In the Classroom
The initial classroom groups would come to Soundhouse® and work in the lab for a five hour session and the student groups would range from Year Five to Year Ten. Working in pairs, I would give the students one hour to explore the world, practise capturing the on screen animation with Game Cam V2, practise making different camera movements, and think of a short story they could create which would be one minute in length.
While most students quickly worked out the array of great shots they could now create, some students would struggle with the idea of creating different shots and would just capture their whole film following along behind the central Oblivion character. With a little guidance, they would quickly get back on track and think about the other options available to them.
After the first hour we would sit down and go through the story boards the students had created. After some discussion, we would allow the students to start capturing the individual shots for their films. For this task we would allow the students about forty five minutes; after this time was up we would remove the game and their films would be completed with whatever material they had captured. Most groups would capture about thirty to forty clips, which would make up the bulk of their production. We would then import the captured clips into the editing software package, Sony Vegas, (any version is suitable) and begin assembling the film. When the vision was edited, we would show the students the pan/crop tool. This is necessary, because as the game vision is being captured, the on screen tool bars of the game are being recorded too. Each shot in the finished film is zoomed-in slightly to hide the tool bar content. The students would then add titles and credits before beginning work on the sound. To complete the sound, they could add music, sound effects and their own voice to match the characters in their films. Lots of pitch shifting created a variety of voices to help make each story unique. At the end of the process, each film was rendered out to an .avi format. The files could be used later to create DVDs, uploaded to YouTube sites or numerous other formats.
After running a number of successful Machinima days for student groups, Soundhouse® decided to add a new element. We wanted the students to be in the films and interact with the characters inside the game. To do this we used a large green screen which is approximately two and half metres high and three metres long, installed in one of our labs. After students had the opportunity to explore the game and technology they created short stories which included themselves. They them filmed themselves in front of the green screen, captured the footage and using Sony Vegas, chromakeyed the shots over backgrounds they had captured from the game. Very quickly we had stories where creatures from another planet had arrived and were asking the students questions about living on earth, a ‘you go girl’ women empowering tale, a Shakespearean tomb involving a sacred candle and ‘Let’s go shopping in a medieval village’.
Using this method of creating Machinima had solved a number of problems. Students were now able to experiment with a wider variety of shots; this also gave them new challenges with editing. The process was now taking place in a computer lab, not as before with groups of students with cameras roaming around the school. However, there was still the problem of creating different environments to shoot in. Though games like Oblivion opened up a wider array of background and sets, students were still limited to whatever setting or worlds the game provided.
