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"My First Movie."

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Tue 26/11/02 at 22:20
Regular
Posts: 787
This is for everyone who is into making their own short films or pieces of movie image. Lets talk about it, especially you Mr Happy. If you need anything post it in here, or if any of you need any advice. :)

If Goatboy reads this I need some footage of his band as he knows, this will help bridge time between sequences I will soon film.

Anyone filming anything?
Let's Talk!
Joby
Sat 30/11/02 at 16:11
Regular
"everyone says it"
Posts: 14,738
Just got back today from a film I am working on with a lose contact I know and well.. it was fantastic.

You guys will get to see me go mental, shoot an invisible assasin and then dive backwards away from an explotion.

Fantastic.

And we got stopped by the police for being in army wear and having guns. Lol!
Wed 27/11/02 at 16:09
Regular
Posts: 23,216
Me animate.

Not much more to say really, currently animating Amneshire, working on pre-production at the moment.

Basically, it works like this:

First, I come up with idea for character. Drawings, sketches, or most of the time just stuck in my head. Then I make a basic drawing of it in 3D Studio Max.

After that, I start working on patching the head, always start on the face. Patching is basically moving individual vertices of polygons one by one. It's very time consuming, but rewarding.

Once I've got the basic head done, which takes about two hours, I'll start working on detail to the head, e.g. eyes, eyelashes, mouths, ears. And then I'll work on textures.

Textures are annoyingly difficult to do unless you know what you're doing, and I really haven't a clue. So what I do is just use built in stuff... cat fur will be smoke (changed from black and grey to white and light grey) with a bump map to raise the texture a little and give the impression of fur. I don't want to use the fur stuff that makes it go all fluffy, because my computer won't be able to cope with it. And my computer being crap is really turning into a problem now... I'm getting so detailed in what I do, it's getting very difficult to edit with all the slow down.

After the head is done, I'll start work on the body. This is hard. The last character I've done, Renna, required me to make breasts for the first time. Very exciting.

Actually, I was a bit stumped. I went through crap loads of porn. I love what I do. In what other job can you research porn as a requirement?

When finally the whole body is done (never mind attention to detail in hands, feet, nails, belly button, tails...) and when the BODY is textured... you can start working on clothes.

Clothes can usually be achieved by slicing the body in parts you want clothed, then copying and making those body parts slightly bigger. Then, just edit to make them more like clothes, open them out add buttons etc, and texture them.

When you've finally got the whole body done, you can start building a skeleton.

Bones allow animators to move the bones to move the character in certain places much easier... if you imagine that a character is made up of 10,000 polygons, you can see how difficult it would be to animate a character by having to move all of those polygons individually to make something seem alive... which is what I did for the first half of the FOG animated stories, but never mind.

Bones can be put anywhere, but most importantly in the head. You can put many bones inside the head, all moving different parts of the face. Putting bones in to raise eyebrows, cheeks, make them smile, frown, move their mouth open and closed, eyelashes, eyelids open and close... If my computer didn't slow down to the point where I can't even see the screen properly, I'd use them all. :0) Then you have to add inverse kinematics, which basically means how the bone structure works... (If you bend your back, the whole body will tilt over, but the legs will keep still.)

But then, after you make the skeleton, comes another annoyingly hard bit... you have to link all the bones to the body. Like attaching nerves.

So for every bone, you much point out which part of the body you want it to control. Time consuming also. And if you get it SLIGHTLY wrong, you'll mess up the whole body.

And after that's done, you've got a character! Hurray.

Amneshire has about eighty different characters. :0)
Wed 27/11/02 at 11:13
Regular
"That's right!"
Posts: 10,645
I'm currently script doctor, assistant director and probably cameraman on my friend's film, 666 (triple 6)

It's about demons, and an MIB style organisation where people are trained at academies so they can be deal with... I think

I'm typing up the script and fixing the dialogue, and we start shooting soon. After that I might make my first script into a film, or adapt my Ammityville Horror story so it's not connected to the real tale (so I can make it without being sued by the people who hold the rights) A few changes and it will be just another haunted house story, but a good one, because I wrote it, heh
Wed 27/11/02 at 01:13
Regular
"everyone says it"
Posts: 14,738
Simple, just buy yourself from Jessops a nice Gun Microphone and you will be happily loving recording dialogue.
Wed 27/11/02 at 01:04
Regular
"funky blitzkreig"
Posts: 2,540
Okey dokey, my new ICQ number is 176153548

I'll probably be on sometime tomorrow after I've written an essay on the royal prerogative (*yawns*)

I'll definitely be on from 10:00pm.
Wed 27/11/02 at 00:56
Regular
"funky blitzkreig"
Posts: 2,540
Law...

I already know that our film society has infringed virtually every copyright rule regarding the screening of films :-)

Anyway, term ends in about a week, so I'm going to get everything finished in the holiday and then I'll just have to wait till I've got all the equipment I need.

What's the sound like on the Canon cameras? I know the XLS1 has a zoom mic, but would that be good enough to get *nice* sounding dialogue or not?
Wed 27/11/02 at 00:40
Regular
"everyone says it"
Posts: 14,738
Oh, and what do you do at Cambridge? What course?
Wed 27/11/02 at 00:39
Regular
"everyone says it"
Posts: 14,738
Right. You really need to get hold of ICQ or some way of chatting with me (as I cannot be bothered to type you an email - i hate that).

I can help you out with everything you just wished. :)
Wed 27/11/02 at 00:35
Regular
"funky blitzkreig"
Posts: 2,540
I don't have msn but I do have AOL messenger, if you've got that. Or just plain ol' e-mail ([email protected])

I might inundate you with technical questions at some point :-)

One problem is that I have to use premiere to edit it. And premiere sucks for title editing. If you look at the DVD cover for crime and punishment in surburbia, that's what I want the titles to look like - that scratchy font, and then if I can do it on premiere, I'll apply this "old film" filter I've got except without the sepia effect to make them scratchy and shaky, which should look quite cool.

I'm not too sure how well the superimposed shots will work. One thing I want to do is shoot a butterfly on a blue screen of some sort so I can have it fly across the screen at some points, and I live near a place called butterfly farm so I'm going to go and do some filming there before I get underway. I think premiere can do blue screen fairly well, but I'm not sure how well and I don't want stray pixels and stuff. Failing that I'm going to go butterfly hunting and release them when I need them.

And I'm also gonna need a new hard-disk to edit the bloody thing because mines too slow :-(
Wed 27/11/02 at 00:12
Regular
"everyone says it"
Posts: 14,738
Sounds fantastic!

Do you have MSN?

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