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.

Presentation

Me, Phil and Jack just did our presentation. It went pretty well, could've been better but oh well. We kind of left the preperation for it till the last minute so it was our fault.

-Reflection-

As I stated, we weren't properly prepared and left a lot of preperation for this presentation to the last minute. Some of our slides contained huge walls of text as well, we needed to truncate a lot of it into dot points.

Presentations

We were going to have presentations tomorrow but I just got an email from Roger saying he wont be there. This is probably a good thing as ours needs a bit of polish.

So tomorrow will consist of further storyboarding and maybe a bit of research

DIM meeting + A few slides from our storyboard

Today me Jack and Phil had a little meeting with other people in our class who are also doing machinima type projects. Was pretty good because we also participated in creating a 'content map' covering ideas to do with our area of study. Today we have continued with our storyboarding and general thinking about the future of our project. I am thinking about asking Heather Banks if we will be able to use the Macs and Final Cut to edit out final product. Me and Phil did video in years 11 & 12 so all should be good. Here's a sample of some our simple but great slides :D

Opera theme

I thought I'd post about this in my DIM blog rather than my IT one as it's more to do with the sort of stuff DIM is about.

Anyway, I was really bored last night so I decided I would try and make Skin/Theme for the web browser Opera.

So far it's going along pretty well. Here's a screenshot of it in action.

More storyboarding and graphics tablet woo wicked awesome woo!

Today me Phil and Jack did a bit more on our storyboard using Celtx. I used a graphics tablet for the first time today and I'm thinking about getting one, it was good to use and made drawing on Photoshop a lot easier.

Storyboarding

Phil, Jack and I started storyboarding the other day using Celtx. We found this on The Moodle. I think it's a pretty good tool and I recommend it to anyone who wants to do digital storyboarding.

We did about 10 or 12 sections of the storyboard using quick pictures done in MS paint as the visual side of them. It's going a long pretty good and I reckon we'll be getting a lot more work done from now on.

DIM Project Ideas

We have come up with a few ideas, mainly to do with crime and corruption but we are chosing to stick with Phil's idea of making a parody of the TV show Cops.

-Reflection-

This is concerning all previous blog posts. If I were to do this again I would have stopped avoiding work so much and got my act together better. The whole team needed to in my opinion, we would have a lot more done by now if we did.

Finally some proper work

Jack, Phil and I actually managed to get some proper work done in DIM. We have made a final decision to use GTA Vice City as the back bone to our machinima project, installed some mods to assist us in this and created an 'Idea Cloud' to get out story line moving along.

1st DIM Blog

Eh, I'll have to say i haven't really done all that much yet in DIM. I've done all the stuff on the Moodle and been to all but 1 presentation and submitted my proposal but after seeing Dirk's presentation i reckon I'll try again with that one. Phil, Jack and I started to storyboard for our Machinima project we want to do the other day, also might be doing a video with Mark but he wasn't at school so meh, and meh to this blog.