The story so far

So I just did my first night of shooting on the set of Badlands, of all the things I learnt last night (and there were many), the most prominent would be that shooting Machinima is hard. Damn hard. But of course, if it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing, well maybe that isn’t exactly right, but it certainly wouldn’t be as rewarding. As catch up to me babbling about the shoot (I’ve done a bit in production that hasnt made it to the blog yet) I’m going to post the first treatment and post more info on pre production and the shoot tomorrow.

‘A Soldiers Revenge’ (working title) – Treatment:

Another day on the battlefront, the Soldier and the Medic gear up. Fastening belts, donning gloves, loading weapons, once prepared they stand at attention, salute and charge off for battle. The two head out to the battlefield side by side, men in arms. The mood is light as the Soldier fires rockets into the distance and foes explode like balloons overfilled with red jelly and confetti. The Soldier and Medic pass encouraging glances as they push forwards on the line.
The Soldier, having expended his rockets heads back to re-gear leaving the Medic to hold the point.
Seemingly from out of nowhere a Pyro torches the Medic to death with his flamethrower, the Pryo cheers with glee as he stands victorious over the medic lying on the ground in flames.
The Soldier quickly returns after hearing the scuffle, with the culprit nowhere to be seen and overcome by grief he falls to his knees. The Soldier makes a grave for his comrade and stands over the grave to lament his lost friend. In the distance the call of the Pryo can be heard, as he spouts flames into the air and cheers.
Fire erupts in the eyes of the Soldier as his loss turns to anger, the soldier charges off towards the sounds of the enemy, trusty combat shovel firmly in his grasp. The Soldier explores the area narrowly missing the Pryo on numerous occasions, seemingly both combatants are unaware of the close proximity of one another until the Soldier spots the Pyro’s flamethrower nozzle poking around the corner. The Soldier freezes, suddenly aware of the uselessness of his shovel against a huge napalm launching contraption. Standing flat against the wall the Soldier stands in fear and silence as the Pyro cranes his neck listening in suspicion. Suddenly, the Pyro grunts, dismissing his suspicion and charges back from whence he came. The Soldier breathes a sigh of relief as he tracks the Pyro, spying him charging down into the gully below he sees his chance to strike.
Charging out onto the bridge the soldier disappears from sight as the Pryo inspects the gully, suddenly from above we see a blur of red as the Soldier dives over the bridge, shovel pointing down at the Pyro the Soldier rides it much like one would a pogo stick.
The shovel blade connects with the Pyro, the force bringing his bulky body to the ground. A glorious crunch can be heard. The soldier grins with glee as the Pyro’s head slowly rolls a foot down the embankment, no longer encumbered by his torso.

Reading through it again, there have already been a lot of changes, but the core plot is still the same.

With a lack of any real dialogue, I’ve used the soundtrack as the driving force in the film. A lot, if not all of the action takes its queues from the score, which I’ve found an aid in guiding the re-writing, shooting, editing and the general pace of the piece. If I solve my problem of where to host the mp3, ill post it on the blog tomorrow.
Until then, T.

Production Woes

So the blog has fallen a bit behind, as has my productivity due to starting a new job on Monday. I have however achieved a few things in the week since I last posted. I exported a demo, found server access and possibly some virtual actors, tightened up the soundtrack and further defined the scene breakdown. This post will be brief as I haven’t the time to go into too much depth on these processes just yet, so I’ll mainly resort to linkage and hopefully elaborate on what I’ve learnt in later posts.

Firstly, to demo exporting the valve wiki gives you the bare basics, commands and basic workflow, which I found enough to get the videos out via VirtualDub to collate the .tga image files. Though for the life of me I was unable to get the direct to .avi commands to work. I hope to expand the details on this procedure though, as most online resources are rather brief and there are a few options available to you.

Also, thanks to the guys from the DWP, producers of the Control Point podcast, as they have agreed to loan me some server time to do some of the preliminary shooting, here’s hoping they let me use it some more in the weekends to come. I’m still baffled that I couldn’t get access to server controls on any Australian servers, but then again I see the use of a US server a benefit in the fact that servers will be empty when I’m most likely to require them. Now I have the server time, I’ve put out my feelers for some virtual actors, simply by spamming my friends list with requests for assistance, I’ve had a fair few interested parties, which is good because I anticipate actor burnout to be pretty high as the shoots will be rather boring and disorganised, at least while I’m getting started.

That will have to do for now, but I’m soon to start posting more plot/story info on the blog and probably the whole treatment as well. Looking forward to sharing it.

That’s all for now.

T

Stills, sound and demo recording

Since my last post I must say I’ve been rather productive. I’ve produced some preliminary stills for the digital storyboard (posing rag dolls in Gmod), roughed out almost the entire soundtrack (Using Sound Studio) along with playing with some of the SFX from inside TF2 and had a look at recording demo’s in game.

The stills I’ve produced are to aid in the storyboarding process I will undergo tonight. I’m visiting my friend, whose artistic talents I will be putting to good use in producing a drawn storyboard. This is being done to hash out how much of the action will take place and to get a little outside feedback on how this is all going. Though I’m sure the final product will likely differ a fair bit from this storyboard (limitations in virtual acting/camera work) but I’m hoping to expand on my ideas and even add in some new ones.

To sound tracking and SFX, two big steps forward. I’ve essentially finalised the soundtrack after scouring through my vinyl and digital tracks, and after putting them all together I’m getting a really strong feel for the story, the ups and downs etc. It has all come together really well and will greatly supplement the storyboarding process. Though the soundtrack is of quite acceptable quality and all the edits are smooth I still feel I will redo the entire soundtrack from scratch, just to tighten the audio to the video. At present the piece is at 8 minutes length, and I’d imagine it will run a little less than that, as I’m looking at cutting out a chorus or two as I’m a little concerned about a few moments losing momentum due to being stretched out due to the music. Also a big development is now having access to the entire sound effects bank for Team Fortress 2, to access this information I had to jump into the team fortress 2 content.gcf file in my C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\ directory. However, accessing a .gcf file is not so easy as accessing a folder in your OS. In order to get to the good stuff you must extract the relevant files as .gcf is a compressed format utilised by steam for game content. There are a few applications which can do this for you, most notably GCFScape, which is all fine and good provided you have the .net framework, I however did not and had trouble accessing the Microsoft downloads page in order to get it and thus opted for GCFExplorer developed by SASiO. With the team fortress 2 content.gcf opened the SFX for all the weapon, characters and various other SFX can be found in GCF:\tf\sound (playing around in the .gcf however brief brought me back to the .pak days of Quake, good times). I must say, Valve have done an amazing job, providing a plethora of amazing effects and entertaining taunts/shouts/cheers for each of the classes in TF2. I took a bunch of these to populate a section of the soundtrack with what is happening in the story just to test the work flow and how Sound Studio ran manipulating these .wav files and it worked a treat.

Lastly, to demo recording. I dived into the demo recording and viewing options in TF2 in preparation for testing the procedure to get it to actual video. Using the following commands in the console (which you must activate in the advanced options and then access using the tilde “~” key) record “<desired filename>” and “stop”, to begin recording and stop recording at will. My advice is name your files wisely from the get go, as you should with anything and everything you save. Note that you can record in any resolution/texture detail, basically any video settings and change them later on, which could be a godsend to those with lower end hardware. I however found no slowdown while recording and in fact forgot about it until 20 minutes later, also of note is that all microphone audio will be recorded except your own. Once you have recorded your content you can access your files from a little in game UI using the command “demoui” or “demoui2″ the first of which is shown below. Its a very simple way to watch/fast forward/rewind and even jump inside your demo’s and view them in no-clip mode from out of body by hitting the Drive button, if you plan to output this for movie making the following console commands may be of use (note that all commands require that “sv_cheats <0 or 1>” be set to 1) “cl_drawhud <0 or 1>” to hide or show the hud, “crosshair <0 or 1>” hide or show crosshair and “r_drawviewmodel <0 or 1>” to hide or show your gun. More demo console commands after the jump.

Thanks for reading, T.

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.