Machinima

CS 3660

Homework 3 (Final Project)

Introduction

This is a team project.  You can have any sized team that you want and that makes sense given the complexity of your final project. The movies should be roughly 10 minutes in length.

Task

Your goal for this assignment is to create a final project movie, that can be shown at the Machinimafest 2010 this year. Each film will be entered into the competition and judged by a panel of experts. They will choose their favorite film. The winning team, besides getting an excellent grade, will receive prizes. We will run the fest like we did last year, which is very similar to how Sundance does it. We will screen each film and then the entire team will go up in the front and answer questions from the audience.

What we want to do is raise the bar with this film. We want all of your movies to be better than all of the movies from last year. We want the jury to be impressed. We want the audience to be impressed. We want you to feel good about what you and your team accomplished. We want you to create something that can be posted on You Tube/machinima.com and get thousands of hits. We want you to create something to add to your personal portfolio that will help you get a good job.

By now, you certainly know that a good film comes from a good story. It is nearly impossible to make a good film from a bad story. So, make sure that you choose wisely. Once you have a good story, the key will be execution. Your goal will be creating machinima that matches the richness and complexity of the story.

Things to consider:

• Fake factory has its cinematic mod, which are high res models of the standard characters. Some of them are amazing. You probably won't be able to change their animations, but you can have MUCH better looking characters. We strongly suggest that you work with these characters if you want the traditional HL2 characters in your movie. Yes, you can edit the textures, but because they are high res, they are much larger. Also, the V10 version pretty much requires a very beefy, 64 bit, computer for the final rendering.
• One way to improve the movies is to add new animations to some of the characters. By adding new animations, you can get them to do things that make sense in your movie instead of using some canned sequence that we have all seen a billion times before. This will take some work, but it should be possible to get any of the current characters into Soft Image and get them animated. We have tutorials that show you how to take an existing character and get it into XSI. Many of your fellow students already know how to model and animate. Use their skills to help you make better looking animation. DO NOT LET EXISTING ANIMATIONS STOP YOU.
• Pay careful attention to your scenes and the props that you use. Make sure that everything looks fantastic from the viewpoint of the camera. Don't waste your time building things that won't be seen by the camera. Focus on just the camera view (like how Hollywood will just build the facade of a building). There are a ton of amazing maps out there (such as waterfalls and other things). Use them. Make the maps RICH and appealing.
• If you are interested in the live action/machinima mixture, by all means go for it. With the Everyday Apocalypse team being successful, we have developed the skills to make it happen. HOWEVER, make sure that the story makes sense. For example, you could imagine a story where a machinima family has a daughter and she brings home the new boyfriend who is a live human. Could be interesting.
• What about making a 3D machinima movie? With 3D being the rage, what about figuring out how to do that? A little research has indicated to us that it should be possible.

Some "different" story ideas that you may not have thought of:

• Romantic comedy - we haven't seen any romantic comedy's done as machinima. Why not? A key in these types of films is to get the audience to care about the characters. If you can pull that off, then the romatic comedy will work.
• Musical - wouldn't that be interesting. Singing and dancing your way to a Machinimafest win.
• Spoof/parody - Saturday Night Live does all kinds of spoofs and parodies. Why not us?
• Serious/political/topical - use Machinima to make a statement about something serious (the environment, the economy, human rights, war, etc.), or politics, or something that is happening today. It would be really hard to do a documentary in machinima, but what could you do to give you the power of a documentary in Machinima?
• Hero stories - Bob's favorite genre are hero stories. You know, where some regular person gets put into an extraordinary situation and how they handle it.
• Traditional genres - horror, action, science fiction, ...

Make sure that you don't violate copyrights and that you use your own music. We want to post these on our uumachinima youtube page.

Process

Mar 11 9am [10 points] - Write up your pitch idea for the film you would like to do. Include the following:

• The pitch itself - the length should be as long as it takes to explain to someone what the story is about and anything you care to say about the idea. This is your chance to sell the idea to the teaching staff and also to your fellow students.
• Name and email addresses of those doing the pitch (a maximum of two people can be pitching each story).
• Estimate of how many people you think that you need to execute the film.
• If you have talked to other students that you think may want to be on your team, list their names.
• Note - Bob will post all of this information on this homework page. Then you can go back and review the pitches for the voting process.

Mar 11 In Class [10 points] - Pitch your story idea to the class. Remember that your pitch can be one or two people per pitch.

Mar 12 (FRIDAY by midnight) [10 points] - Email teach-cs3660@list.eng.utah.edu with your vote for top five pitches in order from number one down to number five. On Saturday, we will decide which movies will be made, assign teams and turn you loose. Note, you can vote as a individual or as a pair or as a threesome or even as an entire four person team if you want (so only one of your team needs to vote). Also, part of this class is learning to work together in teams. Most of the teams have figured that out really well. So, if you want to stick together, then let us know that when you turn in your votes (a team vote indicates that you all want to stay together and have agreed on which movies you would prefer to work on).

Mar 18 In Class [30 points] - Using the handin program (or bring to class) to submit your celtx script file. Make sure that you include in your script the roles that each team member is assigned to do. One of you must be assigned the role of director. The director is in charge of the film and the team. Let us know how you divide the work of the team and the responsibility of the team member. We will send you feedback as soon as possible on the script. Note - if as a team you are having a hard time assigning roles, then discuss this with the teaching staff and they will help you sort it out.

Apr 1 In Class [20 points] - bring your animatic to class to show. Whether you use storyboards or pieces of machinima to create your animatic is up to you. Yes, you need to have the dialog recorded (in rough form is fine). Just like we did for the previous homework.

Apr 8 In Class [20 points] - show your current version of the movie. Replace in the animatic your actual scenes that you have filmed in whatever rough or polished state they may be in.

Apr 15 In Class [20 points] - again, show your current version in class. It should be getting closer by now.

Apr 22 In Class [30 points] - turn in your completed version. The class will critique and the teaching staff will then carefully review the entire film. They will suggest changes and you will have one week to complete them.

Apr 29 Midnight [150 points] - the revised version. This one will be graded by the teaching staff.

(Date/time to be determined) Machinimafest 2010 - come and see your film presented. Invite your friends and family.

NOTE - VERY IMPORTANT WITH REGARD TO GRADING. Each Tuesday (beginning Tuesday Apr 6), we will meet with the director of each team and ask them the following question - for the previous week (which ended in some kind of deadline on Thursday), did anyone not do what they were assigned to do and why. We will then judge the answers and possibly dock points accordingly. For example, if you were given the task to create a particular set or record some dialog or create a faceposer scene and you decided to blow it off and not do it, then you will get zero points for the week. If you did it, but didn't do a very good job (according to the Director) then you will receive somewhere between zero and the maximum points. Remember that this is a 3 credit hour course. So you should be putting in at least 9 hours of work every week for the class. But because you are being judged by what you create and show every Thursday, it isn't enough to just put in your time. You must show tangible results. So, keep that in mind as you work on this final project. No matter what, there won't be enough time to accomplish everything that you want to accomplish. So, make sure that you work steadily throughout the rest of the semester.

Comments

Pitches and Current Votes and FINALLY the TEAMS!!

Animatic reviews by Bob.

Second week reviews by Bob.

Pre-Final version by Bob.