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The Making of BloodSpell Part 1

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

Any large project is going to have a dedicated team of talented professionals to bring it to completion. The making of BloodSpell, the first feature length machinima using Neverwinter Nights, has been a challenging undertaking, a labour of love, and at times, a rampaging hydra of wanton destruction. This week we begin a three part series looking at the people behind the movie and get their expert advice for any budding film makers out there. Interested in machinima? Stay tuned for an exclusive inside look at how it is all brought together.

View the official BloodSpell trailer.

Filming

Who are you and what do you do on BloodSpell?

Johnnie: My name is Johnnie Ingram and I do whatever I'm told.

I'm twenty-six years old, with a bachelor's degree in Drama and a master's degree in Software Systems. I've worked as a theatre director, a drama teacher, and a journalist, as well as a web developer and designer. When I discovered machinima, I found something that married all my interests.

My official job title on the BloodSpell project is Head Of Caffeine Acquisition and Beverage Replenishment. I'm jack-of-all-trades, really. I suppose I basically fill the role of second director. Along with Hugh, I bridge the gap between the geek and non-geek teams, and I'm lucky enough to have a say in almost all aspects of the film. I look over the script and offer suggestions. I hack together bits of (embarrassingly bad) code every now and then. I sit in on the sound editing sessions, participate in marketing strategy discussions, edit textures, and help design our website.

I also make the tea.

One of my main jobs is to be part of the filming team. We have a core group of dedicated masochists who spend hour after tedious hour setting up, enacting, and filming every scene in our ninety-minute movie. There's usually three of us working at any one time, and we've become quite efficient, but when we started this project even a very simple shot would take an age to complete. Each character in a scene has to be controlled or scripted individually, so I provide the movements for every major character at some point in the film. I'm not the only person who does, of course, but when people ask who I play in the movie, it's great to be able to casually reply, "Oh, everyone."!

So, when you're filming you turn Neverwinter Nights into a film. How does that work?

Johnnie: Intermittently!

Machinima is a great tool for telling stories faster and cheaper than conventional film-making, but it's still a meticulous and laborious process. Everything has to be pre-prepared in the same way as it would be on a conventional film set. As if that wasn't enough to worry about, we've got a couple of dozen different bits of code and software trying their best to talk to each other. It goes wrong a lot. And that's before we even talk about hardware, or the patented Strange Company User Stupidity Error.

Luckily for us, NWN is an inherently cinematic game. If you don't believe me, load up the DMClient, change your viewpoint so it's not top-down and hit 'H' to hide the HUD. Cool, huh? Follow the players around for a bit, and suddenly you're a camera. That's the essence of our process for NWN film-making. We've written tools to drastically extend our camera control and flexibility, and we storyboard each and every shot before we even turn the PCs on, but we're not really doing anything that can't be easily achieved by anyone who owns the game and has more than one friend (and if you have less than two friends, you should maybe think about putting the game away for a while).

Machinima is a form of puppetry, so we're using the game as our puppet theatre. Sometimes I'll be controlling a puppet, and sometimes I'll be filming a puppet. On really busy days, I'm doing both. If I get really frustrated, I like to make the lead character explode in a fountain of blood, guts, and gore (the 'Y' key is your shortcutting friend here). I can always create a new one from the palette. It's quite therapeutic.

Can you describe the process of filming a scene for BloodSpell?

Johnnie: Hugh and I sit down with the rest of the film-making team and a copy of the script for the scene we're working on. We talk about the possible ways we could film it. We then argue for a while. Then we start to sketch out a possible sequence of camera shots for the scene. Since none of us except Justin can draw, this usually consists of a bunch of rectangles filled with stick figures and arrows. Hugh and I argue some more. Eventually, there's a mutual cessation of hostilities and we reach a grudging consensus (usually when I realise that Hugh has been right all along).

Now, we move into the tiny room next door filled with computers, server, and our evil nemesis, the Wireless LAN From Hell. We start a LAN game using one of our own custom maps specific to this scene. We set up the first camera shot and get ready to film. It's at this point that something usually breaks. There's an equal chance of it being hardware or software, and we all join in the fun of finding out which.

Before we shot a single scene, we filmed what's known as an "animatic" - basically a moving storyboard - showing the sequence of camera shots for the entire film. This took us several months and almost gave Hugh a nervous breakdown, but it helped us to visualize the film. Then we went back and actually filmed it. Usually, Hugh works the "camera computer" (because nobody else can use his weird trackball mouse) and the rest of us move the characters and trigger emotes, custom scripts, animations, and special effects, but we swap about depending on what needs to be done. We capture footage using a dedicated capture card in a separate PC. This means that we can capture uncompressed video at maximum resolution with all the pretty bits turned on, and still get comfortably more than thirty frames a second (which is what we usually require for final output). We edit the raw footage in Adobe Premiere and AfterEffects, adding in the soundtrack, ambient sounds, and dialogue, and then render it out in a variety of different formats.

What tips would you have for other machinima creators looking to produce cutscenes or films for their mods or for machinima?

Johnnie: Turn off your computer. Seriously, step away from the keyboard and put your hands in the air. Planning and preparation is key to making good machinima (and that's what you're doing with your cutscene, like it or not). Machinima is no different to any other type of film-making or storytelling - a coherent overall vision is an essential first step – so grab a pencil and paper and start scribbling.

There have been quite a few modules released recently that have used cutscenes as a narrative device. Some have been really good, some not so great. Almost any tip that can be applied to a conventional film-maker can be applied to a machinimator, so read some books, visit some websites. In short, learn how to make a movie. There's so much to learn about camera positioning, accepted conventions, and general do's and don't's.

The 1.30 patch added a lot of great out-of-the-box cutscene functionality, but it's still worth looking at John Bye's superb Gestalt Cutscene Scripting System (a deserving Hall Of Fame entry if ever there was one). It gives you an astonishing amount of control over your camera, as well as providing useful functions like temporary character invisibility or invulnerability. There's been a lot of interesting discussion on the Bioware forums about how best to use cutscenes, which is well worth a read. If none of these let you do what you want, why not write the code yourself? I can guarantee that it'll come in useful again later on.

It's also worth visiting sites like machinima.com, and reading the articles and forums there. There are thousands of film-makers all over the world trying to achieve the same end result as you, using all sorts of diverse game engines. In my experience, the machinima community is keen to offer advice and assistance – just ask.

Of course, you don't have to use machinima to make a cutscene. You can just trigger a pre-rendered movie file if you want. If you're a 3D animation guru, you're laughing, but even mere mortals like the rest of us can come up with impressive stylised movies with a bit of sideways thinking. Remember the movies that played between chapters in the original NWN single player campaign? Not a lot of movement or animation involved, but they still looked great.

Finally, don't do it on your own. Aside from the practical difficulties, it's immensely beneficial to have someone else to bounce your ideas against. If nothing else, you need someone who's not afraid to say, "That bit where you have the lead character dodging slow-motion bullets while his designer trenchcoat billows around him...is that really essential in a British period drama?"

Editing

Who are you and what do you do?

Ross: My name's Ross and I'm the lead editor of Bloodspell.

What would you say are the most important points to keep in mind when video editing a project like this?

Ross: I find a lot of effort in editing machinima goes into keeping the flow of the film going without losing coherence in the story. I like to keep out any shots that feel too "computer gamey," such as a character standing around looking vacant or running through yet another standard animation loop. This in mind, it's easy to cut shots down too short leaving the viewer with the "when did that happen? I must have blinked" problem. A balance of lucidity in plot line with non-stagnation of flow has to be achieved.

Sound

Who are you and what do you do?

Nick My name is Nick Koumentakis and I am the sound designer, or Noise King as they like to call me, for the Bloodspell project. My role is to coordinate all the audio elements that are present within the project alongside its footage. Instead of audio being tacked on in post production, a sound designer ideally ensures that audio reinforces, and sometimes leads, visuals and narrative structure from day one in a symbiotic relationship, thus ensuring that the film grips and inspires an audience as the dream-like synaesthesia that characterizes a good film.

What would you say are the most important elements involved in sound design for a project like this?

Nick When people view sound and image together, their conscious attention is underpinned by the subconscious registering of elements and conventions of film/animation that go unnoticed or are so readily accepted that we do not think about their artificiality. Audio can reinforce the sense of the convincing "reality" of the narrative, just as it can warp that reality into the realms of dreams. One of the interesting characteristics of film sound, and particularly Foley, is that it can be produced from simulatory, "hyperreal," or utterly artificial elements, and yet those elements will still sound convincing in the right context.

The conventions of music in film are similarly flexible. For example, it is usually only in Mel Brooks films where we hear orchestral music before the camera pans over to an actual orchestra playing (though it is unlikely that the sound of that orchestra was recorded on location).

Thus, what you hear on the soundtracks of many films are not real sounds but exaggerated and twisted audio illusions. The sound may be representational, or it may be subtly or radically manipulated to interfere with the emotional states of the viewer. Machinima parallels this is in the visual realm where whole worlds can theoretically be created, no matter how strange or unnatural. Your only limitations are the limits of your technology and your ability to control it.

At its core, machinima is just another form of animation or puppeteering, but it is interesting in that a lot of it currently relies on the subversion or recycling of pre-existing elements. The computer game technology it is based on seems to be striving for ever greater realism, but that is not its current strength. Perhaps audio elements can help ease the viewer into a suspension of disbelief, so that they may forget the limitations of the medium and any residual resemblance to the gaming technology it is based on and get involved in the story that is being told.

People seem to have always had a huge capacity and desire to use their imaginations. Hopefully, people will always love good stories, no matter how interactive things get, or how amazing the illusions that media contains. I know that having chosen this way of making our film means we can take some risks we couldn't have otherwise taken and be generally more flexible and adaptive in our attempts to open up the floodgates with BloodSpell!

Next week: the secrets of making everything look good and how to animate it.

Related Links

• Making of BloodSpell Part 2
• Making of BloodSpell Part 3
• BloodSpell: A Neverwinter Nights Machinima Project
• Machinima Tutorial
• Machinima on-going series
• Neverending Nights machinima home site
• Creating intro movies for NWN
• BioWare has immediate vacancies for artists and designers

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