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.