Thursday, April 07, 2011

My turn as Director

We - my machinima buddy and I - started a new project today, one based on a story idea I had. This is the first time I"ve been the editor and director. I made a lot of mistakes but fortunately my buddy was patient while i got the software working. He was trying to be nice when he said my project was ambitious. I'm sure he was thinking...that girl is nuts...gonna crash and burn...but he didn't say it. Thanks!

Anyone in RL will tell you..i am a slow still photograph taker. I like to line things up just so and try different angles and amounts of zoom..all before I take a picture. Maybe why i take so few people pictures in RL...trees and rocks and the sky sit around and wait for me. I digress.

I laid out a list of the scenes I want in my video, in 2 column format. And we started shooting...and my well thought out scenes fell apart. I needed some transitions. Some scenes needed changes to be more logical in the flow of the movie.

I've been trying to pick out places to film. One  was a plaza with an awesome fountain. When I'm places normally, i don't notice things like advertisements and tip jars and store windows. It took time today to lay out the camera angles and think where the actor could move. At the Machinima Monday meeting the other day someone mentioned putting up transparent walls to keep the actors in the shot; now I see what they were saying. It's difficult to explain what you're seeing on your screen to the actors; walls would stop them before they got out of the shot.

Here's some footage i started editing. It's from an early scene. There's no audio yet. Just to give you an idea of what i did today




Mistakes I made today
- filming away..and then noticed i was in the shot in the background
- managed to make the filming window in Snapz not as big as the window of Secondlife
- managed to move the SecondLife window but not the edit window, so i filmed some windows that were under SecondLife...that is really irritating because I got a good shot..and don't think i can trim that line of garbage off the left edge
- filmed things before they were completely rezzed
- realized without an external mic, I can't do voice to give directions to my actors when i have the SecondLife interface turned off
- realized i need to think more about motion...moving the actors, moving the camera.



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