A Machinima / Live-Action/CG Movie Intro By Mark Weiss On ExposureRoom

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This was a joint project between a friend of mine, who is discovering the XBox 360 and enjoys the game called Halo 3, and myself.
He captured game footage, which we played back on our big screen in-studio. We shot some live action sequences of the girl playing the game and operating the game controller with a Sony HVR-V1U HDV camera.
The house and foliage were created in Maya 2008 and a virtual camera was animated to track along the same angle and direction as an HDV camera on the cable in the studio.
I achieved this tracking shot by stretching a steel cable about 35' long from one end of the studio to the other at an angle to match the approach angle of a CG camera I had animated earlier in Maya 2008.
The moon shot was footage I captured last August in Woodbury, CT. Planets and nebula are CG animation created in Maya 2008.
Sound effects were a mix of game audio, cicadas that I recorded a couple of years ago, and sounds I created on a Kurzweil K2600RS here in our studio.
The entire movie is about 20 minutes long and is posted elsewhere on the internet. This intro was my work.

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Updated: 4 months ago

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Interesting Mark. Wouldn't have though you were into CGI stuff. The camera flying into the house from the window was interesting and well done.

So aliens took her?

Thanks for the accolades. It was a creative challenge that a friend put me up to. He's into "Machinima", which is using the XBox360 graphics engine to create new stories. He had a full crew of voice actors over to his office several times last January to voiceover dub the action scenery.
I had the task of showing the XBox overheating and malfunctioning, which causes Susan to get 'sucked into the game' --literally. The next 18 minutes are about her trying to convince the other game players that she's real and needs to get back to the real world.
I suggested the camera fly through, but when we looked into crane rentals and the hassle of stringing steel cables across someone's yard--in January--I decided to try CG for the outside scene. Then I planned the animation camera path carefully to match the physical camera's tracking path and estimated the timing by walking the interior path and counting off the seconds.
The rest was achieving the right CG lighting to simulate a full moonlit evening in August.
My friend's idea of the XBox overheating sounded absurd, so I wrote a new script and made the cause of the transformation due to a nebulae passing through the earth's solar system. As the nebulae passed, all time stands still--hence the jet stopping in mid-flight.
It was challenging to mix the sound FX, which were derived from everything from cicadas on an August night, to thunder, plus using some of the internal synthesis of the Kurzweils. Often a lot of experimentation is involved in finding just the right sound for a certain effect.
It was a fun project that makes a decent portfolio item.

A Machinima / Live-Action/CG Movie Intro

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