Online Voting for the Cinemanila Machinima Festival has started!

The excitement doesn't stop - so shortly after the First Ollies Award Show, which left me overwhelmed and very happy about the support the TMU community has shown me - I'd like to say 'Thank you!' once again! :) - the online voting on the First Cinemanila Machinima Film Festival has started!

I am very proud that Kate Lee's "The Afflicted" has been chosen to be voted on! If you'd like to vote for me (or any of the other wonderful movies in their selection), please visit their website:

Cinemanila Machinima

You will have to register to be able to vote!

There are two categories: Short Film and Music Video.

Among the selections for Short Film are also IceAxe's 'Clockwork', Lainy Voom's 'The Stolen Child', Russel Boyd's/Pooky Amsterdam's 'Shrink Wrapped'... (just to name a few!) loads of great films to vote upon!

Voting will be possible until October, 16th!

Good News!

I'm happy to announce that two of my films have been selected for film festivals -

"Saving Grace" will be shown at the Atopic Machinima Film Festival in France (a big thankyou to Phil Rice!), and "Kate Lee's The Afflicted" at the 1st Cinemanila Machinima Film Festival in the Philippines!

I'm very happy and excited about this, as you can imagine! :)

And of course I'm also looking very much forward to TMUnderground's First Annual OLLIES Award show, which will take place on the Ken & Roger show this coming sunday, october 11th!

Don't forget to tune into the show and join the merry crowd in the chatroom!

Lethal Entertainment

I've already planned to have a site for my films when I worked on the Creative Voice website - now it's online!

Lethal Entertainment is the home of everything 'sisch' - anymation/machinima related - as of now, it features Kate Lee's 'The Afflicted' with detailed background information, a films archive where you'll find everything you ever wanted to know about my older films, homages to voice-actors and modders.... and in the future it will have quite an extensive production diary - yeah, yeah, I'm talking 'bout that secret project again... ;)



Hope you'll enjoy visiting the site! There's also a new link added to the navigation bar of this blog!

The Afflicted is online!

Little did I know that this would be such an ordeal - Vimeo took about 15 hours to convert the movie (I uploaded yesterday) - that has never happened to me before...

The Moviestorm version is visually nice, but there's a sound-synch problem due to flash converting. Nonetheless I thank all those who already watched, and hope you'll watch it again in HD, now on Vimeo (also for download)! It's also up on TMUnderground now, and I'm happy to say that it's the featured film on the Moviestorm page!

I hope you'll enjoy the movie - I'm very glad that both Kate and Sherwin seem to like it!

It's done when it's done.....

.... and it is done!

After countless problems, The Afflicted is finally rendered now - until the last this film was very stubborn - filters didn't work, Vegas produced countless crashes even though I had pre-rendered every little scene (with a heavy heart, but my computer just isn't up to handling files of this complexity, so I have to live with the quality loss) and decided it didn't want to render in .wmv, which is normally my preferred format - so I tried loads of different things, none worked until I found this tutorial by Eugenia.

So now I have a very nice looking mp4 version of the movie - I think it looks even better than .wmv, and the file is astonishingly small - only 311 MB at high definition!

As you can imagine, I'm very, very happy. :)

Was there anything else? Mhm? Oh yeah, release date.... :D

Either coming tuesday or wednesday... so stay tuned!

Hurray!

Back in business, baby -

I've got my vo re-takes for The Afflicted, already re-shot and re-composited (is that a word? Oh bugger), and now it won't take that much longer to finish the movie!

Sound design is coming along fine, too - I've reverted to my old working style, doing it scene by scene.

So all's well in sisch-topia. :)

On another note, I just saw a film that blew me away -
Mellowhardy's Cafe Insomniac ep. 2 - just wow!
I strongly recommend you watch it, and if you haven't seen ep. 1 (shame on you!), do that first!
It's a great story, professionally filmed - the camera work is to die for, and pure inspiration to me!

Until soon!

A mistake I won't make again

Ever wanted to smack yourself real hard? I do right now....

The Afflicted could be nearly finished right now. But it isn't, and it's entirely my fault, for thinking too much of my ability to clean vo's and get them to sound just right.

Having made a lot of machinima films, I'm used to working with different quality vo's. Everyone has a different set-up, different quality mic, room sounds etc. etc. etc.
So from the start, I tried to learn as much about quality and sound enhancement as I could, experimenting a lot - and though it often wasn't easy, I was able to get good results.

Now this time, I overestimated myself. And the worst part is, I only realised it now -when every scene is filmed, composited, ready.... at the stage when I add the original vo's and the sounds to the finished product. It just doesn't work. I do owe an apology to Goofparade, who told me from the start he thought I should ask for retakes after listening to a sample of my cleaning efforts.
I cleaned again instead, and thought this time I got it.

Apparently not - I have to admit that I made a mistake, asked for help (thank you, Ricky, for your time and efforts!) - and now re-takes it is. Which means I'll have to re-film all the scenes for which the new takes will be made, and go back to compositing and snippets-exporting...

Thankfully, the actor in question will do the vo's again - and by no means I want to lay any blame there - this is entirely my mistake, and one I will make never again.

And of course it means you'll have to wait a little longer for the movie...

Production update on "The Afflicted" or how I learn patience...

Work on The Afflicted is in full swing again - or should I rather say, crawling progress? Since my clever idea of combing the .veg files doesn't work, I'm back to rendering scenes in bits and snippets again, and spent the better part of yesterday and today evening..... waiting.

As much as I love movie making, I could do very well - very well! - without the long waiting-on-something-to-render pauses. Very, very well. I'm not an impatient person at all - I spent hours fiddling on scenes to get them just so - but snippets rendering drives me crazy. Especially as I'm hardly able to watch what I put together beforehand - filming in 1280x720 has it's drawbacks, as my computer isn't even able to show me a preview even when the settings are set to lowest quality - well, it shows a preview, but skips a lot of frames.

Which means that I see imperfections after I have rendered... go back, fix them... render again... wait again.... rinse and repeat.

Sigh.

Nonetheless, I've made a lot of progress. Here's another screenie, with the great city MikeDBoing modded for me... minus one very cool detail I want to keep secret until the film is finally released. :)


More updates soon to come.... if (and that's a big if) I haven't fallen to lunacy while waiting...

Enforced breaks.... well, semi-breaks

I have been talking for quite some time now about the need to take a break.... and actually, the break was forced on me rather sooner than I wanted to.

Truth is, for the last two weeks, I have been doing nothing on The Afflicted, haven't taken much part in the community (no listening to TMOA, no chatroom, next to no watching films)... simply because I have been slapped down by the worst cold I've had in ages. Maybe it wouldn't have come out this bad if I had done the sensible thing and stayed away from work, but it's just typical me to refuse to go see a doctor... and crawl to work no matter what.

Well, I've got what I deserved - I'm still not feeling my usual self, my nose and voice still don't sound good (after two weeks!); though it's getting better slowly now, and I'm starting to pick up where I left off. And of course it was only a semi-break - I'm just not able to stay away from my computer totally, so I redesigned the look of this blog last weekend (using a template by Our blog templates - I really want to learn to do them myself - another thing on my list... ), and... (enough whining now)
... wrote the largest part of the script to the idea the Muse hit me with - after long consideration (I'm lying) I couldn't really make myself believe that to be "work" .... :p

Strange thing about that script - it wrote itself almost by itself so far, which is kind of spooky - because it's so very different from the sripts I wrote before - I had to go the 'Matt Way' with this, because of the story being..... (no, I won't tell :p).
Right now it's in the hands of Norrie, and I'm anxiously awaiting his feedback and suggestions.

In other news; a whole bunch of people are waiting for me to do urgently needed vo's for them... and I will do them this week, stuffed nose or not. I'm very sorry for the hassle I caused!

Work on The Afflicted will be taken up again after Easter - man, am I glad the deadline for the competition was taken off....

Oh, and while you're still here, I highly recommend you'll watch this - I just did this morning, and was totally blown away:

Lizards Coming Home

I can't embed it here, because it's in the 18+ category. It's a sci-fi dystopia with a wonderful story, inspiring visuals, vo's, music - I've never seen iClone look this good! Go watch it now! :)

Things coming together

I received some of my special mods from MikeDBoing yesterday - just look at some of his TM mods here and you'll know how good he is!! Thank you, Mike!

So finally I'm able to put some things together, and get a feeling how it all will look in the end - up to now, a lot was only in my minds eye. I rendered a 30sec testscene today - for reference - and oh well, it took nearly an hour to get it done.....


Another thing that I like very much in Vegas is that you can combine .veg files - and the best thing - if you combine two or more of them, and have to change something in one of them, you're able to change the original .veg and the changes appear automatically in the combined one! (what a sentence) This is pure bliss for me - as every other scene is heavily chroma-keyed....

I hope that in the end, I'll be able to piece together the combined .veg files of all the scenes and render the whole film from there - before, I always had to make renders of every individual scene and piece those together, so it would be great to be able to skip that step.


Slowly, slowly, we're getting there! :)

Thank the deities, the deadline is off...... (about perfectionism)

... for the Industry 101 competition - I can finish The Afflicted at my own, leasurely pace! :)

I was beginning to worry - the end of march is not that far away, and most likely I would not have been able to have the movie ready for release until then.

I consider that one of my faults - I don't work well under time constrictions. I hate to rush things to do with movie-making. It goes against my wish to do everything as perfectly as I can; against re-imagining scenes again and again... which is as such not a bad thing, but sometimes I wonder if I'm not too perfectionistic and thus loading on work I wouldn't have to do if I just could be a tiny bit more relaxed.... I mean does the viewer really see the little things that irk me so that I redo a whole scene again the 10th time? Does it really make a difference? It surely does for me - and in the end, it's me who has to be happy with the end result, I know that. And it takes a lot to make me happy with my own work.

Why is that? I'm much more lenient when it comes to other people's work - I tend to overlook things that I would never tolerate in one of my own movies (or at least, I won't let little things take away from the enjoyment I otherwise get out of the film). Is it that the same for everyone? To which extend is the critical eye concerning ones own work healthy, and when does it start to become an annoyance; hampering the flow of creativity?

Learning by doing

Work on The Afflicted progresses - though I must admit I took a little "holiday" this week, and did less than I intended to.
As the special mods that are made for me by MikeDeBoing for the TM content are still in the works, I'm shooting this film in bits and pieces, and almost all the stuff I've got right now is just scenes prepared to get the background footage implemented. So, not that much to show off via screenshots!

I'm happy to say that I'm slowly getting into the workflow of Vegas though - today, I pieced together a scene where the principle character, Terbing (played by Goofparade), stands in front of a mirror.


I finally found out how to resize and align footage I want to play in a mirror; or a viewscreen - and Vegas has a neat "Glow" feature, which enabled me to make it look more convincingly like an actual mirror surface. I think it looks nice as it is now - though if anyone wants to offer advanced tricks, I'm always listening!

I also found out how to place an overlay in a shot - the sign on the wall you'll see in the next screenie was actually made using Photoshop - and it was very easy to place it exactly where I wanted it. In case you're wondering about the black background - this is just another shot which is waiting for its background footage...


The one thing I'll need to do more experimenting with is the shadows function in Moviestorm. I'd love to have shadows - but I've tried all the different settings now, and still the shadows look - pixelated. I have some scenes which cry for shadows (in fact I think the mirror scene would look even better if it had them) - but at the moment I'm too perfectionistic to use them - seeing the ragged edges pulls me out of the mood of the film. Maybe my expectations are too high - I know realistic shadows are damned hard to do, and I know I could do them manually - I'm very grateful that Moviestorm has them (TM never did, not for actors) - but before I'll use them in a movie, I'll first have to find a way to make the edges appear softer. Oh well, things to keep me occupied... :)

New screenshots and update on "The Afflicted"

Work on "The Afflicted" progresses nicely - I've already completed (short of the background footage, which will be filmed in "The Movies") three of the many conversation scenes, started on the intro scene - which I'm still not sure if it will be kept as it is right now - it's a bit complicated, because I have to imagine how a TV scene in the future might look -
but so far I'm content with what I've shot.

Once again I'm very glad I've made the switch to Moviestorm - this film is very heavy (again) on dialogue; an intimate setting - I would feel incredibly constrained now if I had to shoot all that in TM.
With Moviestorm, I'm justing going "berserk" again in adding layers and layers of gestures, a feature I just love, love, love. Did I mention I love it? :)

Two more screenies taken from the film - I had an idea concerning the look, and I'm very curious how it will pay off in the finished movie.

I've also finally decided to switch editing programs - from Magix to Sony Vegas Pro 8 -
and I'm looking very much forward to immerse myself into learning how to use it.
Should be in the post tomorrow..... though I'm not sure I'll make the switch during filming this project - depends on how fast I feel comfortable with Vegas.

Work on "The Afflicted" has started!

As the end of january draws near, work on my new film, the re-imagining of Kate Lee's "The Afflicted" has finally started in earnest - there's so much to do and so little time!

Of course, that's what I always say - but in this case, as there's a deadline...

Most of the vo's are in, and I think I've found just the right actors to bring this to a new life - more on that later, at this moment I won't give away names yet. :)

Mike DeBoing has consented to do some special "The Movies" mods for me - thank you, Mike! - so some of the sets I built in Moviestorm have been tailored so that the TM footage can be green-screened into them at a later point. AngriBhuddist has done a special mod for Moviestorm for me - looks great! - and I'm having fun putting this film together!

This is the first time I actually asked modders to make content especially for one of my movies; so far I always used what was available to everyone, or put things together for TM with my very limited modding skills using Rileyman's excellent "set2prop" program and MED... so I'm very excited about this!


Finally, here are two screenshots of "The Afflicted" - they will give you an idea about the look of the film, and showcase one of the sets I built for it in Moviestorm.
As you can see, I went for a monochrome look, which fits the movie nicely, I think.




It also shows two of the characters of the movie:
Terbing, the male lead, and Treen, which is voiced by me.

More updates to come soon!

New things cooking in my kitchen!

I've been talking to Kate about The Afflicted -and have got a go! from her on re-envisioning it!

This is very, very exciting - as mentioned earlier, I always loved the film, and right now miriad ideas are shooting through my head... I hope Jase180 and AnotherNewDawn, as the creators of the contest, will allow me to use the original music made by Sherwin Liu specially for this movie - it will be perfect for the images I see!

The next thing to think long and hard about is which actors to get into contact with.. we're not allowed to have the original ones, so this needs some serious thought. Although I can see myself taking one of the smaller roles, I'm not yet sure about whom to ask to embody the principle characters ... exciting times!

The second project on my plate is a little something for Ken, the founder of TMU - this will be short, and very funny - reading the script, I had to giggle quite inanely! It will be a lot of fun to bring this to life!

There's even a third pot stewing.... someone offered to write a script for me, and no, at the moment I'm not willing to say more... :)... but it seems this will be a busy kitchen for the next few month, with lots of experimenting and new ingredients.

Makes me happy!

Last but not least, I wish everyone a happy and successful 2009 - may all your dreams come true, and all your projects prosper!

Thinking about a new challenge

Sooo... now that "Saving Grace" is finished - and once I've got all those vo's for all those nice patient people done - I'm on it, promise!

.....I thought it could be the time for a new challenge... so far, every movie I've made has been based on one of my own stories. How well would I be able to bring someone else's vision to life? I've been thinking about this for quite a while now, and it's really something I would like to try. I haven't even collaborated with anyone yet - up until now, I always wanted total control.

I'm still not sure how to go about it - maybe I'll stage a script-writing contest on TMU - I'm almost sure I would want it to be something that hasn't been made into a machinima movie before...

Still thinking. :)

... and while I'm still thinking, I've read in the Industry 101 Remake Competition thread that Kate Lee is offering her movie The Afflicted to be remade.... this was the very first Chat Noir movie I watched, it made me an instant fan of their work, and I'm tempted, so tempted... :)
The original version was made with "The Movies", before we even had the "Stunts & Effects" addon - it's a classic, go watch it if you haven't seen it! and right now I'm trying to envision how it would look being remade using Moviestorm.

It would be an honour to direct a script by Kate - she's a wonderful writer!