EPISODE 2: ALIENS

[Ross Scott]

Well at long last, here is Episode 2 of Civil Protection. This one is the most ambitious video project I've done yet, having more dialogue and action than Episode 1 and weighing in at 11 minutes. Also, this one deals a lot more with the world from Half-Life 2, but I tried to write this episode so that people who know nothing about the game can still follow it without any trouble. Since this one is fairly huge (100MB), I'm offering a low quality version of it as well, although you're going to miss out on some stuff if you watch that one as you won't get stereo sound, nor be able to tell what's happening in the background. The download links are up on the right.

[Guest]

Definitely better than episode 1, although it could have done with being a little shorter.

[Guest]

This must have taken an insane amount of time to put together. And yes I agree. Better than the first. Also I spent several hours subtitling it.

[Guest]

1st dude: Don't worry, this will be the longest episode for a long time, I wanted to lay down the plot of HL2 for people in this one.

2nd dude: Yes, this did take forever, I try not to think about it. Would you be interested in sharing the subtitle file? I already spent 3.5 hours subtitling the first episode:

http://www.radford.edu/~rscott31/CP01-Friday.sub

I could color-code it and you could give yourself credit for the subtitles inside the file itself (like they do for closed captioning in movies). My contact info is under my profile on the main page.

[Guest]

Some pretty nice things you did with face poser! Very good.

[Guest]

How did you do the voices btw? Record and then add effects?

[Guest]

My god this is the BEST machinima I have ever seen. Love the reference to close encounter.

[Guest]

Thanks for the positive comments! And yeah, The voices are recorded then processed to try and approach that helmet radio sound. I don't make them sound like they do in-game however because that'd make it harder to understand and you can't convey as much vocal range then.

[Guest]

How did you make this? what was everything you used? i wanna make these kinds of movies.

[Guest]

I noticed near the end that you can hear some music from Fallout in the background. Fallout fan maybe?

[Guest]

Man the process is way too long for me to list here, email me if you want more details, but here's the really general overview of what I used:

Cooledit: To record/process voices and sound effects, and add in reverb and music

Virtualdub: To do basic video processing like cropping and for compression. (I may use this in the future for motion blur too).

SourceSDK: To animate everything you see on the screen

Premiere Pro: To do color correction (I still need to get better, but it has a LOT, believe me) and help sync shots and in general a better UI for editing than Virtualdub

- - - - -

Yeah, Fallout is great. While I normally hate turn-based fighting games, I got through Fallout because I love post-apocalyptic stuff and everything about the game was great, especially the Pipboy.

[Guest]

This is incredibly well done. Im fairly new to Machinima but from what ive seen this is one of the best series yet.

If you are willing to show me how to do whatever you need help will I would be more than happy to help.

[Guest]

Thanks for the compliment! Unfortunately you may have JUST MISSED your chance to help me out with the animations since I just an offer from another guy who's keen on helping, so it wouldn't be fair to him since I talked to him first. This doesn't mean I won't be able to use your help in the future however, please contact me (info under my profile) if you want to discuss this further.

[Guest]

Great work - camera angles and storytelling are excellent. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that looks like you've built some entirely new animations (Dave leaving the dumpster) - if so, nice work.

Single best HL2 true-mechanima series.

All the best,

--Reverend Speed

[Guest]

Yeah I wish. If I could create new animations you'd see a lot more stuff happening. The dumpster descent is one of Valve's animations, but I had to hack it up in order to get it to work right. I had to switch between a scripted sequence and a choreographed scene so Dave didn't go straight through the floor.

[Guest]

In which case, I'm almost as impressed! Good cutaway! =)

--Rev

[Guest]

Nice sleight of hand then. If you ever get a chance to write up a 'how to' that'd be fantastic.

[Guest]

Great work! Also, just so you know, you've made front page at digg

You've got some great talent bud!

[Guest]

"Lets say we were ready for them. Then what? We call it the 10 hour war?"

LOL!!! That is funny. You are really creative!

[Guest]

I love this episode, overall the whole series are well done, but this one is especially my favourite.

You have a great sense of humour. Keep making these, please!