Epilogue

So I’ve handed in an export of my film in it’s current-ish state. After trying for two days straight to render the whole thing at its current stage in development, I had to resort to creating the film that I handed in by combining previous exports mixed with the latest audio track.

It’s by no way finished but represents how thing’s are going. I just recently finished creating a building exploding at the end of the segment that I handed in, but not a single computer or mac will render this film in less than about 15 hours.

In the video that I handed in, I had to rush it because of the rendering problems that I mentioned. There are quite bad audio sync and volume issues and the dynamic background in the first fighting scene. I shall put on my blog a more improved version of this video once I find a NASA computer to export it on.

 

 

 

Progress

So I’m aiming to finish editing tomorrow, after I’ve recorded all dialogue and edited it into the film. On thursday I’ll be spending the entire day rendering the film, and then handing it in on friday.

My initial plans of actually finishing the film haven’t been met, but I’m close. I’m happy with what I’ve achieved for my FMP and will give myself a long break before resuming and completing this film.

 

The day of the deadline!

So it’s the day of the deadline. I don’t have any more full weeks until college closes of editing. I have however been having trouble exporting my film. I set up the export at 1pm yesterday, and by 9pm, when I was being kicked out of college, it was only at 70% done. This film takes longer to export than I’m actually allowed an edit suite for. So I tried exporting it on my laptop through the night. That was hopeless – by morning it had done 2%. So I have 4 hours to render before the deadline, and it looks like I’ll be forced to pick a lower quality than 1080p, which is quite a painful decision for me.

Homage to my past

In this film, there are two main characters present: they are named; Ben of the Dark, and Ben of the Day (a convenient and easy extension of my actual name). These characters aren’t just creations I’ve come up with for this film, they’re been around since I was 16, and I was creating them in different ways even before that. I made a film completely by myself in the summer holidays connecting the end of school to my first year of college back in 2010, this film was later called Ben of the Dark. 

I admit that it’s premise isn’t ridiculously innovative or original, but it’s a film where I fight my inner darkness in a physical form. I released two parts to this film on Youtube, and was working on the third until my laptop at the time died and the film was unsavable and unfinishable. I believe I had completed scripts ready for about 6 parts. I still have the first few minutes of the third part, as well as a lot of scattered post-effect heavy shots which involve a lot of combat. Below is a short video I made that compares elements and attacks of the current state of my Versus film to the Ben of the Dark series.

Versus – Old VS New

So with this sequel to my first live action fighter film, there are many things I intended to improve on. The first film was made mostly on Sony Vegas, and After Effects was used briefly for lens flares and the tracking of them. The second film will be entirely Premiere and After Effects based.

The first film uses a picture from google as the background. The second film will use a fully animated background that I shot myself, as well as dynamic damage to it from the foreground action. The pace will also be increased.

Upon looking at gameplay of actual games of this genre, I’ve noticed that right before a hit is landed, everything freezes for about half a second or less.  This creates a very good sense of damage and I would like to include this in my film. I have already experimented with it but due to the quantity of hits, the pauses in video add up to too much audio lag. I will try and work a way around it.

I’ve also been looking back at the blog I created for the first film, to see if there’s anything else to improve on. Here is a link to it, it includes plenty of research and blogging:

http://bkdfmp.tumblr.com/

Versus progress

So following too many months of locking myself in an editing suite for 9 hour days, I feel like I’ve spent more time looking at a frozen screen than I have actually editing. But as of now, I’m happy with what I’ve made. I’ve been looking at other work on the internet that is similar to mine and comparing effects and styles. I’m now trying to find tutorials for greater After Effects effects that will make the video more flashy.

The sound levels are far too high but I’ve recently settled on a sound effect for the punches. The sound is actually edited differently for both characters.

I’m often finding errors within Premiere and AE that cause my progress to make one step forward, two steps back. Recently, days have been spent purely to recover errors that have occurred in the programs, usually regarding the many plug-ins.

I have a word file in the project folder that specifies certain effects or elements that are turned off during editing, which need to be turned back on for rendering. It’s impossible to edit with these elements/effects turned on.

Final Major Project Proposal

I propose that my FMP is a four minute video unlike anything anyone has made before. A film that doesn’t follow a narrative, but instead expresses the extent of my skills in editing. At a glance, this film looks like a video game, but at closer inspection, you realise that this isn’t Street Fighter, but infact a 2D live action brawler with actors. The film will be polished and perfected to the peak of recreating the video game genre that it plays homage to. I hope that this film will widen my knowledge of Adobe After Effects. The key areas of my research will be gathered from such video games that are of this genre. My time will be utilized by spending the entirety of days in editing suits editing away.

A film that lives in the void between video games and film.

I will be fulfilling every roll in this production, aside from camera assistance and an extra actor. I shall be researching into video games of this style to get the appropriate style and I would like the assistance of an animation student for a visual effect to go over some of the movements. 

VERSUS – THE SEQUEL

Unused test shots

PASSWORD: Versus

This is just a few example shots (ironically longer than the film itself that I handed in) that I rendered throughout the course of editing the film.
They will be in the finished film in the form of characters motion, combat, or super moves. Some shots have been edited more than others. Here is a screenshot of how it was edited. The clips were segregated into their own sections and named according to what the action is and which character is doing it. In these test shots, that text is still present on the screen.

Versus 2 – Evaluation

Upon first hearing about the brief of expressing what I am about, I knew immediately that my area was editing, and I would like to once again challenge myself to create a more complicated edit than anything I’ve ever made. I do however realise now that I had jumped in the deep end, and the finished film will take me a rather long time to complete. For now, the finished product that I can hand in will be an unfortunately short trailer of the finished film.

My intentions for this film are to show my skills in editing that never fail for people to ask “Wow, how did you do that?”. I wish to do the third year and will be continuing this film throughout it if it takes that long. I will then use this film as an example for whenever I require some kind of show-real of my skills. My original intentions were to be a director, but I’ve realised I don’t have the gift of making people do what I say on set, so I’ll advance my skills as an editor.

The film itself is a sequel to a film I challenged myself to make for a final major project in the past. The original 2D video game style fighter homage was filmed in one day with a DV cam against a poor greenscreen that cut off everything below the ankles,  and my editing skills could only add a still image for the background of the fight. I briefly used After Effects purely for lens flare effects.

On the current film that I’ll be working on until it’s fully finished, all footage was filmed on either a canon 550D or 600D. The greenscreen shots were all filmed on the professional greenscreen in college. As I am fighting myself in this film, there are three different costume changes involved. Two for the different characters and then one extra costume chance for the video game style evolved special ‘rage’ mode of one of the fighters where their clothes change on purpose. The filming of the green screen was done over five different days. Towards the end of the recording it was just a matter of re-filming footage that didn’t look as good. Each day of recording involved jumping, running and shouting, over and over again. During my second day of recording, I must have worked a bit too hard as I spent my night in hospital due to some kind of pain that never occurred again.

The script I wrote is similar to that of the first Versus film I made, where the characters have their abilities and attacks laid out in an order that assists with filming and editing. The pacing and narrative, or lack of, was created entirely through editing in the first film. The difference with this latest film is that the narrative is planned out through the script before the edit. Scenes and location changes are planned out down to the second of the soundtrack. As well as filming abilities and attacks of the characters, I have filmed scripted moments that are outside of these moves. The first 12 seconds of the fighting for example, is all scripted. This is the only section of fighting that is shown in the trailer, as I’m still working on how the actual combat will look. I’m determined to succeed beyond the combat of the first film.

The last scenes that I had to record were the backdrops for the fight. Thanks to the pre-compositions of After Effects that I didn’t have available to me in Sony Vegas (Which I used on the first film), the backgrounds can be animated and fully changeable. For example, in the film, an energy ball is deflected towards Drake Circus’ car park. It blows a massive shockwave and hole into the wall where rubble is shown falling to the road. It all happens very quick, as the entire battle will be. I created the hole in the carpark in Adobe Photoshop and masked it into the backdrop of the film at the right moment. A more missable change to the backdrop are the skid marks across the ground towards the beginning of the fighting. The final film will be full of these moments as the backdrops get destroyed over time.

As a homage to the first film, the final version of this will feature a remix of the song I used in the first film. It will come in towards the end of the film with a surprise ending.

I knew from the beginning of this project that I was pushing myself greatly, but I always like to. I’m disappointed that I can’t hand in a three minute fight scene like I originally thought – I had faced so many problems throughout making this film. For example, the metal arm that Connor wore ended up reflecting the greenscreen so much that I was forced to cover his arm with a lens flare. The main problems with editing I found were that my home laptop became completely incapable of using to edit on as the project file grew more complicated. My only available option was to use an editing suite in college with my external harddrive. After spending full days and nights at home editing, I was then spending full days in college editing, as well as finding and installing the three plug-ins that my film relies on.  An entire day was wasted trying to export a portion of the video so I could put it into Sony Vegas to do the sound design. I was faced all day with this error…

I then later discovered at home after some research that all I needed to was have the Premiere project file on my local harddrive instead of inside the project folder on the external HDD. An entire day trying was wasted because of this.

During the group screening, I was facing even more pretty bad technical problems – problems that made the class wait about an hour for my film to export, which it did eventually. The only problem was that a watermark occurred every few seconds from one of the plug-ins, and a lot of the sound effects including the main soundtrack had failed to render into the video. I was forced to show it to the class by dragging the video into Premiere and playing the exported video along side the unrendered sound effects from Premiere at the same time. A mistake I made was that I showed it to the class with a still non moving background image for the fight which I was using for the sake of editing, to suppress the lag. I forgot to change the background to the moving video before I exported. Luckily the final video that I have handed in has no mistakes.

So, here are some comparative screenshots of the journey that the film has taken so far.

Here is the original footage

Here is the footage edited with simulated smoke created from a single image duplicated dozens of times with an added Wiggle command in After Effects. Full effects and animations have been added to the sword. I hadn’t begun filming locations yet so as a test background, I was using an image I captured from Google Maps.

Here is the completely finished and graded version of the film with individual background videos for each angle that I filmed myself.

The merge between video games and film

To collaborate my 2D Live action fighter film, I’ve been examining the recent merges with film and video games. While making the predecessor to this movie, I researched fight scenes in movies, but I don’t feel like it’s as relevant as I’d have liked. There’s a link to this in the blog address that I posted below a few posts.

As for the topic of video games and movies, I believe that the first step in the cycle was from video game movie adaptations. The first movie adaptation of a video game ever made was ‘Super Mario Bros: Peach-Hime Kyushutsu Dai Sakusen!’. A Japanese anime movie released in 1986. After a few years that included many animated Pokemon movies, the Super Mario Bros later saw a live action western movie in 1993.

In our modern times, nearly every popular video game series has been or is getting a movie counterpart, or a series of movies in the case of Resident Evil. Tomb Raider got itself two movies, and now is in pre-production for a reboot of the series, shortly after the video game universe rebooted itself lately.

So you can take my word for it that there are more than many film adaptations of video games, but how do they work as movies? Do they include the boss battles, or how about the health packs and game overs?

I think when it comes to Hollywood; the movies they create of video games can be watched with absolutely no knowledge of the video games existence. This way they can appeal to much wider audiences, as well as finding a good script writer and director that have actually played the games may be tedious. The movies are just like any other action movie, though I can’t think of a single video game adaptation that isn’t an action movie, or a racing one.

The Resident Evil movies are interesting because it started out being it’s own movie universe with its own characters, but by the third or fourth film, it had introduced a few main characters from the latest games, as well as the main antagonist of the movies is the previous villain who has actually already died in the game universe, and strangely enough dies in a completely different way in one of the movies. The latest Resident Evil movie is also quite questionable as it has more aspects of the video games than just the characters. It involves boss fights, and arena style areas for the bosses to be killed before they can move onto the next area – Just like a game.

And then we look at the reverse, video games trying to be movies. There has always been a slight element of this present in games with the cutscenes. ‘cutscene’ is the terminology used for the parts of a video game where the control is removed from the player and they are simply shown a video of the characters progressing the story themselves for a short time. This gets even more complicated however, as cutscenes have lately been on the decrease, with many game developers favouring the approach of never taking the control away from the player at all. This can involve the player wandering around a room controlling a silent ‘invisible’ character while all of the non-playable characters talk amongst themselves and are oblivious to you (the player) jumping on top of their heads and on tables.

The other approach developers have been taking with cut scenes lately are interactive ones, usually something called ‘quick time events’. These are fast action orientated scenes where a button prompt for the controller is shown on screen and the player has a mere second to press that button in time to ensure a positive outcome of the cutscene and allow the story to progress.

Some games are unfavoured due to being referred to as far too close to a movie for a video game. The video games from the company Quantic Dream are often spoken of like this. Three of their games; Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, and Beyond: Two Souls all have an equally (if not more so throughout the games) climatic movie like gameplay style. To sum it up without going into detail about the gameplay, if people watch you playing these games, they often think it’s a movie.

Over a year ago, I made a film that parodies the video game ‘Heavy Rain’, due to it already being like a movie. It was well received by the internet, and to those who are familiar with the game, the likeness is definitely there.