This article is just an expression of my thoughts towards moviemaking and its future. Besides my mouse cable seems broken.
Where it all began
It is probably impossible to determine the first fragmovie ever made. Same as fans are recording their favorite band performing on concerts, parents are filming their children in their first football games, people who’s hobby is fps-gaming make videos of their frags or memorable moments. Either as remembrance to look back at them later and remember the good ol’ times or simply to show off with their frags. For this purpose not a lot of efforts are required. Download fraps, record a few demos you remembered to be good, add some music in windows movie maker and there you have it: the most common... and boring type of fragmovies. Nowadays thanks to numerous tutorials on the web even the laziest can easily improve their movies - finding and downloading a movieconfig takes 5 minutes, another 30 minutes of work and the intro is created with a cam floating around some map and an infotext that informs the viewer what he has to expect.
But as we all know those aren’t the kind of movies that enjoy great popularity and recieve high ratings. In the beginning of the 21st century the fundamentals for todays moviemaking were laid: if earlier downloading a movie let alone creating one was a very time- and traffic consuming issue, now on the one hand download speeds started increasing and traffic limits were disapearing continuously. On the other hand the release of modern 4cc-codecs such as divx and xvid allowed retaining a decent filesize while still keeping a good quality.
Music
This helped people realize that there is more behind moviemaking. Music now isn’t just a randomtune but plays an equally important role as the frags. By the use of different types of synchronisation the movie gets a flow and follows the theme of the music. Additionally the music can create any kind of atmosphere – is it for a melodramatic tribute, a chilled jumping movie, an energetic actionmovie or something people today like to refer as ‘epic’. But as I see it moviemakers often lack to understand that every factor contributes to the viewing pleasure and all factors go together. Many moviemakers attempt to do some synchronisation and often also manage to apply it at many points throughout the movie. But this alone doesn’t always make a good movie.
Quality
To start of a small rant: What the fucking point of those quality tests flooding the own3d and the crossfire site. If you aren’t capable of evaluating the quality of a picture you are clearly too stupid for moviemaking - period
Back to the topic. In my opinion the actual quality of the movie doesn’t matter too much as long as its a clear and sharp picture. There are loads of movies that prove that you dont need HD quality in order to create an outstanding movie. Sure it’s a nice bonus and nowadays not very hard to create, yet many moviemakers seem to set quality as their highest priority and disregard all other aspects of moviemaking. This definitly isn’t the way ago. With the amount of tutorials out there recording a movie in HD quality is really easy but still people waste countless hours on improving (read: randomely altering) the picture quality. What is much more important are the colors. Even though perceived subconsciously colors have a big influence on the atmosphere. You want the content, music and quality to follow the same idea which is why Bomfunk Mc’s - Super Electric Sound probably fits better with bright, saturated colors, while Requiem for a Dream rather fits with a darker config. Then again Dj Fresh - Living Daylights might work out with intense colors, for example with a red filter.
What is not the purpose of colors is 'omgomg goldrush now has every color of the rainbow awesome omgomg'.
Editing & Content
A widespread misleading perception is that you need to have extensive knowledge of video editing programs and moviemaking mods to be able to make a proper movie. I say that is bullshit! What you need is creativity and motivation to finish the project. The perfect example for simple and yet effective editing is the recent movie Pick 'N' Roll by phaloid. Apart from the artillery simulation the editing of the fragpart pretty much only consists of velocity changes and cuts, plus some simple preset effects. It however was more then enough to create an intense fast paced movie, which is what matters in the end. Viewers watch fragmovies for entertainment, not to get bored - this is why showing a player run through half the map between frags is something to aviod. Frags should be outstanding – not something that happens on a daily basis. Even though you might have fragged mystic once the wider audience couldn't care less.
Also generally many cutting techniques from professional filmediting such as creating tension by stringing together sequences with decreasing size up to the climax (as shown in the final scene of Elegie by fredd) can be applied to fragmovies.
And finally: don’t make movies for attention or to become famous. The best movies will always be those made for fun and own pleasure.
Where it all began
It is probably impossible to determine the first fragmovie ever made. Same as fans are recording their favorite band performing on concerts, parents are filming their children in their first football games, people who’s hobby is fps-gaming make videos of their frags or memorable moments. Either as remembrance to look back at them later and remember the good ol’ times or simply to show off with their frags. For this purpose not a lot of efforts are required. Download fraps, record a few demos you remembered to be good, add some music in windows movie maker and there you have it: the most common... and boring type of fragmovies. Nowadays thanks to numerous tutorials on the web even the laziest can easily improve their movies - finding and downloading a movieconfig takes 5 minutes, another 30 minutes of work and the intro is created with a cam floating around some map and an infotext that informs the viewer what he has to expect.
But as we all know those aren’t the kind of movies that enjoy great popularity and recieve high ratings. In the beginning of the 21st century the fundamentals for todays moviemaking were laid: if earlier downloading a movie let alone creating one was a very time- and traffic consuming issue, now on the one hand download speeds started increasing and traffic limits were disapearing continuously. On the other hand the release of modern 4cc-codecs such as divx and xvid allowed retaining a decent filesize while still keeping a good quality.
Music
This helped people realize that there is more behind moviemaking. Music now isn’t just a randomtune but plays an equally important role as the frags. By the use of different types of synchronisation the movie gets a flow and follows the theme of the music. Additionally the music can create any kind of atmosphere – is it for a melodramatic tribute, a chilled jumping movie, an energetic actionmovie or something people today like to refer as ‘epic’. But as I see it moviemakers often lack to understand that every factor contributes to the viewing pleasure and all factors go together. Many moviemakers attempt to do some synchronisation and often also manage to apply it at many points throughout the movie. But this alone doesn’t always make a good movie.
Quality
To start of a small rant: What the fucking point of those quality tests flooding the own3d and the crossfire site. If you aren’t capable of evaluating the quality of a picture you are clearly too stupid for moviemaking - period
Back to the topic. In my opinion the actual quality of the movie doesn’t matter too much as long as its a clear and sharp picture. There are loads of movies that prove that you dont need HD quality in order to create an outstanding movie. Sure it’s a nice bonus and nowadays not very hard to create, yet many moviemakers seem to set quality as their highest priority and disregard all other aspects of moviemaking. This definitly isn’t the way ago. With the amount of tutorials out there recording a movie in HD quality is really easy but still people waste countless hours on improving (read: randomely altering) the picture quality. What is much more important are the colors. Even though perceived subconsciously colors have a big influence on the atmosphere. You want the content, music and quality to follow the same idea which is why Bomfunk Mc’s - Super Electric Sound probably fits better with bright, saturated colors, while Requiem for a Dream rather fits with a darker config. Then again Dj Fresh - Living Daylights might work out with intense colors, for example with a red filter.
What is not the purpose of colors is 'omgomg goldrush now has every color of the rainbow awesome omgomg'.
Editing & Content
A widespread misleading perception is that you need to have extensive knowledge of video editing programs and moviemaking mods to be able to make a proper movie. I say that is bullshit! What you need is creativity and motivation to finish the project. The perfect example for simple and yet effective editing is the recent movie Pick 'N' Roll by phaloid. Apart from the artillery simulation the editing of the fragpart pretty much only consists of velocity changes and cuts, plus some simple preset effects. It however was more then enough to create an intense fast paced movie, which is what matters in the end. Viewers watch fragmovies for entertainment, not to get bored - this is why showing a player run through half the map between frags is something to aviod. Frags should be outstanding – not something that happens on a daily basis. Even though you might have fragged mystic once the wider audience couldn't care less.
Also generally many cutting techniques from professional filmediting such as creating tension by stringing together sequences with decreasing size up to the climax (as shown in the final scene of Elegie by fredd) can be applied to fragmovies.
And finally: don’t make movies for attention or to become famous. The best movies will always be those made for fun and own pleasure.
it's over whole my screen
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well done crossfire
Comparing ET moviemaking with other games like css or cod4 could be interesting :)
This very disclaimer is made at the beginning of Castor Fiber. And it rocks. It feels like art unlike the plethora of demo+mp3 movies released these days, such as Zaigon.
rofl
Hater! read your column again... you wrote my name 5000x atleast!!!!!!
4 25 14 31 45 9 gl :)
Well, you ain't awesome, no one is awesome! but i guess it might work to help the ego ye.
this one didn't turn out to be quite true or atleast I couldn't find even one "unknown" moviemaker to make a movie for me so kinda hard to try and pick a good moviemaker if you got 0 options :d
not saying my frags are that spectacular tho, but thought atleast someone would be interested :(
movies get rated based on the moviemaker, not the movie
people are jealous, people have personal reasons, good movies get flamed, mediocre movies are voted up
this is why the ET movie scene has mostly deteriorated into generic nu-metal shit
i wanted to write a column about this and other moviemaking stuff but every time i tried to put something together i just felt like a narcisstic prick so i never bothered to post
What good movies are you refering to that got flamed?
But I agree that these people need to stop trying to get insane quality with a few thousand filters on 1 clip when they forget the most important thing, editing.
I shared my config n stuff to help, and i guess i helped... but sync can't be shared :X
I think it was good that you released your cfg and settings for megui but it made moviemaking too 'easy'. Every down syndromed kid can make movies now with good quality and the anoying thing is that most people will even like it even if there's no decent sync/cam/editing etc.
Seriously tho, it's a column, a personal opinion, I'll be happy to discuss if you disagree on any points.
Also, the major fascination in re-inventing the wheel is beyond me. There are things you can do the easy way, and lose nothing, but people choose to spend eons on such small details nobody will notice.
Same visual look is seen in almost every video, too much blur, dof, overly saturated colors and contrast is way too up. You can make a GREAT movie just concentrating on the basics, making things look good, storyboard some of the stuff, think of few things you would like to do - and then let the actual footage do the "talking".
In my opinion, people concentrate too much on fancy effects after another, it makes the end result look messy. You spend eons on encoding stuff just to see the quality isn't there.
Also, everlasting issue of syncing, it's great to have it as a effect, but to sync everything - no, make a movie that is 5 minutes long and the syncing will get boring - over saturating the viewer. It's an effect, it's not an way to do every single detail in your clip.