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Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Sun Jan 07, 2018 6:32 pm

Thread about a project I'm involved with producing a fantasy series - this post for convenience edited to gather all the material we have produced so far.

(Note that unlike in a commercial production where the pilot film usually received most effort and attention, we're actually learning how to do films as we proceed, and so generally the material gets technically better and more interesting story-wise as the series progresses)

First Episode Teaser



First Episode (~ 30 minutes)



(kind of ) Second Episode Teaser



Second Episode (~38 minutes)



Third Episode Teaser




Third Episode (~45 minutes_



Fourth Episode Teaser:



Fifth Episode Teaser:

Last edited by Thorsten on Wed Mar 06, 2019 9:03 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: Making movies

Postby Hooray » Sun Jan 07, 2018 6:56 pm

I do realize that most of this may not really apply to really complex FG aircraft/spacecraft, but I've found the fgtape (flight recorder/instant replay) feature to work remarkably well to reproduce certain situations/sceners, often in conjunction with the route manager flying a pre-defined route in the form of custom/offset waypoints. I suppose if we could gather more feedback like this (tools, best practices etc), that this could help provide a better experience for all parties involved, including those actually promoting fgfs by creating such videos.

Besides, it may not even be that far-fetched to provide some kind of "integrated" UI to gather useful features (and properties/widgets to control them) in a single UI dialog (be that, PUI, Phi, Canvas or whatever else) - for instance, a tabbed dialog could be used to emulate a simple "wizard" interface that could allow people to set up relevant portions of the flight - with widgets included to control existing features like the route manager, autopilot - but also the flight recorder subsystem - probably in conjunction with certain view/rendering settings, and fgcamera in particular.

As you know, the corresopnding PUI/XML dialogs are rather losely coupled, i.e. it would not that difficult to take useful features from existing dialogs (rendering, weather, view, route manager) and come up with a new dialog that is specifically designed for people creating videos.

I did once create such a mashup interface to more easily test Canvas related features, i.e. to access useful features in a more direct fashion, without necessarily having to click through dozens of options.

Image

Just some food for thought obviously ... :D
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Re: Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Fri Feb 16, 2018 9:16 am

In case anyone is wondering why I'm winding down my FG activities somewhat - I'm now involved in producing a full-fledged Fantasy movie. Which is, hands down, incredibly cool - especially that thanks to a broad education in 3d rendering and image processing, it turns out I'm pretty good at video processing techniques and special effects.

Since the project page is now online, here's two teaser still images:

The location - the valley of Gleann an Phéine:

Image

Clíodhna, the main character, casting a banishing spell:

Image

Find details on the project page of Clíodhna - the witch of Gleann an Phéine. :D
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Re: Making movies

Postby D-ECHO » Sat Feb 17, 2018 5:32 pm

Hi Thorsten,
this looks like a really interesting project, I'm curious to see the result!
Keep it up ;)
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Re: Making movies

Postby wlbragg » Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:44 pm

Wow, what fun, I'm up for watching a good fantasy movie!
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Re: Making movies

Postby www2 » Mon Feb 19, 2018 11:43 pm

@Thorsten
First Wow.
Can you tell what is the language is use in the movie?
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Re: Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Tue Feb 20, 2018 7:32 am

We're doing it in German (and the spells in (old-)Irish) - but we know how to do subtitles, so there'll be (at least) English and Finnish subtitle packs.

If at some point we find speakers who produce the sound files, we can probably also do different spoken languages - technically it's not difficult to do, much of the audio editing is done separately anyway - the problem is getting good-quality recordings in the first place.
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Re: Making movies

Postby www2 » Tue Feb 20, 2018 1:17 pm

I have i see some compositing problems with the screen shot of the the village, the houses and other object looks like paste in a bad version of photo shop (think sfx from: "The Langoliers" or "Birdemic: Shock and Terror").
I hope this is only temporary and be fix on release.
BTW: with software are use in the making of this movie?
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Re: Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Tue Feb 20, 2018 4:50 pm

I have i see some compositing problems with the screen shot of the the village, the houses and other object looks like paste in a bad version of photo shop


Merging video streams is considerably harder than pasting objects into a still image. Conversely, stills reveal a lot of flaws which are not prominent in the video stream. You can see compositing jobs in pretty much any cinematic fantasy movie I know if you look at stills. We're good, but we do not have a few hundred thousand dollars for CGI equipment and an art department - one has to be realistic.
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Re: Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Mon Feb 26, 2018 4:36 pm

... and we're online with a first teaser...



Enjoy (and if you like what you see, pass the word around...)!
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Re: Making movies

Postby Octal450 » Mon Feb 26, 2018 5:00 pm

Looks really cool Thorsten. Nice work :)

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Re: Making movies

Postby chriscalef » Mon Feb 26, 2018 5:50 pm

Looking good, Thorsten!

Not to distract from the awesome fantasy movie, but it was cool to run into a thread here about making movies with FG, because I have just spent a weekend re-enabling the FlightGear feed into my own movie making software project ("Megamotion"). Shown here is a very first pass, as you can tell by the lack of any attempt at rotors. :-) Thought some people here might get a kick out of it. Scroll through the rest of the vimeo feed if you're interested in what else is going on. Many thanks to Emmanuel Baranger for the model, all the good folks who made FlightGear possible, and of course Blender for being Blender.



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Re: Making movies

Postby wlbragg » Tue Feb 27, 2018 4:59 am

Gotta go buy me some popcorn! :D
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Re: Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Mon Mar 12, 2018 7:25 pm

Life in the dream factory:

* getting three kids into medieval costumes (no rubber bands or elastic, all have to be tied...) - 10 minutes
* wrapping a foot in cloth (no socks allowed!) and then put it into a medieval shoe - 1 minute per foot
* deciding it's too cold outside and rigging cloaks and coats for the kids - 15 minutes
* driving three kids and a dog to the set, getting everyone out of jackets and to the site - 8 minutes
* getting everyone to goof around while shooting a few clips - 5 minutes
* getting everyone back into the car and driving back home - 5 minutes
* undressing everyone and getting hot chocolate ready - 10 minutes

=> final edited clip used in the movie - 3 seconds
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Re: Making movies

Postby Thorsten » Sat Mar 17, 2018 7:56 pm

Something I woefully underestimated before getting into the details - the soundscape:

Image

This is how a 2:30 minutes (relatively simple) scene is finally composed - that's over 50 different files contributing. The first row contains all the different cuts of the video stream with the sound recorded on the set, the second row the ambience sounds, the third row is the foley layer containing enhanced sound effects to augment what's been recorded on site and the final layer is the spoken voice clips recorded separately, post-processed and moved to the correct stereo position (replacing the voices on set).

It took me a while to figure out how to get precise enough sync between lip movement and the later sound recordings, but now it's okay - and the advantage of the technique is that if we want to run in a different language, all we need to do is record the last row with native speakers and render the project again.
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