My first Machinima in SL, Link posted.

This is my first attempt at Machinima in SL, although not my last, I had a lot of fun filming and building this project and will certainly be coming with more in the near future.

Notes: I used Fraps to do all my filming and edited the whole piece in Windows Movie Maker, which has a hard time with .avi files, so I had to continuously create sub projects and piece them together. I edited the song in Audacity, and used GIMP on a few scenes. There were some scenes shot that lagged a bit, these were shots I definitely wanted to use, but future projects will take that lag into better consideration. I spent 5 days filming and editing and the locations used were Little China, Dark Refuge, Gotham City, and Pendulum. It is a 5 minute film dubbed with a song. After seing the quality of it on Youtube, which you will see as well, I still have some more work to do, with resolution most importantly, it plays in great quality on my computer, but after uploading into YouTube the quality has suffered a lot.

The Plot: An undercover police officer in China Town witnesses a beautiful woman as well as murder, and his suspicion turns into love for the woman who is the murderer. The end and how it turns out you will see.

Your feedback is most appreciative: Was the plot obvious enough? How was the camerawork? How was the editing? Etc..? Any suggestions??

Song dubbed with the film is Portishead, Wandering Stars.

LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCjKkGH83Qk

A note to AMV Mars, I will be contacting you in the near future as I would like to stream this inworld asap.

Special Thanks to AllieKatt, Windows Movie Maker Forum, This Machinima Forum in the SL forums, Machinima Institute member HVX Silverstar, and Steadie who played the police officer in uniform.

Enjoy the film Sayden Westland

Congrats with your first video!

Oh that was good! And the song was a great choice. I thought it was a bit too dark at times, but that may be due to my monitor.

As for the youtube quality, it surpasses the test videos I have uploaded - and deleted so far, I struggle finding the best settings for youtube. :/

yes, its dark its meant to be a little gothic and dark, but I have to say the uploading process into Youtube made it additionally dark, and when there is any suggesstions on the resolution so that after uploading into Youtube it doesnt crunch it so much would be much appreciated.

Thanks for viewing

You could host it yourself and offer it in full resolution.

YEs it was dark in parts but if it helps, I enjoyed it and at the end i actually gasped at what happened .. this shows it is good as it created an emotion at my end, I really enjoyed it and it left me wanting more Way to go!

Hi Angel, I would love to learn how to host it so as to save on the crunching YouTube resolution, maybe you could post me a link so that I may learn how a I am clueless to such an endeavor, thankyou.

And Thankyou very much to everyone that commented so far, I love the drama in this short film I made, and was really trying to make the viewer capture that drama and feel that emotion..I hope it worked..

Thanks for viewing.. Sayden

LOL... I never said a thing and I got a mention.... even if my name is spelt wrong.... been called worse though.

The problem with the flv wrapper format is its over zealous use of jpg compression, which also increases contrast, hence why it looks dark in some places. flv also uses square pixel settings and reduces the pallet, which is why you see a lot of square pixel blocks appearing when it dithers solid colours.
If everyone used DisplayMate and adjusted their monitors to a shared setting, as film makers using PC monitors and the huge variety of GC's, would never need to worry like RL movie makers dont have to as they use a test pattern for the projectionist.

Windows Movie Maker is 'ok' but can't handle finer adjustments of contrast, saturation, colour balance etc like a dedicated editing suite, it also deals mainly with TV format outputs, which we do not use for computer monitors. Nor can it render the output with controls over pixel size, shape etc. You are basically stuck with 'templated' outputs. None of which are QT friendly, eachtime you convert to different formats, the data reduces quality more and more.

Try using BlipTV or some other host for showing your movies over the internet, their flv settings are better than most. Alternatively, create the best possible version of your movie and upload that to YouCrude paying particular attention to the resolution templates offered, otherwise you will get scaling.

Going to the film itself, its a great production, loved the editing, directing and storyboard. If you do have a avi wrapper format version that can be zipped to less than 100mb (zip compressions are non-destructive), you could email it to me via yousendit (http://www.yousendit.com) I can post produce it for you, either send it back to you for hosting yourself, or would consider hosting and streaming it for you.

Loved it. Will try to keep this short =:3

First, song choice -- thought this was great and fit perfectly. Cast, again great choices -- almost as if it was written for them. Perfect. Costumes, not enough people pay close enough attention. Necessary items on male character, great choices on female. Fitting. Lighting -- Sorry. Read other comments and disagree. Darkness was perfect - in fact, think it should have been intended to be done this way. =:3 Love how facial expressions were captured as well as head and body movements. These were very important Also great selection on the animations and loved the pounce and dances. Won't be able to say enough on the camera work and fx which I also thought was excellent. My one very small issue would be the jumpy camera movement at the beginning when the female character was introduced but dont think it was very important in the whole scheme of things. Also it was way better than Id be able to do. Overall I think this was an excellent job in directing.

The story - Catch the feeling from the music before the picture appears. Opens with a dark look from male character, introduction of female character, he sees her, feels, is pained, can't bring up the gun. She sees him, knows. We watch him falling in love and what's not to love about this very seductive beauty except the obvious of course. =:3 Like how attention is brought to the cuffs toward the end. We know hes gonna arrest her. She chooses not to be and kills him. Tragic. Im a romantic but usually not so easily moved as I was here. Felt a great loss.

Read the explanation on YouTube and dont think it was necessary

Cant even wait to see your next one.

P.S. Alliekatt you looked great.

I have to agree, AllieKatt does look great, she was excellent as well while filming, patient and explorative, was perfect.

Thankyou again for your detailed breakdown, its of course nice to hear after producing the first film, and I will take lot of the same elements in to the next film, which is already underway. I also learned a great deal, and should be able to edit out some of the mistakes I made this first time around.

Again, Thankyou and stay tuned

Sayden

Late response to this, but Im have been working on uploading my next film and cant find, if any, settings for YouTube...is there such, or were you talking about preparing the film for YouTube when you mentioned settings??

Thanks for the feedback

Great Video, but how did you get rid of thet darn Second Life Tool Bar ?

There must be an easy way, be greatful if you share that secret with me.

Excess lemmon.