was good, but a bit cliche in execution. Hopefully it isn't the crux of the final product. I assume you stopped the camera and put the character in everytime there was a flash, then edited down the appearance?
Cheers Sarge, it would have been even more cliched if I'd kept the violin screech in at the end :L The trailer actually has little relevance to the final product, the figure you see appearing in it does appear in one of the later episodes but isn't central to the plot in the long run. I recorded two video clips going down the hallway on orbital at the same speed, one with the person in it, the other without. Then in After Effects I placed the empty hallway footage ontop of the other clip. By quickly changing the opacity of the top layer from 100% to 0% then back to 100% I created the flash effect. Then I added the horizontal blue lines and noise every time this happened.
How did you manage to get the exact same angle and the exact same speed? the latter seems easier to accomplish than the former (preset speeds?)
I recorded it in the same clip of gameplay footage. I kept the character out of the scene for a few minutes and recorded going down the empty hallway at a slowish speed. Then I returned to my starting position, without bumping into any objects along the way keeping me at the same angle, waited for the character to appear and recorded it again at roughly the same speed. If the camera was too far ahead at one place I would cut back a bit of footage from one of the layers and reposition it so that when the flash effect occurred the camera would be roughly in the same place. Towards the end though, you can see that the camera appears to jump forward when the character appears, this is due to the two layers not quite matching up because I wanted to emphasise the glitch effect as it got closer to the figure. I'm not sure how to preset speeds, or if it would be too fast for my liking, so I tried to remember as best I could how fast I was going in the previous clip and to maintain that speed throughout the second clip.
I'm sorta' hoping that the final product is quite like the trailer. It was very haunting to see the quick flashes of a spartan running around Orbital. My mind is now calling out for a psychological thriller / machinima.
Ghosts will be a psychological thriller and focus less on action than most machinimas do, and more on creating suspense. If you happen to watch Doctor Who, I've loosely based the character in the trailer off the Weeping Angels. Whilst they'll have a fairly minor role in the plot as a whole, it will be quite significant, sorry if I'm not giving much away but I don't want to ruin it for anyone
Spooky, the trailer did give off the same feeling as the Weeping Angels. One of those "something is gonna' happen, but I can't. sotp. watching." feelings. I'm really looking forward to this machinima. It's something I've never really seen attempted before. How are you going to solve the problem of the Orbital announcements being played over the top? Are you just going to add the SFX later, or just shoot between the annoucements?
haha cheers man, they're by far the scariest things in Doctor Who XD. I think I'll shoot between the announcements like you suggested, because they aren't that frequent, and even if one comes on during a bit of dialogue I'll just mute it out. It'll be where there's movement involved like running or shooting that I'll have to be a bit more cautious of when the announcements will take place, unless I prerecord clips of shooting and explosions on another map and add them on later. Thanks for the interest, I hope it doesn't disappoint when I finally get round to releasing it. I've been working on this for a good year and a bit, but haven't really had a chance to start filming with A levels and stuff. Getting started was a bit slow too cause it's mainly a one-man project.