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BloodSpell: From Concept to Finished Scene Part 1 By: Hugh Hancock, Artistic Director, Strange Company
We wuz wrong. Admittedly, some of that was the result of my script treatment turning from a quick 30-minute film into a feature-length project (what the lovely people at BioWare would probably refer to as "feature creep", except in our case it was more like "feature sprint"). But a lot more was the result of the production process on such a huge film - about the same scale as the first Star Wars movie, in terms of sets, characters, action sequences, and overall length - being rather a lot bigger and more complicated than we're used to. So, if you want to know what goes into making thirty seconds or so of BloodSpell, are thinking about making your own Machinima project, or just want to find out more about how we abuse poor Neverwinter Nights to serve our own ends, read on. Development
We didn't have a firm idea of what we wanted to do with BloodSpell when we started it. We just knew we wanted to make a fantasy film because we were sick of aliens and space marines. We figured we wanted to use Neverwinter Nights. And that was about it. We spent a little while playing with Neverwinter Nights to figure out what we could do with the engine, what would work well, and what wouldn't. Then I sat down with a whole bunch of people (the "Creative Consultants" you see in the credits) and started brainstorming ideas. And we kept brainstorming - as you can see in the picture. Eventually, we narrowed our ideas down to a concrete story, which we then "broke" into acts (we were originally intending BloodSpell to be 6 acts of 5 minutes each), and then down to scenes within those acts. About now, we were starting to figure out that maybe this story we'd developed was a little bigger than we had intended. TreatmentSo, we've got a rough structure for the story. Now, we need to make sure the story's actually, you know, good. I wrote the story up in rough form over about two pages, and spent the next two weeks bending the ear of anyone who would listen to it, telling them the story as a ten-minute monologue, then wandering off and fixing, changing, and tightening anything that didn't grab and hold their attention. Then I'd find someone else, and repeat. Eventually, I figured we had a tight enough story that it was worth moving to the next stage and turning it into a script.
ScriptMany of you may have heard of script guru Robert McKee. I'd recently re-read his book, Story, probably the single most influential book on scriptwriting today, and had decided to use his techniques to polish BloodSpell. So, scriptwriting was a longer but much more polished process than I'd used on previous films. For each scene, I first read my brief summary, in the treatment, then expanded that out to a sheet of story beats: each turn of the scene, whether that's Jered running up on stage, the Captain ordering the crossbows to aim, Jered cutting his wrist, or much more subtle conversational stuff, as seen in the Master and Jered's conversation up the steps, where the scene moves from Jered preemptively apologizing, to the Master setting a conversational trap, Jered walking into it, and the Master exploding with anger. (I later modified this approach - based on McKee again - and wrote each scene I re-wrote as a short story first, with no dialogue but internal monologue from all the characters making it clear what they were thinking and feeling. These short stories read badly as stand-alone stories, but they're invaluable for crafting a strong script, as they give you a strong handle on how your characters are thinking and feeling.) Having done that, and having made sure I had a strong handle on the characters, I sat down and wrote the script. And even then, it went through a lot of changes on its way to the screen.
Sets and Characters
We started creating art assets about January 2004, and we began filming our animatic from those assets in December 2005. We weren't working full-time at that point; however, out of those 12 months, we probably put in the equivalent of six months full-time BloodSpell development. We created sets using the Aurora editor, which is by far the fastest and easiest way that I've ever been able to put together sets for a film (and I've been making Machinima for nearly a decade, starting in 1997). I can't overstate the practical impact of a tile-based system, which meant that our set editors didn't have to be trained 3D modellers to produce spectacular-looking sets quickly and easily. Instead, the process most resembled a cross between conventional set creation and interior decorating. At one point, working on Arianne's Apartment, we were horrified to hear ourselves saying things like, "Yes, but I'm just not feeling the utility of the space. It's too cold." The male members of the crew had to have a quick conversation about deathmatch and graphics cards to reassure themselves of their masculinity. (It's about at this point we started our blog, which has been following BloodSpell's development for the past two years. You can find us talking about character and set creation throughout 2004). Obviously, as each day passed, we had to create bits and pieces for the film that weren't available either in NWN or the vast, vast number of community hakpaks. I've always been particularly proud of our weapon altars, which show off the magical effects on weapons in a way that doesn't normally happen when a weapon's sitting on the ground. This is because the altars are characters that are "holding" the weapons sitting on them. We were also working on the characters for BloodSpell at this point, with our efforts led by Barry Martin and Steve Wallace. Steve's talked about how we made up all the costumes and characters for BloodSpell in the Making Of BloodSpell, so I'll not talk about that much here. Suffice it to say, creating well over 100 custom characters for the film was a mammoth task, as well as Photoshopping each and every facial expression for those characters to well over 200 different expressions, all of which were created by Steve. At this point, we were also working on TOGLFaces - our lipsynching tool, the various scripts and tools we were using for the film, various technical difficulties, re-drafts of the script, and casting and recording actors. Review
At the same time, we also started brainstorming all the tasks we had to get done before release. The result, as you can see from the image, was a bit intimidating. Animatic
For the uninitiated, an animatic is a storyboard, scanned in and converted to a video file, with voice laid over the top at approximately the pace of the finished film. It's a handy tool to tell whether or not your film will work for your audience in its finished form. In our case, our animatic was created by taking screenshots in Neverwinter Nights, based on a rough storyboard (and as you can see in the picture, I'm not kidding about the "rough" part - Ridley Scott I'm not). For each shot, we took either one or several shots of the expected action, then edited them together at about the pace of the film. It was a mammoth project that rapidly gave us an idea of the scale we would be working at - the first draft of the animatic took from December 2004 to May 2005 to create, with either two or three people working from three to five days a week on it, as we created what essentially was a static version of the whole film. In hindsight, I don't think BloodSpell would be half the film it is today without the animatic. We went from shooting half a page a day, maximum, to shooting four or five pages of script per day by the end of the animatic's production. It was through the animatic that we managed to find and iron out literally hundreds of problems with our sets and characters, and develop the toolset we use today to film. In addition, from the first draft of the animatic to the final shooting-ready draft, we added nearly 20 minutes of new plot, exposition, character development, and de-confusing. View a sample animatic (AVI 2.9 MB) Review
We revised that opinion pretty sharply after the evening we spent watching the first two acts in animatic form. We expected the entire process of watching and discussion to take about three hours. As it happened, we started at 7pm and left, finally, about 1:30 am, having filled sheet after sheet of paper with problems, plot holes, dodgy camera angles, dubious bits of artwork, and so on. The next four months were spent fixing those problems. We re-shot, added scenes, re-wrote lines ("It's not hard, it's wrong!" looks fine on paper, but sounds distinctly dodgy in practice), and even re-created entire characters. Probably the most difficult process in this period was the re-creation of Jered. It rapidly became evident during the review process that, well, everyone hated Jered's long, flowing blond locks. We needed to do something. But deciding what turned out to be more difficult than we expected. Eventually, having flirted with inspirations from everything from Brad Pitt to Jet Li, our uber-modeller/animator/artist Justin Hall created the bald Jered you see today.
BioHugh Hancock has been described as "the guru of the Machinima movement." Former editor of Machinima.com and director of 16 Machinima films, he is currently working full-time as Executive Producer on the BloodSpell project. ~
Read BloodSpell: From Concept to Finished Scene Part 2 Related LinksWant to comment on this article or read what others have to say about it? Join the official discussion!
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