Fireguy789s Blog Thingy

Todays Lemons and Stuff

2011-09-11T15:52:00.003+01:00

Right guys, after no interesting posts in ages, and no Making Of's for G.O.D and H.O.C, I think I'll post something people might actually care about instead of me making posts to show im not dead. So without further ado, im working on a new short film. Yep, thats right, I am working on a short film to fill the gap between Cartao and my next big project, in fact, theres a possibility of another short film following this one. Heres a picture of the under-construction set!

Most people (if any) who are reading this, will probably think: "WTF is that? thats not Star Wars!". Truth is, your right. Its not Star Wars, suck it. Those who follow my Flickr uploads will know exactly what it is, as I uploaded a photo of the prototype version of this set there a while back in August. This is a larger version of the set to film a 1-2 minute short film/extended test on. As to what it is, allow me to explain.

No, it is not WW2, I will never make a Lego WW2 film. Ever. The set is actually a WIP Lego WW1 trench for a film I hope to begin filming work on next weekend. WW1 seems to be rather underrated in the brickfilming community (and the real filmmaking community for that matter) and Ive had a growing interest in it for quite a while now. One day, upon realising the lack of Lego WW1 videos, I decided I should one day make one myself, thus, this project was born.

I am not stopping Star Wars, if anything this is probably going to be the only WW1 film I EVER make. My next 3 planned films on the line are all Star Wars, and I have much larger things in store for those. This is just a quick break from my usual material which will also require me to expand my boundaries of animation experience. Anyway, hope you guys aren't pissed at me, g'day :D

Sorry for inactivity on here.

2011-08-18T15:15:00.000+01:00

I promise you guys when Cartao comes out, im going to write a big hefty making of for you all with all the details and I will continue to be more active with my posting, I am more than aware this blog is practically dead lol.

Sorreh/Holidayz

2011-02-18T18:14:00.003Z

Sorry for a lack of posts, more will be coming soon. I will be writing an article on the making of my new short film thats coming out soon and I will be writing a sort of rant article on the Clone Wars sometime. Anyway, just posting this mainly to alert all yeh guys more stuff is coming and Ive got mah holidays now :)

So, stay tuned, heres a preview for anyone that cares...

The Making Of: Lego Star Wars- Disruption On Manda

2010-10-11T17:59:00.015+01:00

Alright, this film is not my best work and I honestly dont like it very much, but due to the good feedback I have been getting, I decided to write a making of article for the film and hopefully write more making of articles in the future. So, Lets get started.

1. The Script

I wrote 3 versions of the script. The excerpt above (which contains a lol fail mistake :P) is from the final version which I actually used. The first version of the film was slightly hard to follow but followed the same scenes and played out in a similar way to the final one. However the dialog was longer and harder to understand, when I read through it I saw I needed to correct a lot, and thus began version 2.

Version 2 of the script featured a few scenes which where removed from the final draft. I had a scene in which the separatist ship maneuvered over the republic one and dropped several boarding pods onto it. Which was then followed by a battle on board the republic ship. However, this scene was removed from the final for 2 reasons...
1. Lack of time to film the complex scene and lack of bricks to build the sets for it.
2. It being plain useless and having no explanation to how it ended later on, it was basically a useless time lengthener.
Another scene i removed was of the droids and that pilot dude going onto a landing transport after the first opening scene and landing on Manda. A later scene depicted them obtaining the file from the library and marching off to return to their transport. These two scenes where cut due to uselessness and once again a lack of bricks. I was also unsure how to build the library set.

Version 3 was the final, where I fine tuned the dialog, deleted some useless scenes (as explained above) and slipped in some extra movement and animation. This pretty much sums up the script. Next came the filming.

2. The Filming

The filming is the main part of any stop motion, and its also the most time consuming for me. I started on a late friday afternoon for this film. With the set already built and the figures/characters gathered together. I began filming and continued to work non-stop. The filming continued over the course of a few days and I finally finished all of it.

I personally wasn't to pleased with any sets in this film except the set for onboard the separatist battleship. It was the only one I feel I really used a variety of pieces for, it was also the easiest to film on. The space port set was the largest and the majority of what I built wasn't visible, which is a shame because I built a nice little refueling station on the opposite end but it never appeared on film. The space port was also hardest to film on due to the ships and crates lying about, which I had to try not to knock during film.

In fact, at one point I did knock the crates, but I dont think anybody has noticed it yet :P lets hope it stays that way for a while.
Most of the talking scenes where a huge drab and where kinda boring to animate due to just large amounts of still photo taking and small arm movements, but the scenes with talking are critical to the plot, so it was a necessary effort.

The battle scenes where more enjoyable to do and at first i thought they where kind of crappy when I put the photos into video clips. But after assembling them to view the battle as a whole I liked it a bit more. And, last but not least, we have the scene in which the captain launches the enemy fighter/shuttle into the enemy battleship. I hate this scene a lot, it was rushed and I can asee the light flicker, If I had time to redo it and had not dismantled the set, I would have redone it. But alas that was not possible and so the scenes now had to be in the film.

However, other peoples opinions on the scene where different and people said all the scenes where good and no problems where noticeable, so I guess thats good :)

3. The Special Effects

The longest, most annoying and painful process in the entire film I did, was definitely the special effects. Not only was it horribly time consuming, it also got very, very boring after a while. Most of the battle scene was laden with effects and these took me a lot of time to complete. There was one shot (the one with all the droids firing rapidly) that had over 600 emitters on it, that took me 2 and a half hours to edit. When I finally finished the SFX, I was relieved and felt like I had just run some kind of huge marathon and won. That is literally how good I felt after doing all of those damn lasers and sparks.

4. The CGI

The CGI was very time consuming and took a lot of time, but still no where near as long as those damned SFX. But I finished the CGI scenes on a better note and just cut straight into the next bit of the film process. CGI was, after all, the last thing I had to do before the final stage. I want to give a special shout out to halowars91 for kindly taking the time and effort to construct the victory class CGI model I used, it would be much appreciated if you checked out some of his cool videos (hes pretty talented) and subscribed. He could use the support and i think hes horribly underrated for someone of his skill level, hes a lot better than me.

Heres his YT channel link: http://www.youtube.com/user/halowars91

5. The Editing

I felt pretty damn happy when I finally got to the editing, with all my footage edited and ready, I jumped right into it, and did it in a few hours. The first thing I did was all the voices, which went in perfectly with the footage and the characters. My voice was slightly echoey and annoying due to me recording in a large room with a high ceiling (believe me, I will never, ever, record in a large room again). Reviloford, Gamemaster905, Falamfalafilms and Supremedalekdunn all did fantastic jobs on their lines and I really liked them. So thanks to them :D

Anywayz, so when I finished adding in the voices, I started with all the sound effects, the sound effects where fairly simple on most of the scenes, just a few beeps and ambient sounds and they where done. But when I got to the battle scene I almost face palmed myself. I worked for 2 whole hours on the sounds for the battle scene, and by the end of that time i couldn't stand the sound of lasers anymore. I was quick to render it and drop it into the final project.

The space scenes didn't have sound because there technically isn't any sound in space. But I now think i should have added sound due to it being star wars and the fact I put in a sound for the explosions. We will see if I use sound or not in my next film though :) only time can tell.

Once it was all together, sound and all, I dropped in my logo and a few titles, didn't take to long, although Final Cut Pro can be a bit of a bitch when it comes to titles. But none the less I did them quickly. So with that out of the way, only one thing remained, the musical scoring of the film.

I started out by finding a track for the opening scene, and after scanning through my library, I found the perfect piece, the music and instruments matched up perfectly. The opening shots are probably my personal favourite in the films. I already knew i was using a piece from the halo reach soundtrack for the first battle shots, and that I did, it went fairly well with it and I guess it works. I actually did the ending music next, although the piece didn't go as well as the others I thought it went well enough for the scene and synced up in places. The music I despise in this film is the track I used that has the choir in it. I was bored, tired and just wanted to be done with the film, so I slammed int he track to finish it off, it doesn't go perfectly, but that type of music fits anything. So thats what I did.

I was finally done, I watched the film over, I personally did not like it that much and thought I could have done way better. My rating for it was a 2/5. Anyway, I rendered it and it was done. I just relaxed for the rest of the day after that.

And thats how the film was made lol, thanks for reading if you got this far :P I hope to write more "making of" articles on my site in the future and remember to check back here every so often for new articles.

In case your wondering, the programs I used where....

Final Cut Pro- Editing

FXHomes Visionlab Studio and Adobe After Effects CS4- Special effects

iStopmotion 2 Express- Putting my photos together and animating them

The Wrath Of School...Damn it!

2010-08-31T08:50:00.006+01:00

School starts tomorrow (Wednesday September 1st 2010) for me. This will cause a lot of problems for films and stuff. Which im going to run through so people know what to expect and etc...

1. Ok, first off, im now in high school so that most likely means my Home work amount is going to rise by a lot. And i mean a lot. I had quite a bit in grade 8 and I cant even imagine how much im going to have now in grade 9. Home work gets in the way of a lot of film related things and its annoyingly time consuming. So thats one problem...

2. I can now only film for around 3-6 hours on maximum a week. And only on weekends. During the week I unfortunately dont have access to my filming equipment and home work and other stuff would cut out that anyway. So my filming time is reduced further once again. However i can edit during my little free time on week days. But thats it. And on another note for flickr friends of mine... I can only enter the 24 hour minifig contests on weekends now because thats when I have access to my lego :(

3. My Real life comes over my internet life. And friends, family and school come before people I know on youtube. I have more important things to do most of the time rather than sit inside my room taking thousands and thousands of pictures of lego figures, and making small movements to them each frame. So im not going to be as active now and once again I wont be working on films as much.

Hope that explains. I will continue to post any major updates on my blog in the future. Thanks for reading.

No, Im not dead. I am actually working on something. The story behind Whats going on with my Films And Productions

2010-08-25T14:30:00.000+01:00

Now a lot of people seem to think im not working on anything. Or are just confused as to what im working on. So, Im going to write this to explain.

First off... Ive been working on my film "Lego Star Wars: Shattered Stars" since August 27th 2009... Which is a long time. Ive filmed 46 minutes of it. And only 31 minutes of that is actually edited with special effects and sounds. I currently have had to fill every characters roll with my own voice until I come close enough to finishing the film to start calling for individual voice actors...

Most people are also confused what the film is about. Or what the name actually means. The name is related to the film. You will see that once its released. And to fill in what its about. Its set in an alternate version of the Star Wars universe. Which has many differences from the one seen in the 6 films.

I may post more on this alternate universe i have created later on. BTW, I also have some preview images of this film on my flickr. So check that out here

Heres a preview photo from Shattered Stars (in better quality on my flickr)

Alright. So, after working on Shattered Stars for a long amount of time. In February 2010 I realised that this film would not be finished for a long time due to the sheer immensity of the project. Im only 1/3 through with it. And theres a hell of a lot of editing to do.

So, I decided to put shattered stars aside for a while until I get at least 6 full films uploaded. And hence I started work on a shorter project. Which is most likely going to be around 15 minutes. The first version of this smaller unnamed project. Which I worked on during the course of March 12th 2010-May 2nd 2010 was scrapped due to some horrible imperfections in the storyline and being kind of stupid. I also lacked certain supplies.

In the end, On May 15th I finished an improved version of the script. And filled in all the plot holes and mistakes. And I got cracking almost instantly. I slowly but steadily filmed quite a bit of the film. And finally on August 12th. I finished filming on this unnamed project. I had 14 minutes of footage.

Here is a snap shot of the film.

However only about 4 minutes of this is edited. And the other 10 minutes still need to have special effects, sounds and voices added to them. Also, another problem that arose is that my holiday is now drawing to its end. I go back to school on september 2nd. And I can only film on weekends for around 2-3 hours during school weeks. So In the end, I decided to use the remaining of my holiday. To get filming done on another film I have planned...

I will do all the effects and editing on my remaining 10 minutes during the school months. And I will be focusing on filming this other film for the remaining of the summer. That way I will be close to having 2 videos out. This second film is quite short. Around 5 minutes. And ive filmed 3 minutes of it. Which is good. Its got a simple but effective plot. But it works...

Heres a screen shot from that film.

That shot took fairly long to render. But I like how it came out. It actually took longer then you think. Those tiny little dots that are larger than the stars are actually loads of ARC-170s. So that affected how long it took to render by a lot.

So yeah. Hope your excited. Or something. So Jah... There you go. Thats the whole story behind what im doing ;) And I hope to have something out soon. Im working hard to release something. And i admit Ive been an idiot for not uploading anything in ages. But Im trying to make something worth watching...
Thanks for reading..

My New Blog

2010-08-25T14:04:00.000+01:00

Well, I just got my new blog set up after Ive left it blank and dormant for around a month. Here im going to be doing longer updates and more in depth announcements. So If you actually give a hoola hoop. You can read this blog. Im not sure if im ever going to get a proper website, but for now. This will do. So keep checking for important and longer updates here.

Click for my Flickr

Click for my Youtube

And your already on my blog =P