Voice Acting and Presentation Prep'

Yesterday, Phil, Jack and I did some voice acting for our machinima. We used one of the Macs in the video lab and the program Garage Band to do our recordings. We did the voices for all characters with speaking parts in the machinima so we'll see how that turns out today when we cut it up and put it on our video. I think the audio may be a bit quiet so we may have to turn it up a bit in either Garage Band or Final Cut and hopefully it doesn't generate too much static otherwise we might have to record again and I don't think we have the time for that.

Today we're working on getting all the audio cut up and placed into the video. We have our final presentation today also, Phil is working on our slide show presentation at the moment. Hopefully it all goes well.

Recent DIM Progress

Phil, Jack and I have made quite a lot of progress recently with our DIM project, especially last week. We got many scenes recorded with the help of Dimmie and Dangles, and our Vice City MP server. Being able to control 3 characters has made the job so much easier, if only we could have used a few more computers! I'll take some screenshots of what we've done and upload them hopefully tomorrow night.

I really should do my proposal, hopefully it's not too late. The anxiety problems I was having distracted me quite a bit from school work and I just ignored it but I'm better now so I don't really have any excuses apart from being lazy. Oh well.

Back Into DIM

It was the first lesson of DIM today since being on holidays. As soon as we got into the SIM lab to get recording we were met with problems, there was something wrong with the switch, preventing the mulitplayer client from communicating with the server properly. I have no idea what was actually wrong with the switch but I turned it off and back on and it didn't work, only after I unplugged and replugged the ethernet cables a few times did it decide to work. 
We managed to get nearly 2 more scenes recorded today, it may not seem like a lot, but it takes longer than you would expect. 

-Reflection-

We've had this problem with the switch a couple of times now. I don't know why, there is nothing apparent as to why it is happening and it seems a simple restart fixes it most of the time. The problem is nothing too dramatic so I don't think it justifies us doing anything different.

GTA Machinima Update

Phil, Jack and I got a few scenes into the recording of our project. As I said in my IT blog, Jack, Aidan and I got VC MP up and running, which will make the recording a hell of a lot easier. We just need to figure out how to remove the server messages from the screen so they're not in shot.

Phil, Jack and I went to start the "filming" part of our project the other day but we came across a few problems. We were missing a skin that we thought we needed and we needed WinRAR and CeltX. We are going to be using a police skin for Tommy in our project. When we finally got one it turned out the skin was shit and it hadn't been mapped to the character properly so Phil and Jack went to find another one. They couldn't find another, then, all of a sudden Dangles came up with the idea of downloading a completed game save because there is a police uniform in the game that you can unlock. Genius.

-Reflection-

Again, a lot more organization was needed. Especially concerning the skin as it took a while to find a police one in the first place.

Screenplay and Character Development

Phil, Jack and I have been working on a screenplay for our machinima using Celtx.

The picture shows part of it for the first 4 scenes displaying things such as sound, music and dialog. It isn't finished yet and we are currently working on it.

Today Jack also started with some character development, giving the characters some history and a just reason as to why our main character can't swim.

Storyboard finished. Close enough anyway.

Today Phil, Jack and I finished the storyboard for our GTA Vice City machinima. Well close enough anyway, maybe a few minor adjustments and it will be done. 

The next step will probably be to add a more detailed script to it also using Celtx. It will be a vast improvement over our current script that if you were to represent it with the word SCRIPT it would look like this S.....

Roger was also looking into the idea of being able to export the storyboard as a .PDF to upload here, if it's not possible we'll just have to scan some print outs or take a few more screen shots.

-Reflection-

I don't know if I would change much about the storyboard. Overall I'm happy with it.