Why Only 25 Threads In Movies & Machinima???

What happened to all the content?!

There was a wealth of information here...and links to lots of great machinima!

Not good.

- Infrared

The more I think about this the more I realize how much we lost. There was information about Filming Path, tips, AWM Mars wrote many very lengthy and informative posts.

If this is the way it's going to be...it's not worth the time posting here if posts are going to get lost or deleted without a single word from whoever is responsible for running this forum.

- Infrared

Go to User CP-> Edit Options->Thread Display Options
and change Default Thread Age Cut Off to show all threads.

I have 566 threads listed in M&M.

Cheers,

skribe

Oh...thank you skribe!

The reason I didn't consider it was an option is that the Resident Answers thread
was not clipped...so the admins must have different defaults set for the cut off.

Again...thank you very much! I am so relieved. =)

- Infrared

It would seem approporate that some threads should have perhaps become sticky. Those that contain useful information, as a 'easily find' reference guide. Machinima is surely one of the most up and coming creative elements in SL.

I feel many talented people here have tried to start one or more, but have simply dropped off the page. The net result is a prolifercation of threads asking questions already fully explained, pushing useful threads to the historic pages and forgotten about.

There will always be personal preferences of how to acheive things, but all in all, there is still a whole raft of fundemental elements that will never change for the foreseeable future.

Rather than spread this thread all over the forum, here is a link to information I posted, to kick this off. I've copied below the content of my post, for those that cannot open the post. /278/95/212641/1.html

This movie is the subject matter.

http://www.wba-advertising.com/antiquity/antiquity3.mov

I should have elaborated more on my first post about what techniques I used in the movie link provided.

Despite the fluid movement, I did not use flycam, I used what is known as the 'Burns Technique', simply put, by taking a large screen footprint movie, I used the pan/crop mask and 'animated' it in its own timeline, movement and crop size are all available in this technique. As it doesn't rely on movements within the platform during capture, the 'movements' are very smooth and predictable as these are rendered by the editing programme. Providing the raw captured data is of a high enough quality, zooming in should not cause pixelations and or fuzzyness.

With the atmospherics used, these mainy consisted of using the right perspective and set lighting conditions within each scene. I then introduced both 'sunlight' and lens flares to enhance the atmosphere. Again using the 'Burns Technique', I was able to animate the masks, morphing them within their own time lines, to manipulate the direction and intensity. In hindsight, the scene with the horse rider, I should have used more keyframes to break the lens flare and intensity as it past through the trees (perhaps later ).
As you can see when the camera emerges from the water and shows the ghost ship, I used the morphing properties in the sun burst and lens flare masks, to introduce the light and increase intensity once the camera was out of the water.

In some scenes, there is a change of lighting showing interactions between textures and light perspective. This is pretty much elementary work within the rendering programme. Taking a series of shots, at different times of the day, midnight, sunrise, noon and sunset and matching each section to the correct size, then overlaying them and gaining a perfect position match.

I am utilising morphing masks using the 'Burns Technique' introducing moving clouds in the skyline. This is acheived by taking footage ingame of actual clouds, and applying a bounding box and chroma keyers to remove the sky, then animating those on layers within the background footage for greater 3d effects. Combined with lighting masks and colour balancing masks, the effects should be potentially better than windlight when combined with spectacular background RL pictures of scenery. This is an ongoing project and wont be available for a while yet.

I have also used in other movies, a Gausian Blur mask. By creating a mask around the foreground subject, inverting it and applying a subtle amount of Gausian Blur, this has the effect of drawing the foreground subjects out of the background, therefore creating depth perspective. The only draw back is the enormous amount of work, morphing the masks in a moving scene, so it is used sparingly.

Another technique I have used in other movies, is the 'snoot mask' or 'bounding' mask, whereby a portion of a scene is encapsulated with a bounding box, which you can change the shape of and the colour, feathering etc. Then by using a solid single colour for the bounded area, use a chroma keyer to remove that surrounding section. Overlay that footage over another underlying layer, will give the impression of a 'thought bubble'. Again this can be morphed using the timelines for different effects.

On the subject of multi-layering and chroma keying. Another movie I completed recently http://www.wba-advertising.com/fetch/fetch2.mov shows how overlaying multiple movies with the background extracted (chroma keying layers), over a solid background, can incorporate a lot of subject matter. There are 5 layers incorporated into that movie, 3 for the models (although only 2 models were used in the shoot), the solid logo background and the text. I have experiemented using morphing masks and prerendered sets of movies, and can acheive over 20 layers in a single move. The drawback is that it is very time consuming and alignment has to be precise, along with keyframe timings.

The application of masks and bounding boxes, can acheive excellent results even with a simple subject matter as shown in this movie http://www.wba-advertising.com/kaliko/kalico4.mov (no music version) or http://www.wba-advertising.com/kaliko/kalico4a_mp4.mov (with music). For the camera viewer shots, I created a simple animated gif for the viewer frame, and animated the REC section. The viewer portion is a simple alpha layer. The gif was applied over the main footage to create the illusion of actually seeing through the eye peice.

Enjoy.

BTW, I have included the source media for you can load the url into QuickTime direct, so there are no browser issues. However by loading and viewing the media, you are not permitted to alter, amend, copy, or show this work on any internet source of any kind other than to personally view the contents. It is protected by copyright laws. All the media supplied and hosted by WBA-Advertising is scanned throughly and to our knowledge, contains no maleware. Media shown within SL is from a seperate source hosted on secure servers not linked in anyway to internet hosted links.

Machinima is a very niche market. It is very time consuming creating a film in SL or RL.

www.machinima.com