "feel" for some of the characters and what is happening, pulling you that much more into the experience, instead of just watching some bang-bang-we-got-the-bad-guys action piece. This is something that Tr1n1courge did with his Red Dawn serier, but Infinityloop and the crew at FEAR productions have taken that and multiplied it.
There are unique mods for BF2 that also bring out new dimensions to using BF2 as a Machinima engine. I love some of the subtle things I've seen with Merchant of Death, they are just as telling as the large-scale events and I really think people will walk away going *wow*.
and if you don't, I'll refund you your ticket price :)
well, got a bit sidetracked. I had gotten The Witcher as a gift and, well, installed it. damn damn damn, why, oh why?
so, after extracating myself, i'm back to pulling out avi footage from teh demo files.
I was watching some of Sinclair Patrick's (Rising Wave films) Red Dawn series to look at his camera angles. While this project is more a staged memorial than action/story, I find his camera use inspiring and helps me get in a frame of mind to work on my machinima bits.
So far, I have a lot of footage of the Blue Angle flight taking off and landing. I am using Battledirector to make some nice camera movements - it's real nice being able to slow down the demo playback and use that to make sweeping camera actions.
Can I just say faceposer is a bitch to work with, and yet frustrating simple once you've grasped it. The hardest bit I found was loading the files into GMOD - a tutorial for all relevant parts (or at the least links to existing tutorials) will be up soon
In the mean while,
yes it sounds very wooden, but it's taken me five solid man hours to record that small fragment
If anyone has tutorial requests let me know. I'll try to get motivated enough on the weekend to start recording something with CamStudio. Anything you can think of just post and I'll see what I can do.
So I'm still in the process of creating my Opus. It's BF2 machinima.
I've been playing around with video compositing for a while now and I'm pretty decent at it. In some little tests that I've done for effects I've manged to create some pretty crazy looking shots. As is normal, my hard drive crashed about 4 months ago and the place I took it to to have the data rescued screwed up some how and so I've lost the files I originally wanted to show.
But that just means that for the time being I'll just have to text out what I wanted to share with everyone. Some of the stuff here I haven't even tested so it would be good to know if it works. Most of the stuff is applicable to almost any game I imagine.
Super Untested Greenscreen Idea
As the title implies, I haven't tested this, but, I imagine it could only work. The idea is for BF2/2142.
First you'll need to copy your original installation, or at least the files in it. This trick could also work as a mod, so long as you have two copies of the mod in your BF2/mods directory. So that's the first step. How you implement it is up to you.
