Video Games are an emerging medium right now. We’ve all seen what happens when we add a little real life to vieogames– we call the results “Machinima” (Or, y’know, “that funny Halo clip on Youtube”). But what happens if it goes from the other end, when you add a little bit of video games to reality?
A link to my original thesis on the project: https://projectxa3.wordpress.com/2015/09/08/thesis-1-0/
Did further work on Premiere for evening scene, adding audio from the game Half Life 1. Program crashed. Recovered program, after moving file containing the sound clips used from the desktop to the project folder. Program was unable to re-find audio clips. Tried to re-import source folder for the audio clips, program ground to a halt. Will re-do work on Thursday. Also attempted glitch effect in AfterEffects. Video I chose to use had a watermark on Youtube and a $13 price point on the source, so that’s out. Search for alternatives yielded many tutorials, few source clips. Currently considering having it stand without the glitch distortions. It’s more of a “technological”-feel effect, less “video game”-feel, after all. Need to reevaluate whether it’s there because it serves the video or because I just think it’d be cool. Feel like it’s probably the latter.
The next step is to add the glitch effects and then finish it off in Premiere.
Final prep, set Evening scene to render for the first time. I have an idea to first render it out, add distortion in After Effects (probably a displacement map) and then take the result of that and put it back into Premiere, replacing the original video source’s place in the timeline in order to have the UI elements stay stable-ish in the final video. Then I’ll render it again in Premiere and that’ll be the final cut of that scene, I think.
Added and refined error texts, added minor effects.
Wrote status error popups for bedtime section, arranged about half of them on the timeline. Will fine-tune arrangement and effects.
Watched footage of first-person footage created in a videogame, specifically Grand Theft Auto 5. Useful.
WEEK 7
Oct 7-8: look into getting camera from library
Oct 10: Get velcro tape, construct hat-cam., conduct tests.
Oct 11: Film go-to-bed scene with hatcam, tests permitting.
WEEK 8
Oct 12: Re-d0 wakeup shot Finish HUD test-rig.
Oct 13: Get velcro tape?
Oct 14: CONSTRUCT THE HATCAM
Oct 15: Get velcro tape? Make hatrig.
yeah.
Oct 16: Redo wakeup shot in new HD cam.
WEEK 9
> Cull Selections
> Aftereffects Tutorials
WEEK 10
>Finalize wake-up scene (HUD, etc)
-My first finding is a recording of what is considered to be the first Machinima film created, “Diary of a Camper”:
A fascinating watch– it’s really quite good, especially for something so old.
-I’ve got a pair of Spy Gear camera glasses for my first-person filming. Quality’s worse than I’d hope but better than I’d fear. The mic is absolute garbage, but that might actually be a good thing. Means I can junk the internal audio and rerecord whatever I want or need for my project without having to worry about whether I’m losing something useful. Because I’m not.
-I’ve tested the recorder specs a few times now. Secondary findings are that they just plain do not do anything useful at night.
-“Machinima”, as defined and separate from other mediums, is specifically when you not only record something in a game engine, but also add some form of narrative to it. Red vs Blue is machinima, straight game walkthroughs are not. I think Let’s Plays are somewhere on the fence.
Reading the book, they mention an old machnima on black French people called “The French Democracy” talking about how it’s subversive by its media, in having to use stock character models as more or less cardboard cutouts of people being like how these people are marginalized and similar use of having to substitute the New York Subway for the Paris Metro. That all makes sense. It’s when they start going on about that old chestnut of “it looks like it’s moving but it’s made of pixels that aren’t moving” thing, which is apparently in this usage about how these people have no social mobility or something that I begin to smell something a bit. I’ve been making essays like that for six or eight years now, and I know reaching for a word count and grasping at meaning when I see them.
difference between plot and narrative
PLOT
sequential, causal
NARRATIVE
Over the last ten years, there has been an explosion of media utilizing video game footage, known as “machinima”, across the internet. These videos range from simple recordings of gameplay footage with voiceover from the player(s) for instructional or entertainment purposes, to people combining videogame footage with scripted plots and “choreography” of sorts, depending on the game.
At the same time, the video game industry is in the middle of a surge of games that feature a first-person perspective and a core mechanic of simple exploration in an environment to provide engagement in an experience, pushing immersion in the experience to new heights.
From these phenomenon, I intend to explore the common space in the overlap between these two phenomenon that is the immersion in a media, and the overlap between videogames and the real world.
This is all a somewhat longform way of saying that between the people over at Extra Credits talking about video games and immersion and their affect on the real world and stuff (seriously, go check ’em out, they’re great!) and my preexisting love of both Videogames and Machinima, I generally have me some thoughts about this sort of stuff on a daily basis. The thought in this specific experiment is something along the lines of “Hey, machinima is what happens when you stick real life in a video game, right? How about instead if you went the other way around and stuck the chocolate in the peanut butter instead?”
The idea behind this one is about how everyone tells you to grow up and be an adult but there’s so little specific instruction there is on actually being an adult– I was taught four different times in school about the american revolution, but how to “balance a checkbook” (did I pronounce that right?) was only gone over once during high school, almost in passing. Another part of it is that personally, I find that I’m often told to do more, take initiative, be proactive, but when I actually do something entirely of my own volition, it’s usually met with a chorus of “What are you DOING you idiot?!?”, in spirit if not in action. Thus, when you start, you’re given an objective–“Go Forward”– but not really told how to do so. Is “forward” up? Right? Left? It’s not down, is it? You sit and try various directions, but you can’t tell if any of them are right, and eventually you’re told that you messed up too much and now your life is ruined because of it.
Moving forward, the next steps in refining this piece would be having unmarked areas of the space you’re moving around in that would trigger popups of text that would say things like “No, not that way!” or “Go the other way, then do the thing when you get there! It’s simple” or “Why can’t you just do it right??” that would fade away after a few seconds–there’s plenty of instructions given, but not much actual guidance.
Once that is accomplished, the only other improvement would be for the You Messed Up screen/message to come up after a random number of instances of the ‘instruction’ popups rather than after a set amount of time, and adding a manual “restart” button to it instead of it just automatically looping back to the beginning.
Note from the future: the space below is supposed to have an embed of the interactive flash file I created for the project. Unfortunately, it was hosting from a university database that has since deleted my files and user after graduating two years ago. I will be looking for backups and somewhere to host them presently.
<html>http://www.personal.psu.edu/wlb5068/keyflashB.swf</html>
For the movement controls, I actually followed a guide on the Newgrounds.com forums, found here: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/700462
ProjectHub 