Here Come The Girls!

You wanted a version of the crowd scene with the ladies? Here you go.

The sweet thing about machinima is that this only took a couple of hours to put together. All I did was start up my movie, save it as a new movie, and go through the cast list one by one, converting each of the 60-odd characters into their nearest female equivalent. Then, just for the hell of it, I made some small changes to the set and the lighting, adjusted the colour of the intro text, and hit render. Lovely.

I also did some quick calculations as to how long it would take me to get those shots in real life. Say, a few hours booking the hall, and sorting out the people to do the shoot, making sure they knew when to arrive. Another hour or so making sure the more outlandish costumes were ready. A crew of three or four would spend a couple of hours putting out chairs and getting the room ready before the cast arrive. That's about 13 or 14 man-hours already. Then the cast arrive, we get them changed, run them through what's needed, and shoot it a few times. Say, if we're really lucky, an hour each for the male and female versions. That's another 125 man-hours for the cast, and another 10 or so for the crew. All in all, about 140 man-hours to get those two shots filmed, then we take the footage home and edit it. I'd have to put in, say, about 16 hours.

And that, of course, assumes everything went swimmingly. I didn't even think about insurance costs, actor releases or other legal stuff. And what's the likelihood of getting 60 people to perform flawlessly in an hour, even if all they have to do is walk onto a stage?

Doing it in machinima took me about 12 hours for the first one, and another 2 for the second one. That's about the same effort on my side as doing it for real, but only 10% of the total number of man-hours and a fraction of the hassle.