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.
