For Those who Have Created Machinima Before

[Zetos Lapier]

Alright, I'm certain that there are at least a hand-full of us who decided to rack our brains over the thought of making a machinima.

 

Then there was even less of us who willingly put in all the man hours to see it go through.

 

Finally there's the very few of us that actually put the machinima up.

 

No, we're not talking about those stupid little garry's mod, slap a person in the face kind of machinima's. I'm talking about the ones where you have actual people taking their time out of the day to put together something big.

 

I myself had done this... 15 actors, needed all of them, but I should've given them a schedule of when they could come on. Have you ever tried to guess where to hide 15 actors on stage? Or how to cover up the blood that they like to leave laying around for your scene because apparently they had itchy trigger fingers.

 

I had a professional camera man, who had actually studied in real life. He made some great cuts for me, was able to steal other peoples work and edit it up to something beautiful.

 

The only problem was, when it came down to the last bit of editing we decided to get the voices. I had been calling voice actors since the beginning nearly 4 weeks earlier. Two replies. Two very tiny children voices.

 

Yes, they did not go through, neither did the machinima in the end, my friend who had done all the editing that far and had one last final cut to make disappeared off the face of the earth.

 

So 4 weeks, nearly 8 hours every day, getting the perfect scene, customizing the perfect animations in blender... Alll for naught.

 

Anyone else with the horror stories of actors? XD

[Lord Sinister]

I have never created a Machinima, but dang, I do feel sorry for you. All that work...

[Ian]

I made a CoD: WaW machinima with my friends as a challenge to some squeakers who made some insultingly stupid videos. We did it on a stormy, summer day in the late afternoon, and finished two hours later. It has poor quality, the story doesn't make much sense, and some things I attempted to re-shoot turned out worse. In the end, we uploaded it, and it is the only true machinima we have made.

[Kirkreng]

I have never tried it, and i probably never will. I am just not funny or original enough to make whole machinima. As for your machinima, whether you put the machinima up or or not. In the end it counts that you had fun MAKING it.

[Alyxx Thorne]

I would love to work on a Machinima, but I don't know what kind of talents I'd have. I'm happy being a groupie for Machinima celebrities.

[Axeldeath]

I would love to work on a Machinima, but I don't know what kind of talents I'd have. I'm happy being a groupie for Machinima celebrities.

[MakoVlazkov]

I once recorded a session of gameplay in a Gmod server, and killed my buddy with a throwing knife, does that count?

[CTN]

I don't have actors horror stories but I can share some of my ordeals.

 

I started brainstorming for two machinima series about 1 year ago. I came up with the concepts and finished the first script in may. Since then, I've been struggling for a few months with bugs and crashes and learning the SDK. I was overwhelmed by the amount of unexplainable problems that occurred and finally gave up when I had found out I couldn't autoextract phonemes. I shelved my projects and would check the forums every few months to find out if any improvements had been made. Finally, I came to the conclusion that things are never going to get any easier and I should put my laziness aside and get to work. So I listened to the old Romanian proverb "Need always teaches you what to do." and manually extracted the phonemes for every line, did the flex animations, asked for help on the forums, recorded every shot and now I'm very close to finishing the first episode. After that I'm gonna work on a website and start the second machinima series, start a topic here about them and see what people have to say about my work. It's hard to be a one man production company but it can be done!

[VerdwaaldOdyssey]

Alright this was just too tempting to pass up, i just created an account just so i can reply this.

 

Right, so my actor horror story starts right after i made my first ever Machinima featuring 15+ actors and a few horrible voice actors, the first film itself was unplanned, but somehow managed being an alright machinima for a first timer. So i wanted to create another, better planned film that featured actual characters, script, pre-planned shots, so on and so forth, i was extremely eager to get it done so i downloaded a script writing software, spent days on it writing away while messaging all the actors who'd helped me with the first film and posted on different forums, asked in the game i was filming on if anyone would like to join me in filming, so i get the script completely written out, each scene separately planned out in my head, all just in time for the filming day I'd told all the actors to attend. Finally on that day on that exact hour I'd planned out, i logged in and got onto the game, created a room, sent the invites and out of the 15+ people I'd hoped would come only an altogether of 4 showed up...

 

In my opinion the hardest part of making machinima is finding trust worthy actors who'll help you make the film, other talents are meaningless just as long as you are there and willing to be patient, then help when possible will without a doubt automatically make you the best actor there.

[Coeus]

Did try this for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory with my clan on there. Uh, the main problem was the fact that they all live on the other side of the world to me. Voice acting was not a problem though, they could do it. Not much of a horror story as it is just trying to be up when they are up and being able to do it. Time thing can be a horror thing i guess.

[Blue]

In my tiddering with SourceSDK I realized a few things: 1, that while a fascinating discipline and just as intriguing as anything I would ever wish to pursue, Level Design and Theory are far more demanding than my current time and interests permit.

2, Choreography of elements in SourceSDK for the purpose of simply watching as opposed to making it playable, doubly so.

 

Personally I have a great deal of interest in making use of the Source Engine to make an entertainment thing, but it most certainly will not be a machinima.