The Straad Players

A friend suggested I write a “making of” piece just like they do in movies land so here it is.

The making of movies in games or virtual worlds (Machinima) is not new but the interest for me developed in a different way. One day I was showing my granddaughter my house in Second Life when I noticed a friend was online. I asked him to fly down as a dragon and say HI to her. She was delighted and from this an idea for a virtual theatre group was born.

I had been doing a lot of animation work with community groups both young and old and I thought this would be a great way of acting out performances and making kind of virtual puppet theatre animations. I figured what I needed to do was make a promo movie to demonstrate the process as this would be more easily understood than simply describing it. I thought I could knock this together quickly but how wrong I was. The whole thing sucked me in and I had many skills to learn, invent or figure out.

Firstly I made a plan. I couldn't call it a story board because it was just a list of events with no diagrams. However, I had a fairly clear idea in my head of the start, middle and end.

The concept eventually would involve a number of people working together and to prepare for this I created a number of accounts with male and female Avatars: The Straad Players. I had to take each one shopping for clothes to give them a different appearance and I also gave them different body shapes. As I was initially working alone I just logged two avatars onto two laptops, one to act as the cameraman and the other to play the part. To capture the action I needed some software. The Second Life browser can do this but it seemed a little limited. Another popular tool for grabbing on screen action commonly used in Machinima is FRAPPS. However I already had a free tool (PC only) that I had used for a while called CAMSTUDIO http://camstudio.org/

I set Camstudio to record an area of the screen 640 X 480 pixels and positioned that rectangle in the area I wanted to shoot. On a large screen this gave me a good bit of offscreen or offstage area where characters can wait to make their entrance. I experimented a lot with resolutions and settings to get the optimum capture. I'm still not satisfied that I've got this right and more experimentation is needed. My first shots were flyovers of Cedar Island which I had planned would be the opening sequence. I shot a lot of footage as its really hard to get smooth zooms and pans. I found it best to have the camera controls in the Second Live interface visible.

I shot another piece for the opening which has no real reason to be there, it's just my avatar sat playing a piano but it works nicely with the music. I was quite new to Second Life and had found a place where, if you sat your avatar on a piano stool a script caused the character to animate as if playing the instrument. There are scripts to do all sorts of things such as dancing so these could be useful in future productions.

Next the camera settles on the shore, Straad waves (another script) and walks towards the camera to welcome everyone to Cedar Island. I shot this scene and left it for a while as I had to figure out how to handle the narration that would begin at this point. I had planned that the camera would cut away from the character to a long shot of the island while the narration continued. Then just in time I discovered a software program called Crazy Talk by Realusion www.reallusion.com This is fairly inexpensive at £50 ($99). I recorded the audio track in Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ which is a free open source audio program. The wav file was brought into Crazy Talk and combined with a still image of the character in order to create the lip synch sections. Like everything in this production I was learning as I went along and I soon learned that these sections worked better if I had an image of the character over a fairly neutral background.

I was creating many little film clips that would need to be edited together. I decided to use Windows Movie Maker even though I had access to the more powerful Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. I made this choice for a number of reasons. Firstly the two bigger programs are more powerful but not good for my eyesight as there are many menus and icons and they are quite small. Movie Maker is simple and straight forward and I could work fairly fast. It is free on the PC so easier to introduce to community groups. However Movie Maker is quite basic with just one audio track to I had to plan ahead and make many clips, some with audio, some without and then combine them all. As I put it all together I found I had made many filming mistakes. Many shots had the computer curser visible (the Machinima equivalent of mic in shot ?)

At this point I decided some other voices were needed and I cast around for volunteers. I ended up with two UK voices and one from the USA but all sessions were done online. Playwrite Tom Kelly was given a few lines and would have sent a minidisc but I wanted all collaboration to be online so I waited a week or so whilst he went looking for a PC mic. Amazingly for a playwright he proceeded to get his lines wrong over and over again but we eventually nailed it. Nick Murray sent me an audio file. Andee Baker wanted to do some voices but wasn't sure how until she said she had found she could record audio on her mac in “Word”. Who was I to doubt this and sure enough some files the duly came in. Now another software application (actually a suite of apps) came in really handy: AVS4YOU http://www.avs4you.com/ is a great suite of audio/video tools and will convert anything to anything else. A really useful set of apps for this kind of work and at £50 ($99) well worth getting. It converted Andee's files to something useful to me. Nicks audio files were .wav but Crazy Talk refused to recognise them. I used AVS4YOU to convert them from .wav TO .wav and hey presto it worked!

Then something really exciting happened. Jon Seattle who owns Cedar Island where we were shooting scenes gave me access to a huge sky platform to convert into the Straad Players backlot meaning we had a place to build sets where the natural (virtual) terrain was not suitable. Some scenes that made it to the final movie were shot here. To develop this stage area I had help and advice from a couple of online friends Kate Miranda and Fuzsea Lime from Canada and the USA respectively. They are dragon masters, scripters and Second Life architects as well as being members of the Straad Players.

Because of the original inspiration for this project I always planned there would be a dragon scene in the movie. The day I decided to shoot it the original Dragon master was not online but Kate Miranda was so she was engaged to play the part. Now, I don't know if you've ever directed a dragon before but I can tell you it's a nightmare!

DIRECTOR: Now, I'd like you to fly up to the head of that waterfall and on my signal sweep down and land just to my right.

DRAGON: Swooooosh, plonk.

DIRECTOR: No no no no no no !!!

DRAGON: Well it would help if you weren't standing behind a flipping tree!

I see now that what I should have done was log an “assistant director” onto my other machine and this avatar could have been positioned at the spot I wanted the dragon to begin from. This would have given me a view from both perspectives of the shot and would have helped position and direct the dragon. I learned a lot this way and made mistakes I'd try not to repeat a second time. When I came to the final edit I realised I had made the classic film mistake of “crossing the line”. Of course I did not know about this term until I read about it and then I realised why the scene looked “wrong” but by then it was too late to re-shoot the scene. For an explanation of this and other movie terms go here http://tinyurl.com/3y47lp

I guess I could have gone to Film School and maybe come out a Speilberg (or not!) but I enjoyed learning in this fashion and I'm sure there's a great deal more to learn. I'm not looking forward to shooting some more Machinima movies with the many people who have shown an interest. New movies will be showcased at www.straad.org.uk

Steve Thompson
Community Media Coordinator
Institute of Digital Innovation
University Of Teesside
T- 01642 384567
M- 07795 826953
E- s.d.thompson@tees.ac.uk
Tees Valley Community Media
http://www.tvcm.co.uk