wtorek, 27 grudnia 2011

A portal :)

Today, I've made another simple 2D sprite, this time it's a standard q3/ql portal.



I thought of this neat idea today while making these sprites. I want to make a short quake-ish 2D platformer game and attach it to the movie. I already saw some tutorials on youtube. It might learn something useful and have some fun at the same time.:)

But don't worry, I'm still working on the movie. This portal will be used in the intro, and I've also made a background but I won't be sharing that with you. You'll see it in the movie. I'll be making updates more frequently now, so you're welcome to check for news every now and then. :)

niedziela, 25 grudnia 2011

Workworkwork

Today I've made a retro 2D sprite of the sarge model. I'll use it in the intro. Made an forum avatar from it for cityy.




I don't have much experience with pixel art, and I think it came out pretty decently. Tomorrow I'll try putting it into vegas:)

sobota, 24 grudnia 2011

Merry christmas!

Heey, it's this time of a year again. Time sure flies. While I'll be eating tasty things with my family, vegas will render some previews. Time management ftw.

So yeah, merry christmas everyone and happy holidays!

Back to work!

Few days ago I resumed work on the movie. It's almost christmas time and I have a lot of different stuff to do as well but I try to spend my free time on movie making.

I didn't start putting the actual movie together yet, but I'm getting closer to that. Yesterday I've put all of the frags I've got into vegas and rendered previews. If put together these previews make up to about 10 minutes of footage. Of course I won't use all of that. In the end the movie will be somewhere between 4 and 6 minutes, or at least that's what I'm planning. I want to keep it short and interesting. Long movies tend to get boring after a while and I'd rather see people complaining that it was too short than the opposite.












I'll probably go back to wolfcam later on to render a recam or two for appropriate moments in the movie.

Also, still not 100% sure about music, and it's been over a year now that I'm thinking about it. heh. oh btw while talking about dilemmas. I have no freaking idea how to name it. Hopefully I'll think of something while editting.

When will it be ready? In 2012 for sure.

środa, 2 listopada 2011

Bleh

Well, I haven't posted for a while, the reason behind that is simple. For now, I've lost motivation to work on my current project. It doesn't mean that I'm dropping it. The release is postponed and that's it.
Right now I'm learning 3D modelling in ZBrush. It's a great tool and after learning it I will be able to use it to improve my quake videos as well as start making my own 3d models and animation (with some additional software). I really want to get into this kind of stuff and express myself.
Quake videos have a very niche audience, whereas CG art scene is huge but at the same time very demanding (almost as demanding as ESR users ;))
So yeah, apart from my quake vids, expect some 3d content from me in the future.

środa, 28 września 2011

Footage ready

Wooosh, it's been a month since my last post and I didn't work on the movie too much during this period.

But it's not that bad. Today I finished capturing the footage. I wanted to start working with vegas, but I encountered some problems, I'll deal with them tomorrow, probably will have to reinstall.

I want to render a preview off all of the frags and see about long much I can do with them (movie duration). I focus on the content, and I rejected so many frags already, damn.

Not sure if my post is making much sense, it's pretty late and I'm tired as hell.

niedziela, 28 sierpnia 2011

Short break.

Capturing the footage from the demos made me excited about the movie again:) Gonna do my best!!

But unfortunatelly, I'll have to deal with some personal boring stuff releated to my university in the following days, so yeah gonna leave home for a couple of days. But when I'm back -> movie making full speed ahead :)

piątek, 26 sierpnia 2011

The Afterspray - summary

On 26th of August 2010, exactly a year ago, I released my last movie - The Afterspray. So far it's my most successful one. Let me give you guys some numbers. Over the past year it accumulated over 32000 views on youtube.com and over 18000 views on own3d.tv, that equals over 50000 views in total and counting.

The number of downloads isn't as big but considering that not everyone is collecting quake movies and, sadly, people tend to watch only the stream, which is totally not the same thing as watching it from your hdd, but almost 2000 downloads, which makes 5 downloads per day on average, is enough to make me happy. :)

The movie was posted on various sites in many languages and most of the comments were positive. There also was a little bit of constructive criticism and I'll use it while editing my current project, which, by the way, will be very different from afterspray, which I made thinking about making something that the community will like, this around time it'll be about using an original idea/theme for the movie that I thought it would be cool to work on.

Anyway, if you haven't seen The Afterspray yet, or you watched it a long time ago, it's a nice opportunity to watch it again :)


Capturing footage!


Two days ago I finalized some ql config releated stuff, yesterday I cleaned up 100 gigs from my HDD and today I've began capturing footage:) Already captured all the frags that I rated 10/10 and half way through the 9's. Things are going super fast :)

Oh, btw according to my flag counter, yesterday my blog hit 1337 unique visitors w00t!


Pretty cool I must admit. Anyway, I found a nice blog with music that will fit into the movie, so yeah a lot of listening again:) The music that I use in my videos is really important to me.

Expect more blog post in the near future :)

czwartek, 11 sierpnia 2011

Three dee!

Hello there, it's been a while since my last blog post. Suprisingly now that I have a lot of free time I lack motivation to work on the movie. Some days are exceptions though and I'm close to starting capturing footage. Before that I have to finalize custom stuff, like the hud or in game billboards. At first I didn't have a slightest clue how to make a hud, but thanks to http://visualhud.pk69.com/ it became childs play. Since the hud I'll use will have a custom font / icons, I had to go through the hassle of locating the responsible files in the ql .pk3's. If anyone is interested I might share my knowladge about it later on.

Meanwhile I found and fixed some minor flaws in the cfg and still, as always till the last minute, triend to find a perfect song(s?) for the movie. That's a really hard task considering that the music genre is really niche this time and I'm sure a lot of people will really hate it only because of the music. It will really fit the theme of the movie and there's no turning back now. At least it will be original. :)

Oh yeah as the title of this blog post says I'm starting to learn 3D modeling and animation. I got myself ZBrush and 3Ds max and some ebooks about them. So yeah, if I'll work hard I might learn something and use it in my movies, and more!:) Something to look forward to.

Uh, I'm pretty sure a lot of people is already dead tired of waiting for this movie to be released, well I'm really sorry but I'm a normal human and I also have other things to do then just dwell in front of the screen, also I don't want to rush it. So yeah, it'll be released when it's done.

piątek, 29 lipca 2011

ding dong!

Today is my last day of work, actually, I'm writing this post from a PC of a friendly local worker, there's a badass laser right next to me, cutting shapes from metal plates.

So yeah, later today I'll have to clean up the dorm and pack my stuff, my father will pick me up in the evening.

Yeeeeah, vacations! Finally a lot of time to focus on the movie. You're probably wondering how's the movie going, and well, it's going slow. Recently I've upgraded wolfcam to 8.3 and noticed this nifty little command that let's you render footage at higher res then your screen supports, so yeah probably the highest res version will be 1080p but I don't think that it's gonna be the 'main version' what I mean is that the size of frag messages and stuff will be adjusted to the 720p version. I also worked a bit on custom content, like the ingame ads, hud etc - stuff that I have to finish before I start capturing footage.

Recently a few nice movies popped up on ESR, I was envious of zeroql's movie crisp and clear quality so I asked him about it, he gave me a link to a youtube tutorial for ultra HD movies or something, heh, to be honest I expected something more than that, like megui presets, bitrate or something, but it's fine as long as I'll get the desired quality :)

piątek, 15 lipca 2011

In-game ads and stuff

Today I was playing around with quakelive's insides, I always wondered what's the path to the in-game billboard ads. For anyone interested, they're in pak00 and the path is "textures/ad_content", insides there's ad1x1.jpg (256x256), ad2x1.jpg (512x256 - the typical big billboard), ad4x1.jpg (1024x256) ad8x1.jpg (1024x128) and adbrightoverlay.png which is present on space map billboards (special effect thingy, cba to explain). This will be my first movies with custom ads, and that will most probably be it when it comes to custom stuff, I'm not a big fan of these cpma weapon effects and particles, sorry.

czwartek, 14 lipca 2011

cfg, codecs and quality

Today I was messing around with compression and quality. I've finally set up a nice in-game configuration and I'll be uploading a quality preview to youtube soon (download link as well). I'm thinking about making high and low quality versions. The high quality version would be 720p at 50fps, right now I can't render 1080p videos, would need a new monitor. I'm not sure about the low quality version yet, probably also 720p but 30fps.

There's still a lot to do and hopefully I'll find the motivation.

piątek, 1 lipca 2011

Resumed work.

Yesterday, I worked out a decent movie config on wolfcam. Updated MeGui and noticed that I have to download some presets. I've also noticed that I have some demos that I didn't cut last time. After a while I got bored. :<

Today after work I was too tired to do anything with the demos.

I need some motivation to get into full speed:)

wtorek, 21 czerwca 2011

Getting there.

I'm pretty sure everyone who has sent me demos is getting impatient by now. I didn't get to work on the movie yet, BUT! I'm almost done with exams and stuff@uni. Since the 1st of July I'll be working in the weekdays from 7am to 3pm, but don't worry I'll have time for movie making since unlike university, I won't have any 'homework'. So yeah, starting on July the 1st I'll be movie making on full speed. Expect updates, teasers and such.

Oh yeah, btw, I applied to a 2nd course on uni, and guess what, it's about computer animation, movies and montage. :> Perfectly fits my interests. I hope, I'll manage two courses simultaneously, we'll see :)

sobota, 21 maja 2011

Slow, slow, super slow

Yeah things aren't going as fast as I'd like them to. I really have a shitload of stuff to do for uni and on top of that I had some personal things happening which surely didn't motivate me to work on the movie.

Since I've already seen and rated all the demos, it pretty much comes down to capturing and putting everything together.

When I started working on this movie I thought to myself 'Ok, I'll work an hour or two on the movie everyday during weekdays and some more on the weekends and it'll be done in no time!' - but now I've realized that I can't work like that, I can't split my attention between movie making, uni and personal life, so to work on the movie I have to really focus on it. I won't have much time to spare until July, and that's when I'll be able to focus solely on the movie.

Also, I'm not gonna accept anymore demos, I think I have enough, or at least I hope so. I'll do my best. Oh and btw, I'll be working on another movie this summer, I'm probably even more excited about it than I am on my current project. heh anyways, probably gonna take a while before I post something again, but don't worry, once I'll get to work seriously on the movie, I'll make up for it.

czwartek, 21 kwietnia 2011

Long time no blog!

Things are going very slow recently, I don't have much spare time. When I do have a free moment and the will to work - I re-watch all the demos and rate them, later on it will help my greatly with arranging the frags around. I want to focus on the flow of the movie.

In a couple of hours I'll go catch the train home. Gonna stay there for Easter.. So yeh, happy easter guys.

niedziela, 13 marca 2011

phew.

Just catched up with all the demos I've received so far. From 1,8 GB I rejected 1,49 GB and accepted 325MB.. and believe it or not, I still want more.

More outstanding frags of course, not average, common frags. I'll be working on a trailer to encourage players to send in more frags, I'll announce a deadline once the trailer is released.

Few days ago I received my additional cooling unit so high temperatures aren't a problem anymore. I'm really happy with it.

You might think that I'm really slow with this, but I have other stuff to worry about too, movie making is nothing more than a hobby, and I don't get paid for it. This semester at uni is really tough, I have to work on simultaneously on 4 different projects and learn how to use ansys and matlab. But it's interesting so I can't really complain.

poniedziałek, 21 lutego 2011

*yawn*

I've just spent a night on watching demos, and there's still quite a bit to watch. I can give you some numbers

From a total of 1,14 GB of demos I have received so far I:

  • have rejected 453 MB
  • have given an ok to 218 MB
  • still have to watch 482 MB

I'm being strict and I've been rejecting a lot of stuff that any other movie maker would gladly accept. I really want to have some outstanding content in this movie, and I surely won't rush the release, I'll take my time to polish it up until I'm happy with it.

Tomorrow I'm heading back to uni, and I'll do my best to fit movie making somewhere in my daily schedule. As for today, I'll try to watch some more demos.

niedziela, 6 lutego 2011

Few thoughts about frags

Since quakelive is offline right now I can't watch demos for the movie, I thought I'll write a bit about frags for movies.

While watching the submitted demos I noticed few things.

Nowadays when we watch a frag movie we want to see really good content. The frags should be unique and fresh, everyone is already bored by ztn plasma + rail spawn kills, dm6 'rail-jumppad' lg holds, etc. Also, the viewer is looking for kills that require skill, random spammed rocket that results in a mid air rocket isn't anywhere as good as a precisely landed one. Every-day, casual frags don't have a place in frag movies as well. We all know that.. Yet, for some reason, some players (and I'm not talking about only newbies but recognizable players also) don't seem to understand it.

Before submitting a frag, people should actually watch it one more time and ask themselves "Would I like to see a frag like this in a movie?". Everyone always approaches the content of frag movies in a critical way, everyone should look at their own frags in the same way.

You might be thinking that I'm asking for too much.. hell, maybe I do! But if you don't like it then submit your demos elsewhere, there's a bunch of beginners that would be more than happy to get to work on 'average movie quality' frags.

Heh, this post has such a negative feel to it. It's not like I've rejected all the demos I received, some of them are really nice.

If you've submitted some demos to me and you're wondering if they were rejected beforehand just e-mail me and I'll let you know.

Oh and btw, in the info post I mentioned that I'm looking for entertaining and dynamic frags. I had to reject some frags because they weren't dynamic enough but I'm sure some other movie maker would be very happy to work on them because they deserve to be in a movie, they just wouldn't fit in the one that I'm working on. So yeah as I wrote in the last paragraph just e-mail me. To be honest everyone who's submitted some demos should e-mail. Now let's see how many of you follows this blog and is actually interested how things are going, hah! My guess is none :)

Oh and btw 2, I had to reject some frags because they were used in other movies. I don't understand people that submit frags to many moviemakers at once. You could at least let me know! *cough*draven*cough*

Oh and btw 3, I'm still accepting demos!

niedziela, 30 stycznia 2011

Watching demos part.1 :>

Yeeeeah, finally I found some time and actually had the motivation to go through a part of the demos yall gave me so far. So yeah, today I watched 63 demos, out of these only 33 were labeled as OK. The rest was rejected, either because they were too average or were already used in another movie or weren't a quakelive demo at all (yeah really, wtf :D). It took a few hours to get through those demos, and my notebook didn't like it apparently.. even new its bottom is hot.. gotta buy a cooling mat or w/e it's called.

Oh yeah, and for those who are wondering: I'm still accepting demos. :) Right now I'm in the middle of the exam period but once it's over I'll have from 2 to 3 weeks of free time! yeeeh! And I'm planning to spend it on movie making mostly.