Art 343 Final

Eric T Franklin

Digital Media 345 Final

Clint Sleeper

Machinima Video Final Project

            For my final project, I want to do a machinima video. I chose machinima because it is a style I am very familiar with and have done in the previous past before I have taken digital media classes. My idea was this:

            " For my final project, I want to do a machinima video. My idea(s) is I want to create an after math of a firefight (a shootout basically.) What I wanted to do is use the games Halo or Call of Duty to film and uses to build the environment for the project. The premise is that a solider (or civilian) will walk through an aftermath of a fire fight. As the person walks through, there will be shot or cut backs to when the fire fight happen. As this happens, the person will be collecting dog tags (possibly cutting to a shots showing how the solider has been killed) and continues on to view the destruction of the after math of the firefight. The location/setting will a small town that was occupied by soldiers of a war. I wanted to go for an anti-war propaganda with irony since the games that are being used are war type/shooter games. Throughout the whole video it will mostly be showing the person/solider just walking through the after math and grabbing all the dog tags and cutting back to the firefight. At the end, the solider/civilian will reach the end of the town and looks back to see what war has done to this small town. Then the camera will pull away from the town and aftermath. (As an alternative ending, the solider get shot by a sniper from a faraway distance). The message /moral would be that war affect everyone no matter how big or small the event maybe."

            The games I had in mind were first person shooters (Examples Halo 3, Halo 4 Halo Reach, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Call of Duty Black Ops, and finally Call of Duty Black Ops 2.) because they are the popular ones and were the ones I had for the Xbox 360.  After trying out certain games that would work with my idea and would be able let me have a lot of creative controls, I decided to go with Call of Duty Black Ops 2 because the game had the map that would work best for my idea and I was able to have full control of the camera which I believed would play a huge part in the project. Along with that, the game had a special game mode called "Killed Confirmed" which along for dog tags to appear after you kill the opposing enemy and you earn point by collecting the dog tags so it was perfect for my project. The map I chose was the map called "Standoff" as it was a small enough town for the project. For the hardware like how  to record my game was I used a Hauppauge 1212 game capture device, and an Xbox 360. One problem I ran into while testing was I could not have placed dead bodies for the video. I had no way of place fake AI dead bodies because the games could not let me. So I asked a few of my friends to help me out with this project since not only when they are killed spawn dog tags, will also be able to produce the dead bodies. The tasked I asked for my friends was to go to certain spots and be killed by me or by the other players. I filmed in game stuff about 2-6 times and about 2 days worth of raw footage.

As seen here I took was able to film a lot. Through my whole filming progress, I had a set route of where to go, what to do and how to react. In the next part , I went to filming again, only this time, I was not stuck in a 1st person view, I was able to control the camera after the game has be played as seen here:

Instead of being stuck in first person view, I was able to go into free camera mode and get certain angles of the shots I want and what need to be focus. I kept doing repeats within the shots till I felt the shot was good or the angle was good. I also wanted to try and make the camera fluidal and smooth. As for the players, I had 3 teams, FBI, American Rangers and Mercenaries. The FBI agent was the one picking up the dog tags from the dead soldiers (American Rangers and Mercenaries). I wanted to make sure the people are identifiable and make sure who was who since I was limited to the game's engine. Next in my editing program, I used Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 since I am familiar with this editing program. I threw in all the video I had filmed and started to cut parts to where the shots I want, where the death sense were, and make the video flow together. Another problem I ran into was since I had a lot of video, editing down to how I wanted the video to run and how much was to be cut was a challenge since I filmed a lot of repeats and different angles of the shots as seen in the picture.

To help with that, I made empty video slots to where the shots I liked, I cut up and moved them up to the empty video slot.

My final produce to my whole project was this:

The huge thing that unfortunately got me was time, I wanted to so much more, but because of time, I had to cut a lot just to meet deadline. Hopefully I'll go back and edit more to make it the project I had envision.

            My final thoughts on this project was I had a lot of fun and I realized that what I did had a lot more than I wasn't expecting, but the whole filming and editing was a blast and I learned from this that timing and pacing is key.