We Are 138
Yo everyone. Just a brief update on our comings and goings right now. Front page updates will be sparse until we get a new expansion to pounce all over. On the plus side, we’ve gotten a John Deere™ sponsorship due to the amount of farming we’ve been doing in Solteris, the Throne of Ro.
But for right now, I present to you a gift, these two droids a new Triality movie has been constructed showcasing our aforementioned activities in Solteris, the Throne of Ro.
The movie’s soundtrack is helped along by two bands this time: The original Scumdogs of the Universe GWAR & the merry-time mastermind Andrew WK. We hope you enjoy it.
60 MB .wmv format
Soundtrack:
Hell Intro by GWAR
Take It Off by Andrew WK
A lot of people ask me all kinds of questions about what goes into these movies we put up on our site. So, I figured I’d share some infoz about the process. After all, sharing is caring.
I use Fraps to record everything. To get the variety of footage I need, recording usually starts immediately upon entering the zone for the first time and goes on every night until the video is rendered and uploaded. The more clips/source material I record and have to work with, then the less ‘repetitive’ the movie will feel, which is difficult when you’re limited to a single zone as the movie’s subject. That’s why as much variety in the recorded clips is critical. As an example, pre-processed/sorted/cropped source material (just the raw clips I recorded) for the Solteris movie resulted in nearly 1,000 video clips, totaling nearly 30GB of data:
A lot of those clips are really cool moments that I capture but the majority are just junk; ranging from people just standing around to me waiting for an NPCs to run through an animation and they aren’t behaving to me around to me just accidentally hitting the record button and so on…The idea is to capture something cool and interesting sort of by chance. If you try and make you’re source material ‘cool’ it’ll come out looking staged and boring. I think so anyway. The I open each clip in VirtualDub and comb through them one by one, frame by frame (no exaggeration) in order to condense it down to just the clips I feel will work best in the movie. That whittles the first batch of clips down by about half, but the storage size increases dramatically because of the increased quality and the compression change of the converted clips. Compare this image to the image shown above:
After exporting each clip from VirtualDub and saving them in .avi format, I bring them into Adobe Premiere. Within Premiere, I break them all down into proper categories to make it easier for me to know what I’m grabbing and it really makes it a whole lot easier to mix up the video. Also, this really makes it easier to make sure every landscape, event, NPC, boss, etc. makes it into the movie. Again – variety is crucial! The source material ends up categorized and looking something like this:
After that, I send it out to my team of expert Korean sweatshop animators to put together into the final product. Did I say sweatshops? I meant happyshops. At the happyshops, I’ve heard it’s just a matter of assembling the clips in Premiere over the music in a way that mixes up the visual content and hits those musical cues. Export the final product to a .wmv or whatever format makes you happy and share it with the rest of the world, hoping they like it more than you do because I promise you’ll be sick of your own creation at this point!
