Moviestorm in Education: Long Road College, Cambridge

Students from Long Road Sixth Form College recently completed their animation coursework videos using Moviestorm.

The Level 2 Media students were asked to come up with a short three to four minute moving image product using Moviestorm. The groups gave initial ideas into a typed proposal and from this generated storyboards and in some cases design sheets. They then moved on to producing their final videos, which can be watched here.

Two groups (3 & 4), one all boys and the other mostly girls, chose a scenario about teenage party life. Two groups (1B & 2) chose to do a music-based production, a music video and a reality music TV show. The last group (1A), ventured an ambitious first episode of a ‘Youtube’ style series.

 Long Road Media teacher Steve Thorne said:

"Great time and effort was spent adding the small details. One example was the music video group’s work to recreate the band to look the same as the real one! After working with Moviestorm again this year I think working in pairs generates the best results and group time management."
 
Before the final Moviestorm videos were produced, the groups of students worked on either the characters or settings and then brought them together to add the camerawork and action.

Steve chose Moviestorm to give the students the opportunity to work with a 3D animation software so they didn’t have the same limited scope of the usual video productions shooting scenes around the college. He added:

"This was their chance to use filmmaking techniques in a virtual setting. They also had complete control over every element within their production. I think the generated animations link well to game design and advanced 3D animation software packages."

"Overall it’s been a fantastic resource for the course. The students have really taken to it and enjoyed the production work very much. It’s definitely going to be built into the course more next year!" 

 The initial production stages followed the Moviestorm six-stage production process. All groups were very committed to the ‘Sims’ style character design stage and the production of the virtual settings. CEO of Moviestorm Andrew Kennedy said:

"The students at Long Road demonstrated a rapid development of filmmaking skills and final sophistication between their demos and final movies, and it is nice to see ideas that were formulated whilst they initially played with the software for the first time coming through in their final pieces. 

Steve Thorne needs to be congratulated in creating this module, as it is giving the students an opportunity to test and develop their individual filmmaking skills without the normal logistical and budgetary restrictions, from production design and casting, into scene direction and camerawork, and through to sound design and editing skills. We hope to see more collaborations and films from this group of students, and look forward to supporting Long Road Sixth Form College into the future."

Further links

Final videos here: https://vimeo.com/album/2367854

Demo videos here: https://vimeo.com/album/2302569

Flickr Album here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30136544@N08/sets/72157633378985852/

One, two, three. THREE?

One of the things we're currently looking at - and before you get your hopes up, this is firmly in the category of "when it's ready" - is animations involving more than two characters. This was something we've decided we need to do to improve our fight scenes, and something that's been on the wish list for about five years. Way back when we wrote the first spec, we were throwing around ideas about movie cliches. Here are a few that came up in the section on fighting:

• One guy pins another guy's arm behind his back while a third socks him in the stomach.
• A wounded guy is carried with his arms around the shoulders of two others.
• Caught in an alley, fighting the guy in front, get sapped from behind (or kidney punched).
• Caught by a mob.
• Step between two fighters, push them apart. (Referee?)

They're all great movie moments, but all of these require three or more characters to be closely involved in the action. And that, according to the guys building it, is a real challenge.

Animating one character is tricky enough, when you think of how many different actions you need to combine (walking, talking, breathing, holding something, gesturing, and so on). Animating two characters working together is really hard. You have to make sure they fit together without intersecting or missing. According to one of the guys working on The Sims 3, they spent several years trying to get two characters to walk hand in hand, and they eventually gave up. If you look closely at any game, you'll see people intersecting or air kissing. That usually doesn't matter in a game, where you're focusing on getting through the level or landing that dream job. But in a movie, where the viewer is focused on the characters, it's a big problem.

We have some two-person animations. Not as many as we'd like, admittedly, but enough to have some basic character interaction.

But now we're going to have a go at three person animations. We won't get everything on that list above, and it may take a while, but hey - we'll see what we can do.

Moviestorm 1.4 is imminent

It's taken a while, but it's going to be worth the wait. We've just assembled a complete build of Moviestorm 1.4, and it's looking good. We're dealing with a few minor issues over the weekend, then we'll be putting it through its final tests on Monday & Tuesday. If all goes well, we'll release it mid-week - and then our entire programming team is taking a well-earned holiday!

Moviestorm 1.4 includes a whole bunch of new features that you're just going to love. If you've been following the dev blog, you'll have seen us getting excited about them over the last couple of months. Individually, they're pretty cool. Now that we've put them all together, though, they add up to a huge leap forward.

• For a starters, there's a whole new dressing room, and a completely new head creator. You can morph faces in a huge variety of ways, add make-up and decals, and you can create random characters to give you inspiration or fill out your extras quickly. Oh, and we fixed those annoyingly visible neck seams. That's something we've wanted to deal with for absolutely ages!
• There's a totally new lighting system, which gives you much better lighting and really brings out the relief in your movies. It's a tri-light system which allows you to create effects similar to the traditional three-light system used on real-life movie sets. It includes lighting presets, so you can quickly flip to day, night, or low-light scenes. You can still use the old ambient & directional system if you want, but once you've used this, you won't want to go back. There's also a new color chooser which remembers the last colors you picked, which is handy for so many reasons.
• The help system has been completely revamped. It's now much easier to use, and links through to the video tutorials. There's also a beta of the prop info tool: press one key and it shows you what every prop on the set can do. We also made a printable cheat sheet that you can stick in front of your keyboard or on top of the screen.
• One of the most important "under the hood" updates is the auto-save and backup system. You can store up to ten backups of each movie, which means that it's easy to experiment with a scene, decide you don't like the way it's going, and get back to a previous version.
• And, as we promised, we worked our way through a bunch of "papercuts", those little annoying things that irritate the hell out of you. Like the save dialog, which always confused people, and now makes sense. Or the load movie screen, which you can now order by date and quickly find the last movie you worked on. And when you load a movie, it goes back to the last view you were in. And so on.

The test team keep telling us how much easier and quicker it is to use Moviestorm now, and how the new characters really allow you to get much more variety into their movies. We're really looking forward to seeing what you guys do with it. The movies you've created so far have amazed us, and we're sure that you're going to do something truly astonishing.

Your face looks different

Last week, we showed you some of the more extreme heads we could make with the new face creator. This week, we've got some more normal looking male and female faces, the sort of thing you're more likely to use for most of your movies.

Bear in mind that this is still in development, and we're still adding new things and chipping away at the rough edges, so these aren't final. However, it's clear that we've got vastly more variation in these characters than we've had before, even without going for pointy ears, hooked noses, or oversize chins.

More tantalizing hints

You can glean a lot about what's going on from the feed of the updates committed to the main Moviestorm codebase: here's just a few entries from today:

• Revision 23995 Committed by amos_willbond: - Updated icons for morph regions (character shop).
• Revision 23996 Committed by amos_willbond: - Further changes to morph area icons (character shop)
• Revision 24001 Committed by chris_ollis: - Extra face textures for morph male
• Revision 24012 Committed by ben_sanders: - Mouth height separated, and full morphs added
• Revision 24013 Committed by ben_sanders: - Added blood and blemishes to the skin detail
• Revision 24014 Committed by ben_sanders: - Beards added
• Revision 24015 Committed by ben_sanders: - Copied beard thumbs from core

The new character workshop is definitely taking shape!

Smooth

If you're hearing strains of Santana then that's about right - have a look at this pic straight from my dev machine (it's not even been committed to the Moviestorm source code repository yet!).

That neck seam has been bugging me for years but I've finally found a way to get it smooth from head part to body part. Annoyingly the answer's been staring me in the face for almost as long, but there's so much to do and so little time.

Hopefully, we'll get this to you as part of the next major Moviestorm release.

Video blogging

Just as an experiment, we decided to present the latest news of what we're up to as a short video blog. Let us know whether you like this format.

The miracle of birth: where Moviestorm characters come from

Sometimes we wonder about Chris. There he sits at his desk, surrounded by pictures of Bjork, Ne-Yo, Rihanna, and Lily Allen, listening to My Chemical Romance, Green Day, and Bat for Lashes, while browsing Etsy, Hot Topic, Yukka and Vintage Vixen. He tells us it's research.

Then he sits in the coffee room, doodling and mumbling to himself, with that strange look in his eyes that all artists get. You know, the one that says, "I'm being creative, don't talk to me, just bring me doughnuts and drinks heavily laden with caffeine."

After a while, stuff like this gets mysteriously plastered on the walls of the office, usually half-way up the stairs. or left lying on people's desks in plain brown envelopes.

And a while later, new Moviestorm characters appear.

(More screenshots soon, but here's one of those guys in action.)