Rays of Light Through Dark Clouds

I have made my apologies on my YouTube channel, and I am going to make them here as well. I have been slow in answering emails and questions, and I do apologize for that. It is true that since my knee has healed enough to allow me to get back to work and out of the house, I have been busy, but to be completely honest, I did not anticipate receiving a large number of messages when I returned to making machinima videos.

It's been just a bit overwhelming, but dearly appreciated and inspirational. I'm just a little bit stunned, and in my attempt to respond to the messages tonight, I found myself at times at a loss for words. What I am most amazed at is how kind everyone has been. I'm not used to that. When I was part of Britannica Dreams, I wasn't able to see the comments or emails. For the most part, what was brought to my attention were the unfavorable things. Lately I've been concerned that I made decisions then without having all the facts.

My first online experience with machinima was a rather gloomy one, and that is not a reflection of just the audience. However, this second experience has been completely different from the first, and this is a direct reflection on the audience. These supportive comments have been rays of light through dark clouds, and my thanks goes out to all of you.

So, with that said, I do apologize for taking too long to reply to the messages, and to thank everyone for the amazingly beautiful support and flattering comments. The main reason I chose to address this issue here is because there have been a lot of comments and questions about my camera work, especially in the video, "Vampire Masquerade".

I will be honest with you ... the one major thing that improves the mechanics of the in-game camera is the actual PC ... more precisely, the graphics card and the computer's processor. I'm running on an Intel Core 2 Quad Processor @ 2.40GHz and an NVIDIA GeForce graphics card.

I have also changed the settings in the config files. There are two sites I recommend you visit to get great info on this subject .....
The SidDog's Machinima Tutorial
and
Jaydee's Movie FAQs

Both SidDog and Jaydee provide excellent instruction on working with the camera files in the game. However, there is no exact way to do it. It's trial and error, based on the effects you're wanting to create. My advice to you is to back up your original files and play around with the settings. It can take some time to get it the way you want it, but it can be worth it in the end.

And finally, I'd like to address one more issue that was mentioned many times. There was some questions about the camera work in some scenes where editing played an important part. In the video, "A Long Time Ago", I intentionally relied mostly on camera work. There is very little editing at all with that video. Most of the heavy editing was in the, "Tigers" video. By the way, I am considering a remake on that one. I think I prefer to keep the editing to a minimum and use more camera work. The questions about these particular scenes were from people who are using Windows Movie Maker as their editing program.

My experience with WMM was short lived and a few years back, so, I don't think I'd be fair in saying Sony Vegas will give better results. I happen to know a few machinima directors who do brilliant things with WMM. However, I do know that with Sony Vegas you can achieve nice smooth pans, but your camera work needs to be smooth. No amount of editing is going to fix a choppy camera movement.

It's a matter of personal preference, though I have found many agree that close-ups are more effective. I tend to work close with the camera and pan out if there is something in the foreground or background that is important to that scene at a particular moment. I don't particularly agree to end a scene by panning out ... I find it more effective to the story to let the action in the scene carry the view out of the frame. These are the things I think about when setting up the camera.

I hope this has answered the questions about my camera work, and I wish everyone the best with their video projects.