The Movies !

Just wondering if anyone else has had a dabble with this yet ?

I took a bit of time out from programming to make my first little movie entitled - "The Beast Within"

You can view/review it here :

http://movies.lionhead.com/movie/16381

Be interested to see anyone else's efforts !

Mmm, I have my eye on this little squiffer. Had some good reviews.

I bought Q4 and F.E.A.R. today - so I'll wait a bit. However, I certainly have my eye on 'The Movies'.

Heh, that is good - I didn't know the movies they make are so long - it is still playing

I played it a bit at a netcafe, but after an hour or so decided not to get it due to the severe lack of a "bulldozer" type tool or other way to rearrange the lot.

You can pick up and move buildings, fixtures, everything.

Yes, but it takes several decades to rearrange even a small studio.

Cool ... checking out your ...

OK watched it! Great stuff!

LOL! That was actually pretty cool! I'm surprise you can actually do all that with the Movies. I wonder how long it took to do it though.....cause that was a pretty long flic. It seems as though you messed up a bit towards the beginning cause some of the guys spoke without moving their lips. But i thought it was hilarious how the sherrif beat the crap out of the Chinese dude....but who ever knew what would happen at the end.....actually I knew it was comming.....

The flic was long as hell......but still pretty cool. I definately have to check this out...

after watching this..... I'm going to get it.

So do you record your own voices, or does the software generate it for you?

You record your own voices which are then automatically lip-synched to the actor you choose. It's the best part because it allows you to really act out the roles ! The sound quality in mine is very poor as I just used a cheap headphone mike - with a proper mike and some voice tweaking software you could really ham it up !
If you don't want to use voices you can use sub-titles instead.
You can also add your own sound effects and music or just use the stock one's from those supplied which are numerous.
Some lip-synch detail is lost though when you export to the online format. Exporting to the highest detailed format gives great results.
My movie would be considered quite long - most of them are under 5 minutes but you can make them any length you want. Takes quite a bit of time to do properly - probably spent about 4 days solid on this one as it contains over a hundred different scenes.

Interesting Smiff.
Would you mind answering these questions? ..

1) Is each character capable of doing all the pre-defined animations like punch, fight, fall down, frown, smile, run, walk, etc .. ?

2) How detailed can you go? For example, can you make a car pull up outside a building, get your actor to enter the vehicle and drive off?
Do you have controls over vehicles speed and movement path for instance?

3) What about camera actions? Again, how much control do you have? .. examples: fade out, follow actor, blur, lighting

Thanks in advance.

Yes, every single bipedal character is interchangeable and can do all the actions. This gives you a lot of flexibility when choosing scenes. It allows you to have e.g 2 men snogging - if you're that way inclined - or 2 girls slow dancing - which sounds better to me !!
The downside to this is that all characters are similarily sized because they use the same skeleton - there are no children or small characters.

To answer the first question - yes. Every set has a whole load of scenes with vehicles pullin up - setting off - people getting in - getting out. You can vary the number of people getting in or out.
To answer the second question I would need to explain in a bit how the film making process works. Very basically every set has a list of possible scenes that can be played out on it - probably a couple of hundred. Some of these scenes are common accross all sets while some are available only on certain ones. In every scene there may be up to 10 actors playing out specific actions - you assign your actors to the action you want them to perform. You can assign extras to any secondary actions or just leave them unassigned.
Every scene has tweakable parameters - for example you can change the state of emotion or degree of violence, change the direction of motion etc.
You can also change things like lighting and weather.

You do not have total control over the cameras but have some degree of control e.g choosing crane or dolly.
The way to get what you really want is by clever editing - shoot a scene twice using different parameters and then editing them together with the post-production tool.

All in all its extremely flexible and pretty much anything is possible. There is a vast amount of sets and scenes to get started and there will be a "propshop" opening on the 7th December where you can download net sets & scenes - whole new genres are expected !
The game can also be modded with your own backdrops and costumes.
The StarMaker tool allows you to create your own actors as well - you can pretty much create any character you could imagine.
As you may have noticed I'm quite impressed.

That looks great!
"What did you do to the guy, geez?!?!" ;-)
As soon as I find a job - I'm gettng my hands on one of these!

I would expect that there will be a series of sims style expansions with all the missing things. Such as children. loads more scenes. Loads more genres... and loads more of everything.

should be good. And will spawn lots and lots of machinema. Altough.... would you call it machinema?

I have to say that I love the Movies as it makes me hark back to the good old days when Game Studios would innovate and do something different. It also runs far quicker on my old laptop than other games with similar and sometimes worse graphics so it appears that Lionhead can also code efficient engines too.

Innovation, efficiently programmed.... the writing must be on the wall for Lionhead in today's world.

I couldn't figure out what the site actually does or how to make my own movies. What is it?

" Your browser is not configured correctly to receive WMV streamed video"

Oh wait, you can save it to harddrive thank god :)

Haven't seen it all but that's pretty, best not let me get my hands on that game, otherwise I'd just make something really disturbing.

There's no cheese models in the game. =]