SL Film: The Missing Saloon of Oak Grove

Hi all,

This is my first ever SL Machinima (or any machinima, actually). The tale revolves around the sadly long-term missing saloon in the all-but-forgotten wild west town of Oak Grove. I hope the moles repair it soon - and move the wwhole town to a better area of the sim

The movie: http://headburroantfarm.blip.tv/#1018719

Blog posts about it: http://headburroantfarm.wordpress.com/category/sl-machinima/

HeadBurro Antfarm.
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p.s. Sorry for the cross post into the sticky thread here, but I'm not sure where this should go.

Excellent style.. quite unique.... I liked how you showed the various perspective shots and the way you intro'd the movie, for the most part, we perhaps become obsessed with movement in movies, you showed with this style, that you do not always have to. Look forward to viewing more of your work.

Hi AWR,

Thanks for your kind words. I'm really only starting out filming so a lot of the choices I made in that film were either down to lack of experience. Others were purely because I was working alone as actor and camera man - this reduced the type of camera work availabe to me throughout.

I'm just about to edit together a short "Extras" film and post that to Blip TV - this will show some of the progression to the finished product (as well as some bloopers to show the difficulty in making films in SL). I think it's important to do this to help not only me, but hopefully others learn from my experiments. I've been publishing step-by-step 'lessons leant' on my blog too.

I really have a very log way to go before I can come anywhere near your work on the destroyable prims - the final shootout and car-over-bridge was excellent!

HBA
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This was fun to do - and I hope it helps others learn from my efforts. Here is the link to the Extras! from my film, The Missing Saloon of Oak Grove.

http://blip.tv/file/1021837

Crikey, I couldn't keep all the bloomers I make lol.. I wouldn't have room for the good stuff.

If you currently work alone, why not try using the Joystick FlyCam function in the Advanced Menu. Using a 'joystick, gampad etc' you can move your camera to the place you want to film at, and still use the cursor keys to move your avatar, however, it will be quite a learning curve to move your avatar without a base orientation point of view... but that could be worth filming anyways

Hi - I have the SpaceNavigator all primed and ready to go, but until the FLYCAM text issue is fixed, I don't want to do that.

I know what you mean about moving seperate to my camera, but years of shoot-em-up's have finally paid off and I'm not too shoddy at that part

I probably won't do this for every film, but it will be fun for these early ones just to help me learn

You do have 2 choices, either use the old client, where the flycam text isn't a problem, or use Fraps or HyperCam screen capture programmes. With Fraps, you will have to use the 1/2 screen option, or with HyperCam, you can dynamically select what region of the screen you want to capture, therefore leaving out that small area where the text is

I'd like to keep using the latest RC as it supports my SpaceNavigator whereas the normal viewer doesn't.

It looks from this comment on my blog (http://headburroantfarm.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/sl-machinima-lessons-learnt-3-in-a-series-of-many%e2%80%a6/#comment-1137) and the link to the JIRA in contains that this is soon to be fixed.

Still, a quick question about your FRAPS idea - why would filming half-screen help?

Well half screen selects a region window within the client window creating a void border, hence the flycam text would not be included by default.

Oooo, I assumed that half screen 'shrank' the recorded screen down to half that of the actual screen.