Machinima difficulties
I believe that the sum total of my group’s machinima for “Raging Bull” came out pretty well. Once we cut down the actual video used and inserted more game clips, it seemed to flow better and genuinely seemed like a more finished product. However, there were many impediments along the way and things that made our machinima not quite as full as we wanted it to be.
One of the first problems is gaining complete control of a video game for the purposes of recording and editing gameplay. We were able to get a decent amount of control out of our game, Fight Night Round 3, but not the true level of control that we had initially sought out to achieve. We were unable to swing the camera around the ring freely, and forget about trying to capture clips of the boxers talking. This really made it difficult to get good shots to use that fit the mood of the scene.
Finding a video game source that would make a great movie scene was also trying. I didn’t want to take the easy way out and just record a bit of one of my games based on a movie, i.e. Reservoir Dogs or a Star Wars game. We tried Dead Rising to recreate a scene from Dawn of the Dead but realized that all of the memorable scenes in that game required multiple playable characters, whereas that game is single player only. Fight Night gave us the control of two characters for a scene comprised of mainly two characters which worked out well. Also, trying to control one of the boxers using a Guitar Hero III controller because I couldn’t find my second XBox controller makes things a bit harder too.
Synching up the audio to fit with the video was also a bit of a nuisance. Editing in Windows Movie Maker was a hassle since you cannot just cut out the parts you want, but rather you need to trim off the beginning or end of a clip. It would be much easier to just remove any bit of audio or video present in a scene. Again, the result came out fine, but after much work in the editing process and bits left in that we had to leave in whether we wanted to or not.
