Quick aside: I just posted a new sound-design entry (click here) on the BloodSpell Production Journal, entitled “Anatomy of a Crossbow.”
By Wednesday midnight, I was a real wreck. The reviews from within the machinima community were starting to pour in on BloodSpell, and I was really getting the impression that people just weren’t liking it. And, well, I worked with them on it, and just really wanted people to love it! So I suppose anything less than rodeo clowns doing backflips in the streets was going to be a letdown. And that’s my own fault, because I’ve been looking at this thing the entirely wrong way. (more…)
Strange Company’s epic feature film, BloodSpell, had its first episode released today, featuring thousands of pieces of custom content, an engaging story, and sound design work (and even a wee bit of music) by yours truly. Check it out… in hi-res if humanly possible… and leave ‘em a comment to tell them what you think of it!
This might be oversimplifying it, but it seems to me that there are two types of machinima filmmakers: those who start from a story or a visual idea and bring it into the world of a game engine, and those who start from a game engine and extrapolate from it a story or visual idea. Neither is right or wrong; both approaches have their share of success stories and failures. But I believe that ultimately, only one of these approaches has a future if machinima is ever to be understood at large as anything other than video game cartoons. (more…)
The recammed classic Quake2 deathmatch which launched me into machinima has been given fresh treatment over at z-studios.com. It is now available in DivX and WMV, as either an action-packed two-and-a-half minute highlight reel, or - for collectors - the entire 20-minute match, both of which feature an all new musical score.
Check it out here:
http://z-studios.com/films/thresh-vs-billox/
By the way, for those of you who track this site by way of RSS feed, z-studios.com has it’s own RSS feed, accessible from any of its pages.
Hope you enjoy this trip down nostalgia lane!
As you may or may know, the art of foley has its roots not in a post-production facility in some basement studio, but in live performance. Foley artists have all manner of contraptions - many of them homemade - to emulate all manner of sounds to provide audio illustration for films. (The craft actually has its roots in radio, a medium where sound is the only medium Elizabethan theatre, and they may have had predecessors in early Greek dramas — Thanks, gToon for the correction… see his comment below. In this century, foley work first became popular in radio dramas, and only took on the name of Jack Foley later when film hit full stride.)
Foley sound is used to enhance productions for films and television. In fact, almost none of the sounds you hear in the final edit of the movie were likely captured during filming. (more…)
Working on BloodSpell has re-exposed me to some principles of sound recording that I haven’t focused on in years, and I thought I’d share a few tips regarding the use of Reverb.
First, a couple terms so this will make a bit more sense: (more…)
