Home 
For Players Player Profiles The Making of BloodSpell Part 3
The Making of BloodSpell Part 3
Profile by Jay Watamaniuk
Coding. The mere word fills many with terror. Follow that up with the dreaded concept of organisation, and you could have a panic-stricken riot on your hands. However, for any machinima project, coding and organisation are essential ingredients. So, get out your garlic and plastic shields, and read our final installment of the behind-the-scenes making of BloodSpell, which dives into the dark depths of logic and herding cats.
View the official BloodSpell trailer.
Coding
Who are you and what do you do on Bloodspell?
Dragal: I am Dragal, a graduate in Artificial Intelligence and computer science. I started working on the BloodSpell project about 1.5 years ago. Initially, I was mostly involved in the level design aspects of the project. Now, as well as helping with filming, I handle much of the script writing for the project. Other interests include music, playing Go, reading, cooking, and Linux. When not involved in activities relating to these or BloodSpell, I can often be found in the pub or some dodgy club.
What would you say are the features that most impress you about NWScript, and why?
Dragal: The first thing I thought when I saw NWScript was, "Oh, it uses C type syntax," which meant it was instantly familiar. In fact, the syntax is so familiar it can be easy to forget that you're using a scripting language and to start expecting all the tools available in a fully fledged programming language. This combined with the IDE with built-in help made getting to grips with NWScript very easy.
Additionally, virtually any effect or action can easily be created thanks to the object based system.
Can you tell us a bit about why a film project needs so much coding, and what tools and scripts you've made for the project?
Dragal: One of the problems with filming using a game engine is that characters have an unpleasant habit of attacking other characters, moving at inappropriate times, and generally not doing what was expected or desired. Fortunately, Neverwinter Nights has many effects which can be used to avoid these problems. The easiest way to use these effects when filming is to create a wand that will apply that effect to a creature when it is used. Of course, each wand needs a script.
Some of the wands (and associated scripts) I/we have made include:
- A Target wand. This allows objects and locations to be stored on individual creatures. These can be used by other wands (for example) to move multiple creatures to specific points simultaneously.
- A Timed Walk wand. This moves the slected creature to an area specified by the target wand in a specified amount of time. The time is specified on a local variable stored on the creature. This wand was designed for use with camera panning wands.
- Some Camera Movement wands. These collectively allow complex panned shots to be simply set up and (repeatedly) executed. By selecting a start position and an end position, the camera can easily be moved between the two points in a certain amount of time. The camera accelerates and decelerates at the start and end of the movement to avoid sudden changes in speed.
- An Immobilize wand. This prevents a creature deciding to wander out of the shot at a critical moment.
- A Ghost wand. This makes creatures insubstantial to other creatures. Without this it would be impossible to make creatures stand close together.
- A Invisibility wand. This is possibly the most important wand for filming and was made long before I joined the team. Without this the film would be full of out of place creatures (often dwarfs in DM costumes). We use this to make our "cameraman" and other DM characters controlling the action invisible.
- A Blood wand. This enables us to make creatures bleed at will. Very useful in fight scenes.
- A Return to Mark wand. This is capable of returning all creatures on a map to previously stored locations. Useful when we need to reshoot a scene.
There are many more wands we use, as well as some that have been superceded. I am sure many more will be added to the collection as nearly every time we shoot anything someone will say, "wouldn't it be good if we could...."
What would you say is the most impressive tool that you've coded for the BloodSpell project?
Dragal: Probably the Camera Movement set of wands. This took quite a bit of work, although it was made considerably easier by the gestalt camera tools. The main problem was the lack of feedback available about the camera position. To get around this I first set the camera to a known position. After this, wands are used to move the camera. These allow the camera to be moved in a variety of increments and also to keep track of the current camera position by use of local variables stored on the creature whose camera is to be affected. This involved designing an interface that did not require too many wands (a naive implementation would have involved around 20 wands).
Organisation
Who are you and what do you do on BloodSpell?
Erin: I'm Erin McElhinney, a freelance journalist/ short film producer/ film event promoter/ stagehand/ do-anything-that-sounds-like-fun-and-involves-the-arts kind of a person. Needless to say, this means I'm also chronically poor, but I've managed to survive in Edinburgh for five years after leaving Northern Ireland.
In my spare time...I mostly like to sleep. It's highly underrated.
On Bloodspell, I am Organisey Gal, which means I look after our calendar and admin, make lists, arrange meetings, pin people down, make lists, take minutes, ring people to wake them up and then talk to them until they're really, *really* in the shower, make more lists, call up actors, recruit crew members, do research, and avoid making tea at all costs. I began and still do some of the filming, which involves me moving NWN characters around at Hugh's bequest, and then usually screaming at the monitor. A lot.
How is a massive project like BloodSpell organised?
Erin: Pretty easily. See, Bloodspell is massive in scope, but not in actuality. It's the beauty of machinima: you have a completely pared down crew, as you really only need the bare minimum to be able to make a grand project. So, there are no actors, no trailers, no egos, no 50 people to feed every day each with their own particular needs and allergies, no irate landowners to deal with or policemen asking why you're waving replica guns around in a field. That's not to say our cast doesn't provide me with their own frustrations. I'd quite happily have killed our main characters several times over. But they can't threaten to walk off set when you yell at them.
We use an online calendar and a project wiki, which, along with our livejournal, provides us all with a solid base of information to refer to. And unsurprisingly, the majority of my communication with my team members is done through email, as they are never far from a computer.
Of course, it's only going to get bigger, which will just serve me right for publicly saying that it's manageable at the moment.
As a "non-geek", how have you found working on such a techie project?
Erin: Ha! Several of my friends and former employees would stare open mouthed at me being referred to as a non-geek. Outside of Bloodspell, I'm considered pretty geeky, but as soon as I walk into Strange Company, truly, I am among the l33tz0r. As the only girl in a room full of men wearing all black (most of whom have long hair) who argue about operating systems and make obscure jokes about code, I actually feel pretty special. Like I've been considered enough of an asset - despite the fact that half of everything that's said in every filming session goes over my head - to be recruited onto the project. As soon as the boys start geeking, I either get on with my own work, try and learn a little by listening, or switch to my favourite online game of the moment. Er, just don't tell Hugh that last one.
Honestly, it's nice. They have their remits, and I have mine; and it's nice to be the only one who does what I do. Plus, when we have nights out with the voice artists, I get my own back by engaging in an enthusiastic discussion of shoes with the only other female. Stereotypes exist for a reason.
What advice would you have for less technical people thinking about working with Neverwinter Nights or machinima?
Erin: Whilst recruiting for Bloodspell, several people added a cautionary note when sending me their applications that they thought they wouldn't be 'techy' enough, and that always confused me. I'm pretty sure they were imagining a dark room full of pale, bespectacled geeks hypnotised to screens full of streaming code - and that'd be a pretty accurate assumption, actually. But there's only so much knowledge you can have in one room before you have to start *doing*, and as with any project, if you keep your eyes and ears open, pretty soon you've created your own store of knowledge, and then before you know it, you're actually contributing as much as you're learning. Besides, you need a balance - of personalities, of duties, of responsibility. If a machinima project consisted of solely technical geeks, it would suffer for it, even as an uber arty farty installation project would for lack of someone to know how to re-wire the plug that lights the whole thing up.
~
Related Links
Want to comment on this article or read what others have to say about it? Join the official discussion!
