The trials and tribulations of making a machinima
Soooo…
Brian and I are nearly done with our World of Warcraft/Zoolander machinima and we’ll post a link once we’re through tweaking it. It’s been an interesting process. Making a machinima is definitely more difficult than I had anticipated. It certainly is time consuming. I’ve memorized that one scene, shot by shot, line for line, and the funny thing is that I still haven’t seen the rest of the movie. And after watching that one scene over and over and over and over…I don’t even know if I want to watch the rest. If I do, I’ll probably fast forward through those four minutes.
Making characters to represent the actors was easy enough. Finding a location to film…not so much. And running seven or so characters to the chosen spot isn’t exactly a tea party either. I feel bad because after we spent a night of filming in one spot in Silvermoon, I decided the next day that this little haven in Eversong Woods would be a better place and I ran all the characters there. And Brian couldn’t argue since I had spent an hour re-locating everyone. Sorry, Brian. ^^;
To film, one of us controlled our “camera character” while the other would act out two or more characters. Let me just say that this was a pain in the ass. It would have been so much easier if we had other people to control the host of characters, but all our friends were busy. Boo to everyone having a life…
The next day in class, we discovered that we had to make a storyboard. We had already written out a verbal storyboard, but having pictures definitely sped up the process. We knew exactly what the shot had to look like instead of trying to interpret out nearly illegible notes (that we had written around 3 in the morning) that said things like, “Zoo turn and close up over Hans and co shoulders”.
To further speed up the process, we made macros for each line and action. I even sat there and timed everything according to the sound clip (that we finally got after hours of driving ourselves crazy with several different programs). I had everything synched up nearly perfectly and I was so proud of myself! But then Brian got back from class and we continued filming and I realized that I just wasted my time. We had to shut off Windows Media Player because it was slowing down my frame rate. And I was sad, but I’m used to it. I always spend so much time obsessing over little features and I end up not using them. It’s just my curse, I guess.
Anyway, now it’s all up to editing. Brian’s much better at this than I am since he’s had experience with editing programs. If you want insight on this part of the process, refer to his blog.
And that’s the whole story. I only have three complaints about using WoW to make a machinima. 1) WoW lags like nobody’s business so we had to re-film so many shots and we had to readjust the screen size and the fps on Frapps over and over and over. It gets very monotonus very fast. 2) Varying schedules and periods of availability + filming outdoors = lighting problems. Expect to see periods of evening and night time mixed together. And 3) WoW emotes are very limited so it was difficult trying to synch every word and action up. This process involved a lot of improvising and editing, but I guess that’s a part of every cinematic experience.
Here are some other things I discovered in the process…
1) While NPCs are convenient, they are no substitute for real people. Don’t film near them. They’re annoying and will do things like laugh or walk away at inopportune times.
2) Real people, though, can also be a pain in the ass. People are inherently nosy and if you’re standing in a large group, they will walk up to your face and emote you back.
3) Quadruple boxing is possible, though not recommended.
4) WoW runs surprisingly well at a 11 frame rate.
5) Just as Rome was not built in one day, [good] machinima cannot be made in one night. Have lots of caffeine ready.
PotM: If my computer could have expressed emotion, it would probably would have been @_____@
