Making movies

Alright, so last night I finally sat down with The Movies and made my first little picture. Since last night was Halloween, I made a little slasher movie. Click the picture below to download the QuickTime. It's about 70MB download so this is a big fat file. I will see about generating a smaller version that's more web-friendly.



The story is wafer-thin and the title is stupid, but it's a slasher movie so both are appropriate for the genre. I mainly made this to start to learn how the game's moviemaking tools work and see how much control I had over the final product. This took about .. oh .. 7 hours or so of work, which involved watching all the tutorials so the next movie should hopefully not take as long. Also, as the "years" progressed in the shooting of the picture, a lot of additional costumes, props and sets were unlocked so I will have more options next time. (Watching the little characters shoot the film on their sets and so forth it is actually kind of amusing.)

There are limitations with the kinds of things you can do. I'm really unhappy with the control of the titles (you basically have almost none), and oftentimes, the kind of story I wanted to tell was hampered by the selection of scenes available. Keeping a consistent lighting and environmental mood was challenging as well (before the monster's first attack in the bathroom, the lighting is "night" and there is no fog. When the main character rushes into the room, the lighting becomes red and the room is full of steam).

However I had the most fun with experimenting with camera moves. Although complex multi-stage movements aren't possible, the game does give you a lot of control over where you put the camera and how it tracks through a given scene. Lots of dramatic possibilites are there for the taking, constrained only by the size of the set really. I was particularly happy with the camera movements up the stairs while the main character was being chased, and the pan and movement while the other girl was stepping out of the bathtub. It takes a bit of experimentation because you can only control initial mark and final mark, and how long the camera has in the scene to make that movement. But it was really fun to play with.

Anyway, enjoy :) I am sure I'll be posting more of these little things.