First Draft/Soundtracking

Today’s focus has been on nailing down a first draft of the treatment for ‘A Soldiers Revenge [Working Title]‘ and screening and obtaining music for the soundtrack.

The story has been in my head in one form or another for at least a month. I had jotted down dot points of the story but it’s good to have it solidified in a first draft (of a bout 400 words). The cast has varied over this time, at one point involving 5 of the 9 characters from the Team Fortress 2 game. Now it has been refined simply to three: the Soldier, the Medic and the Pyro. I plan to hopefully redraft the treatment 3 to 5 times before stepping up to principal photography (does this term exist for machinima, I guess so) for which I will be recruiting one or two friends to step into virtual acting roles. One of whom will most likely be an old friend who has a great hand for drawn art. I plan to enlist him also to produce the final storyboard for the piece, which brings me to the next task, producing some frames of the storyboard in Gmod, posing rag dolls of the characters to aid his artistic interpretation of the storyboard. It’s likely the story will take some twists and turns through these processes but even so I’ve chosen not to publish the treatments on this blog, at least at this stage to protect my ideas from being stolen but more importantly to avoid spoiling the story. I intend to publish the treatments once the final product is done as seeing the treatment at its various stages would be of interest and relevance to this blog.

Onto sound tracking, some of my inspiration for the sound tracking and style but perhaps more the pacing of the short has come from the brilliant machinima (and first well produced piece I saw using TF2) Ignis Solus. I found the lack of dialogue can be compensated for by how animated and defined the characters are, a lot can be said from the game models expressions and movements. This supported my decision to use only the existing expressions of the characters in the game (of which there are quite a few) to communicate in the piece, I’m currently mapping all the characters taunts and expressions to see what I have to work with and where I will place them within the short. Also of note in Ignis Solus is the orchestrated soundtrack which has been my plan for ‘A Soldiers Revenge [WT]‘. I’ve been listening to a number of classical pieces along with orchestrated versions of popular World War II pieces, these suit the art style of TF2 quite well, with tunes like Colonel Bogey and We’ll Meet Again already cemented into the soundtrack for the piece. These two tracks were brought to mind via a vinyl record inherited from my grandmother, which I have digitised. Though its unlikely these digitised versions will make it to the final soundtrack (the vinyl is a little worse for wear) it did however bring to my attention the idea of using the fuzz/crackle to effect in the opening and perhaps closing of the short.

Technical section: In what is sure to become a common occurrence (and may even warrant its own category in the blog), I’m going to run down some of the technical processes, hardware and software used in production. As stated previously I have recorded some tracks from vinyl records, as a vinyl enthusiast (I no longer buy CD’s, only digital downloads and vinyl) I’m currently using a DJ3500 TT from Pioneer, running through an old mixer/pre-amp to an 8 frequency equaliser to my Pioneer multi-channel receiver. With this outputting to an Edirol R-09 24bit recorder (very portable) I can get tracks from vinyl to my computer with relative ease. Its this stage I’m now at, where I’m trimming the tracks from the long recording of the whole record. If I was more patient than I am, I could actually put track breaks while it records or even in the Edirol unit internal software itself. But I haven’t, though I may try it out in further digitising efforts to test the different methods for which is best for work flow. I’m currently trying out some shareware software on my Mac, Sound Studio, after trying in various other applications I own  (which I’ ll talk on in good time I’m sure). So far Sound Studio is filling my needs, the interface is friendly and accessible, much more so than Cacophony, which I tried out first and dumped rather quickly. Essentially the software only needs to cut and save sections of an mp3 file, and save them separately, but I see a need for more robust functions further down the line, so here’s hoping it has them. I see this paragraph becoming a jumbled mess, and its past bed time, so I’ll leave it at that. In coming days I plan to post the tech specs of all the gear I’m using tools/software/hardware etc. Hopefully its in an easier to access form than this.

Signing off for now. T

Day Zero

And so it comes to this. I’ve thrown together this blog on WordPress to document some of the production process of a machinima short I’m putting together under the working title ‘A Soldiers Revenge’. I’m not sure why I’ve gone with WordPress, I used to run a blog (that is a long time dead) on Blogger but I guess WordPress has stuck in my mind for some reason. Please correct me if there is something I’m missing, better to make a switch earlier than later.

So to business, I’ve had a bunch of multimedia ideas rattling around in my head for the past 4 years and with my sights set on starting a TV/Film production course early 2009 this blog will document and hopefully distribute (with the help of Youtube and the like) some of the projects I plan to use as a folio for applications to said courses later this year. These ideas will hopefully take the form of live action, machinima and animated shorts which will be discussed on this blog at length. I plan to post resources and tutorials I find and perhaps even write myself for personal documentation as well as spreading the knowledge.

Any external input and encouragement is welcomed and encouraged as I find my worst enemies are procrastination and perfectionism. Both of which I’m hoping this blog will ease.

And so to production notes. As stated earlier, the short I’m working on presently is a machinima piece currently named ‘A Soldiers Revenge’. I will be using the Source engine, specifically Team Fortress 2 as the game engine the machinima will be shot in. I’m starting out using live ‘actors’ to play the parts and record the scenes in game as a player combined with spectator mode, I’ve chosen this path after looking at Faceposer and the choreography tools provided in the Half-Life 2 SDK, which are a little daunting at present. I want to try machinima on in its simplest form (machinima-lite if you will) for starters before upgrading to using the tools in the SDK. In trying not to make this first blog post too epic I’ll leave it at that and post a still shot I worked on in Gmod posing some characters in what will eventually be a scene from the short.

 

This is a still taken in Gmod. Where I have posed rag dolls of the Solder and Pyro characters and taken a screenshot using the “cl_hud 0″ function (which I later learned was not necessary in Gmod as it has an inbuilt camera function). Note the Pryo’s flame thrower, if viewed from outside this framing looks ridiculous and the weapon isn’t even close to the characters grasp, however, in this framing it works to a T. Also of note is the motion blurring of the Soldier which was done in Photoshop CS2, by simply grabbing the soldier and adding the motion blur filter, which works to good effect I feel. My only real disappointment was with the placement and angle of the shovel, which I would have preferred be more on an angle of decapitation. I’ve found Gmod to be impressively robust, deep and a massive potential drain of time and productivity (but no more than TF2 itself) all of which demonstrates the brilliance of the Source engine.

As a closing note for my first post; I’m left wondering how all this online meta stuff will effect the end product, whether it spoils the mystery, or if it will add to the achievement. I guess time will tell and I’ll learn along the way what to publish and what not to.

Bye for now T.