Sunday, September 28, 2008

Summary of the Beeb: Part 3

As mentioned before, in the third week we decided to focus on a sitcom format. Dean and Alex chose to do part of an episode of the Mighty Boosh to see how the two remaining engines fared.
Meanwhile, I didn't really have much to do, so was glad when Rupert Harris from the Bamzooki team got in touch with us.

Bamzooki is a CBBC show where kids can download a kit, create their own Zook, an insect-like creature, and give it different skills. Some will be fast, some strong etc. They then submit their Zooks to the CBBC website, and some are contacted to be on the the show. The contests are rendered in 3d and superimposed onto the show to make it seem as though the kids can interact in real life with their creations and watch the competitions on a table in front of them.
The idea was for small segments of the show to have the Zooks out in the real world, creating mischief. Rupert was wondering if any of this could be achieved with machinima, so I had a play in the Bamzooki engine and with some video editing software and came up with this:



I also explored ways to personalise the Zooks a bit more and give them character, so I created a dummy Zook in Max and made it some features. It was good fun but unfortunately the Bamzooki engine doesn't support alpha channels, so that was a bit of a dead end.

This time round, Alex had the most success. His Mighty Boosh machinima came out really well and although there are limitations and things Moviestorm can't do that the script required, you can't tell too much. Moviestorm was very strong with regards to set creation and character customisation, as soon as the video plays you can see that it looks like the Mighty Boosh.


Dean had a lot of problems with Source, his lip synchs refused to preview and his character refused to begin the machinima sitting down. His choice of characters was also very limited by the way the Source engine works. Each character comes with their own set of embedded animations, and you can only choose from these when you are making a machinima. Unless you want to edit an existing model and re-export it, or make a whole new character and add in the animations, you're quite limited. The default textures weren't really ideal either, and make the shop seem a little bit creepy!


Jappet was unsure if I should upload these as they're based on existing works, but there are a lot of machinimas that use film and TV soundtracks, especially ones done with Moviestorm. I did e-mail the production company behind the Mighty Boosh asking for advice about it but unfortunately didn't get any reply. I think we should be fine as they are mostly our own work and they should fall under fair use with regards to copyright. That being said if I do recieve any e-mails or comments from official channels telling me to take these down I shall do.

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