Down the Rabbit Hole

For my final project, I decided to make a machinima using video footage taken from The Sims 3. Aside from having to learn how to use the latest version (as I had only ever used the original Sims many years ago), I also taught myself how to use the in-game movie-making mode. 

Once I had recorded a selection of scenes I wanted to use, I taught myself how to use iMovie, which was on my computer.

I put the clips together and made note of what actions I still needed and set about making them happen within the game. After getting the remaining footage, I finished slicing and dicing the content into my video, but it was still missing something.

In the meantime, I was introduced to Adobe Premier Pro, which I thought was much better (or maybe it was just that I was showed how to use it properly and didn’t have to figure it out for myself!). I decided that I would keep my video file I had already created in iMovie but transfer it over to Premier to add my final scene, which I hoped would give my video something extra.

The video I’ve made is a trailer and I wanted to have the main characters from it end up watching their ‘own movie’. I thought the way to do this would be to take footage of the Sims watching TV and also the trailer credits and insert them into the same frame. I wasn’t really sure how to go about doing this so I imported the video into Photoshop as layers and then took a screenshot of the credits and made that into a layer to put over the TV screen. Because of the perspective, I had to skew the trailer credits to fit the TV. Ideally I would have liked to have had some of the trailer actually moving on the TV screen but I just couldn’t figure how to make that happen! It’s probably because I was using Photoshop but my skills with these programs are not quite advanced enough to chop moving footage into other moving footage! Something to work on in the future. I was pleasantly surprised though to find I could export my newly edited TV screen as a .mp4 by rendering the layers into video.

This footage was then added to Premier Pro where I added it to the end of my existing trailer. I then ‘unlinked’ the audio and visual from both the video made on iMovie and the new end clip. I then deleted the last few visual clips from the iMovie video and replaced it with the new footage created in Photoshop. This way, the existing music still carries through to the final clips. Finally, I added in a few extra scenes, which I re-shot to enhance the video aesthetics.

“Machinima is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production.” - Wikipedia

Machinima: “making movies using computer games” - Makeuseof

Popular games for making Machinima: - The Sims - Grand Theft Auto - Halo - World of Warcraft - Quake - Second Life - Counter Strike

Way back in week 4 or 5 we were introduced to Second Life. This was the first time I had used the program and it reminded me a lot of The Sims that I used to play back when it was first released. The only real difference seemed that people from the ‘real world’ could go on and interact with others in a virtual space, essentially an online real-life meeting place. 

This got me thinking about how when I played The Sims, I didn’t just create random characters, but people I knew from my real life. I’d create a house where I’d live with my friends without parents, I’d get us jobs doing what we all wanted to do when we grew up. We’d have electronics we couldn’t afford and relationships with the people we secretly liked in real-life. It was a place to imagine what life could be.

Talking about Dirty Media last week, someone mentioned The Matrix. I remembered this scene where they talk about there being a glitch in the matrix and I thought it would be cool to not only add a glitch to the scene about glitches, but to make the glitches flash with Agent Smith. 

In theory, if you put a clip at the beginning and then cut out parts of the media, the initial media should glitch to the first image. So on my first try, I added a clip of Agent Smith before the Deja Vu scene and then cut out the frames where in theory Agent Smith should show up. However it only ended up glitching, without revealing Agent Smith.

So I went back to my editing software and added in my own cut scene of Agent Smith in the places I thought he should show up. I then strategically placed glitches into the combined piece on either side of the Agent Smith frames so the Deja Vu scene would glitch and show Agent Smith. Above is what it resulted in. I’m pretty happy with it. It could be better but for a an experiment it went quite well :)

Below is a screenshot of me selecting footage to use.