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BloodSpell: From Concept to Finished Scene Part 2 By: Hugh Hancock, Artistic Director, Strange Company In case you missed it, read Part 1. Voice Recording
We cast our film in much the same way a conventional film or theatre director would do: created some posters for the film (using suitable artwork from the 'net before we had our own), plastered anywhere we might reasonably expect actors in Edinburgh to frequent with said posters, and waited for e-mails. We took over the cellar room of a convenient pub on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, and proceeded to audition down to the cast we've got today. We rehearsed the script over the next few months, and finally recorded all the dialogue for the film down onto our Tazcam hard-drive recorder over a mammoth weekend in June, 2004. We then forgot about it for the next few months whilst we worked on getting the film ready to shoot. In November 2004, we decided to get the audio off the hard drive recorder and into the animatic. And lo, it was then the problems hit. I'll not go through them in full detail here - you can find the frustrated rant over over at the Bloodspell Blog. The short version is, "if something's holding your files captive, just pay the money to get them out," and "hard drives do crash--unrecoverably." We'd have to re-record all the audio. Every. Single. Bit. This turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to BloodSpell. As a result of the disaster, we were freed up to do whatever we wanted to the script. We re-wrote virtually all of Act 1, changed about half the dialogue elsewhere, added characters, removed characters, re-cast. And then, as we started filming in November 2005, we recorded the first two Acts of BloodSpell in a much more professional environment, with higher-quality, newer equipment, and with a cast who'd had nearly two years to, say, act at the Globe in London and gain experience. If that hard disk hadn't blown up, we'd have a much less impressive film now.
FilmingThere's an entire other article on filming, which I'll write at some point. We all get in in the morning and sit down at our PCs. I attach the VGA-out of my PC to our capture suite, we load up NWN, and we all join as DMs. Then I turn my DM invisible, act as the camera's viewpoint, and control character expressions and lipsynch through TOGLFaces whilst the other two people in the room puppet characters around, control AI, run scripts, and generally make the film happen. We started filming with the trailer in October 2005, shooting 100 shots or thereabouts for our release in November 2005. As I write, in mid-June 2006, we're almost exactly half-way through shooting the film. As you'll see from our raw footage here, one of the biggest advantages for us in using NWN is the simplest feature - the "Pause" button. Using that, we're able to set up a little bit of action, run that for a moment, then pause the game, set up more, and repeat. In the Jered on the Steps sequence you see here, for example, we set Jered cutting his wrist with our custom blood VFX, ran our camera script, let that run for a few moments, then paused it and fired off some effects through the DMFI One Ring. (Although nowadays we tend to use dm_visualeffect - thank you so much, whoever decided to add that into NWN. If you could write something to remove the "selected" halo too, we'd love you forever.). We then unpaused, let that run for a couple of seconds, ran another sequence of effects, and brought Lloth in from Limbo to splatter our priest in the next shot. View sample raw footage (AVI 3.3 MB) Editing
I'm sure everyone knows how video editing works. Editing for BloodSpell is a pretty complex process, with scenes often having well over 100 shots (Act 1 Scene 2, for example, has 121 raw video files, which often break down into two or more shots), and some scenes also requiring us to break out motion graphics programs to remove cursors that have inadvertently worked their way into shots, re-colour embarrassing flashing headbands (TOGLFaces sometimes decides to change textures where we'd prefer it didn't), and add in interior or exterior shots through doorways, which in NWN would just be black. At this point, we also choose and assign music tracks for the episode. These won't be all the music, but they'll be the main highlight pieces, like Proxy's Slasherflick or our somewhat controversial choice of "Funk Dancing For Self Defence" on Episode 3. Phil Rice will incorporate these into his work later on in sound editing. We generally take five or six passes through editing - the first one, known as an assembly, is usually very rough and contains lots of footage we need to edit out. From there, our next two or three passes are tightening up, usually alternating editors between Chris, Ross, or myself so that at least two people edit any one scene. From there, we assemble a rough soundtrack, usually consisting just of voice and music, and move on to.... PreviewIt's vital to get an outside opinion on each episode before it's released. For the first Act (the first three episodes), we organised an event with the Edinburgh University Anime Society, and showed the entire three episodes to an audience of 100 or so, who were all given comment cards (you can see an example in the image) and asked to fill them out for each episode. Yes, focus groups have a bad reputation, but having external input on your film is absolutely vital. Once we'd completed the preview, and recovered from the ensuing hangover, we collated all our comment cards and wrote down the most frequent comments - including, in Act 1, comments about the Master's beard, which in the preview appeared to be escaping from his face. View sample preview (AVI 4.0 MB) Re-shoot
At this point, we could be doing anything from re-recording voices, to re-shooting individual shots, to re-modelling character faces and re-shooting or inserting every shot they're used in. Sometimes we lengthen shots or insert exposition where we'd gotten a bit over-enthusiastic. More often we take out shots and tighten our editing to remove "shoe-leather," which outsiders are invariably better at spotting than the crew who have, by this point, been staring at these shots for about six weeks. SoundOnce we've got a rough edit, about preview time, we send a cut of that edit, along with separate music and dialogue tracks, off to our SoundMeister, Phil Rice. Sound is vital for any animated film. I can't stress how vital it is. I'd say that probably half the action of the film comes across purely as a result of Phil's foley work - from clashing swords to subtle footsteps and creaks. There are hundreds of individual effects on each episode, and Phil spends hours and days parading up and down in a leather jacket, for example, to get the leathery creaks of Gad's armour across. (You can read some of Phil's superb summaries of his work at the Bloodspell Blog: Episode 2 Did You Know, Episode 3 Did You Know, and elsewhere on the blog.) Phil also levels out, treats, and cleans all our vocal tracks, removing the sounds of actors shifting their feet as they record, or planes going overhead nearby (or the sound of my television emitting interference because I'd forgotten to turn it off - sorry, Phil!). He records incidental music in an incredibly wide range of styles, and generally makes the film happen. We generally go through two or three iterations of the sound track. Phil will send me a preview to review and comment on, which will usually be met with an equal number of comments from Phil himself as he re-listens to his work. He'll then edit the track into an improved version. We'll usually then send him the final, locked version of the film, which Phil will then turn around in record time, re-timing music, sound, and dialogue to our changes, and return to us with a final version a few days before release. Listen to the final audio (MP3 4.0 MB) Complete - Or Is It? - Finished VideoThe last few days before release are a rush, as we run off a release candidate video, review it for last-minute changes and fixes (we've gotten tighter about this since the embarrassing "falling through the stairs" shot on Episode 3), then run off seven different versions of the episode in Quicktime, AVI, Flash, and WMV formats. Some poor sap then gets to watch through all seven versions looking for any encoding errors before we finally announce they're done, upload them to the Internet Archive, and announce to the world that another episode of BloodSpell has been birthed. But is that the end? No, we don't think so. "A piece of art is never finished, only abandoned," and we don't intend to abandon our work just yet. We've already got plans to release the entire film as a (Creative Commons licensed) DVD version, and we'll probably be going back over the entire film and fixing things yet again. But that's a long, long way away now, probably four or five months of shooting and releasing. We've got 10 episodes of BloodSpell to go, and Jered's got a lot of running, fighting, decision-making, mystery-solving, and, of course, bleeding to do. And so, if you'll excuse me, we're nearly finished with footage for Episode 7, I've got to master Episode 6 for sound edit, I've got an extras voice recording session to organise for Acts 4 and 5, and Steve's just finished the new Ghoul faces, which means we need to get on with the re-shoots there.... View the final film (AVI 6.3 MB) 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.~
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