Nov 4th meeting with Mr. Rawson

A look at timeline (reverse chronogical):

• Feb 1st = Final Draft due
• Jan 1st = MUST start writing at latest!! 
• Dec 31st = product must be done
• Today we have 2 months left 

How can we cut down on production time?

• no voice actors, 1st person reflection voiceover
• less characters 
• more audio, less visual 
• what are the only movements that I need?
• what can I reuse / duplicate / loop?  
• can I cut some flashbacks? and make it simply a voice comment?

The harsh truth is that we WANT to make a great machinima, and we want to finish the story, but if timeline runs out, we will have less time to write our report, which CANNOT come second.   The report must take priority.  SO, we've got to be very careful as to how much time we devote to the product.

Better to have a shortened product and a better report

1. what about a trailer?

human ingenuity

WOW map viewer isn't working ... hmmmmm grrrrrr .  OK another software issue ... how many software issues have we had by this point?   5 -- ish?  Probably?  How long has the software set back my productivity?  1 month / 2 months?  This is an element for reflection .... ahhhh yes. 

Without map viewer, we can do the animations of teh charactres, but it won't have any background.   Can we create the whole character animations bit, and INSERT backgrounds later?  YES.  OK good, so what we're going to do is focus on the character animation and deal with the backgrounds later.    SO -- conclusion, we are doing animations and NOT backgrounds.  done.

Sounds - another program?  Getting the sounds will hopefully take 1 hour.  After 1 hour I should be able to play/insert any sound I want.  I'll blog about this once it's done.

Steps/Goals.  Today is Nov 4th :    Hope to have ______ done by ______:

1.  Animations,  Mon, Nov 14th
2. Put together in Vegas  :  before I leave for England 
3. Sounds:  Dec 5th
4. Voice over (not perfect)   Dec. 12th
5. Titles, final edits (possibly subtitles): By START of christmas break.

All of this is A LOT to do before Christmas break.   But if all of this isn't done by Christmas break, chances are that we're just going to fall too far behind. 

Christmas break is the production HARD deadline.  Product is second to the report.

Video footage from the first 20 minutes of using Sony Vegas.

I'll be honest. I opened up Sony Vegas and was clueless. I didn't know anything. There were a lot of options, a lot of buttons, moving thingies and STUFF. I was lost. Very lost.
But I looked up 2 tutorials and boom, this is what I "created" in 20 minutes.

Basically now that I have the characters animated and ready for one scene (this is not it, this has 3 people, the original scene has 6 and a background)
So, I imported the 3 character animations and a spell animation. I removed the green screen from the background of each animation. Then I moved the object where I wanted it to go, and then I played around with the time till everything was correct.
Now, I talked to my mum and she said buying fraps is not a problem (yay) so I will get rid of that annoying little white writing above EVERYTHING.
For some reason, I can't get WoW Map Viewer to work, so in this particular teaser there is no background.
This was a first, rough try.... without further adieu, here it is

Like I said very simple, very basic, no sound effect and no background. Just to see how the program feels.
And I must say it feels good, it's a joy using it!
I also have a bunch of annotated pieces of paper with character placing, how long each animation has to be for a scene to work with the voice acting, etc.
I can also tell the the guy on the left (the storyteller with the blue hat) is moving slower then the other two. But I'd have to re-record the animation and I just wanted to get this first try off my chest!
This wasn't as hard as I feared it would be... Thank the lord!
Now bibliography for the videos I used (in case I need them later)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdSLDD7RWyA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxhNf175I9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZy2KuwPQmM

Not all of them are great quality, but hey, they were on top of the list!

Sorry for mistake!

Kept saying Adobe Professional when in fact it's called Premiere.... it's been a long day!

Also working on the first scene as we speak! I will have something very small to post here soon, I just need to figure one thing out!

And now video editing...

So it turns out that I can't edit my video with Adobe Professional... my windows is 32-bit, and said program requires 64-bit. Is all hope lost? No!
There are two.. competing programs on this market (for windows) Adobe Professional and Sony Vegas. Thank god sony vegas runs on both windows, AND has a free trail too! And now thanks to my fast internet the download is done.... let's see how this will work out!

Video recording

Right, after a couple of mishaps with the WeGame client (basically it had to be online to save the videos, and the internet downstairs isn't working causing the videos to... not work.) I decided to go classical and simply download fraps. Now there is a minus using this software. The file sizes of the movies it creates are MASSIVE. A 5 second clip is 10MB, which might not sound like much but get a whole movie of several characters and environments and you have lost many GB's.
The other minus is the writing on top of the movie (www.fraps.com) is always there. Perhaps there is a way to edit it out, but if there isn't I could always buy fraps (27 euros..)
Other then that the software is extremely easy to use and it should be easy to edit as well.
So, let's put some green screen magic to work and record our characters! I'll post a sample on here when I have a couple!

Ugh! *frustrated*

Nevermind what I said about our internet downstairs, it still won't work... *deep long sigh* thats working with memory sticks then... at least it's an okay speed on my laptop.
Right, back to downloading the recording software then...

Long silence, but good news!

Haven't been updating/working on my personal project for longer then I would have liked to.
There are some personal reasons, but now that the issue is over and done with I can say what's new, what I plan to do and when!

What's new, well finally we have fast internet! Instead of 25kb/s, the speed is now ~8mb/s which is a MASSIVE improvement. (I love it.) This might sound like little news, but the fact is that the computer (Windows 7) downstairs on which I must do my project used to have no internet at all, no idea why, but it simply would not work. Now the issue with that is that I would need to have a laptop or some iOS device with me whenever working because I couldn't check anything or download necessary software. Now that this is fixed, I can freely work downstairs with no issue (the connection still gets disconnected sometimes but hey ho..)

What's coming up;
Wednesday, Friday and the weekend (Sunday at least, I'm away Saturday) will be Personal Project dedicated days (in this week) Meaning that I will start recording every single animation. I have a list of which animations I will need from every character, so now all I have to do is the easiest thing.
I select the movement I want my character to do from a drop-down list
I record the movement
Aaaaand that's it. How simple is that? When all the movements are done, I will open the video editing software, insert background, which I will get from this handy program: http://wowmapview.sourceforge.net/ Then I can simply add the animated character, move him into the place I want him to be (my machinima has no big fight sequences or action filled moments) and then as a last step add the music and voice acting. (MAYBE I'll add subtitles too, as I know that voice acting can often be a pain to viewers...) If however I don't have enough time (I don't know how long this process will take) I will only add subtitles and no voice acting, making this a "musical" piece.
Because however simple it sounds, it's a tedious, time taking process. Ah well.
Also, dear Mr. Rawson when would you be available for a meeting? I'm good on wednesday and thursday and friday... Basically the rest of the week!
A little note aside from personal project; I think I might continue to make machinima when this is done... I just.. like it!


So there's that.. Off to work now!