Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Project 1 - Machinima - Final Product


This is my group's Machinima, "The Wizard of WoW".  We used World of Warcraft, WoW Model Viewer, FRAPS, and Vegas Pro to generate, edit, and render the content of this movie.  We chose to recreate the iconic "Lions, Tigers and Bears" scene from the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.  Co-Created with Paul Stufkosky and Sam Sorensen.

We were all pretty new to this process, but I feel that we've made something pretty funny while still paying tribute to a classic film.  This was our first time working with green screen, and we experienced some hiccups with that process.  Our choice of animating the characters separately over digitally inserted backdrops filmed live from the game led to some significant difficulties, but it also allowed us more freedom in generating characters that were as close to their screen counterparts as possible.

Monday, February 6, 2012

Project 1 - Machinima - Progress Report

For out project, we are recreating the scene where Dorothy and company meet the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.  We are doing an approximately 3-minute segment.



So far we have scouted environments and taken screenshots and preliminary footage with FRAPS.  We are working on getting a program called WoW Model Viewer, which will allow us to composite background and subject independently of each-other.




We are using the area "Stranglethorn" to create our video because of its relative similarity to the forest from The Wizard of Oz.  We have already mapped out where the Lion will emerge from and started matching panning shots to the footage from the film.