First stop is one of my first "large" projects: Eden.
EDEN POSTMORTEM
Student Film, Spring 2011
Eden was a machinima (a film created within a game's engine) created on the Source engine, long before their rad movie maker was released.
With Eden I was in charge of managing our post-production team, providing SFX, music, editing our rough cuts, and applying post-production with a final soundtrack.
Challenges:
1. Getting everyone together for team meetings and collaboration.
Getting a team of 10-12 students together to create this short film was a surprisingly daunting task. Everyone had different schedules, abilities, and conflicts. At my recommendation we ended up creating a team dropbox that we could use to keep files together and a text log to register what changes were made by whom and when. We also used a shared google doc to keep contact and manages changes. It ended up working really well. We had expectations and short meetings during our classes then we were left largely to our own devices. I checked up on my team, addressed needs, and made sure that everyone had a goal and time to get it finished. I made sure our levels came a long well, cleaned up and edited our film, and acquired sound and music to use.
2. Source Engine
Before Valve's slick new movie maker was released, machinima in their Source engine was fickle at best. It was prone to crashing, difficult to prod into what you wanted, and difficult to manipulate as well. For the sound on this one, I originally tried to replace sound within the engine to better learn their tools and see what I could accomplish, which worked...sometimes. Instead I found that doing most of our sound in post was much more efficient and when Source crashed for the third time in a row editing gunshots, I decided I'd stick with Premiere Pro to the end. In lieu of the frequent crashes I made period backups to our site, to an external hard drive and had CTRL+S macro'd on my mouse to save frequently.
3. Sound Effects
I volunteered to do our sound and post because I was one of only two film students in our group (as I recall), I'd recently gained a taste for doing sound and wanted practice, and ultimately I thought it would be fun to do. I quickly discovered that our Source files were very limited and the SFX there had been overused to death and easily identified by their game.
I decided to borrow sound effects and music from films that our short film paid homage to: namely, Blade Runner. The gun sounds and music were lifted from the film and I edited them largely to retain their original quality, but better fit our world and my own taste. I ran the gunshots through a lot of reverb, some phasing, through a low pass filter, and lastly stretched their decay a bit to draw out the post-shot sound.
Results:
To this day I think that the writing was cliche'd, some of the voice acting could have been better, and my music composition (which I accomplished with my computer keyboard and a lot of plugins in FL Studio) could have been better.
But for my first student project, not bad. I was able to learn a lot about implementing sound and scripts into a game engine, tweak existing sound effects, and work as a leader of a team and with my team as a whole to accomplish something.
In fact, at the short film's premiere, U of U's Student Machinima films, we won "Audience Choice". I think my family and friends contributed to the majority of those votes. Our producer, director, writer, Luke Hartvigsen, sent our submission to the International Student Film Festival in Hollywood, where it won "Best Science Fiction" award. Pretty cool.
http://unews.utah.edu/news_releases/u-student-scores-sci-fi-win-at-film-festival/
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