(01-13-2015, 12:56 AM)Giggle Snort Wrote: My submission -
This took too many hours
Note that the video title says "Draft 1.0" that's because I'm still accepting suggestions. If you guys think that it's too dark to see stuff let me know and I may do something about it.
Special thanks to IMG for letting me film their convoy during normal operation.
Bravo!
You've certainly got the cinematic aspects down. Loved the music too, where did you find it? Music is quite a hard thing to come across for this kind of thing.
It took balls to go down the narration route. Especially when everyone expects to hear the voice of Morgan Freeman or someone of similar caliber narrate trailers and the like. I thought the dialogue and script was good, but your microphone definitely let you down. If I had to critique the voice, I'd say you came off a bit bored at times, especially in the opening. Try and find a microphone, place it 3 feet away from yourself instead of right next to your mouth, stand up and put your back in to it...I can guarantee it will sound better!
I wasn't sold on some of the video effects, such as the shaky cam/colour bars effect after the Nomads were introduced. There are some jarring camera moves which felt unintended, but apart from that I've got nothing. Camera moves over-all were fantastic, from the use of close-up shots of the action to the pretty shots of planets, suns/stars, vehicles and stations.
Music (even if it wasn't yours...if it was, WOW) was a perfect fit all around. You even nailed the timing of the emotive bars of the tracks with three different elements(video, vocal and over-all composition/structure of the video) which is a very hard thing to do, especially when you can't customize your score to your film like the big shots can. My only critique here, which is almost a non issue would be it felt too happy when talking about the great war.
Especially loved the part at 2:25 when the capital ship blew up and the music tapered off to a eerily silent string section holding the anticipation but letting the mind run free to interpret the emotion how it liked. You could have gone many different ways with that clip and I think you chose the best option by far.
Miscellaneous stuff:
- There is some funny artifacting going on on the right hand side of the screen at 2:51 during the shot of that bloody radiation hazard of a star. I am bitter, it killed my trade ship many times.
- Not a fan of the fonts and screenshot at the end. This is the time when you really need to seal the deal and make the viewer go "WOW, how great was that!" It's a great opportunity to show off an awesome static cinematic shot with an integrated text effect or something of that nature.
All the best with what-ever changes you make in the future. Make sure you get back to us if you share your progress if you choose to keep it going!
Thanks for the kind words!
Yeah if there's one thing I was unhappy about, it's the voice-over. There's a definite bass boom when I'm pronouncing the hard words. I never thought of placing the microphone away (it's attached to the headset). It's actually a pretty good microphone but I think the software I use is mainly for video editing and I was a lazy bum and recorded through that instead of using something better. I also realize that I tend to speak in a monotone and it was a bit of a struggle for me to do some of the "exciting" voice-overs mainly because anything else sounded ridiculous (again, probably because of the proximity of the mic).
For now, I think I'm done with the video. I love the game but I've already put ridiculous amounts of hours into it
Another big pain in the Butt was removing the frikking local and system chat messages that people kept using even after being told not to ... had to learn a lot of stuff from youtube videos and even then it looks terrible sometimes (like in the IMG convoy beginning at 1:14)
That being said, some of the suggestions you put forward are amazing and I'll keep those in mind whenever I make another video about anything (specially the voice-over part).