'Behind Blue Eyes'- A Stalker's tale

Hi everyone.

Although I have various pieces of test footage up on my Youtube account, this is my first fully edited and completed clip, featuring my own character, Shadowtracker. I have to publicly acknowledge V I X E N of Spines, who graciously 'killed' me for the Recluse's Victory footage.

All told, this took three days of filming (and a lot of patience) with an extra seven hours of editing to get the cuts and timing right.

Please, feel free to be as harsh as necessary; I think I have plenty of room to improve.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=dW5lNGhMlNc

S.

I'm hardly the last word on videos, but here's my take:

1) VERY cool song - to improve your hits to your video, list the song's title and artist both in your YouTube and tags (folks like me enjoy knowing who some of that cool music belongs to)

2) you've got the foundation for a very good video as far as a character tale goes, but you do need a) a lot more camera movement, b) a lot more shot variations, and c) more of a 'storyline'. Your character may be an assassin martial artist, but he's got to live somehow - you might show more about he makes his living on the streets, dealing with contacts, fighting others, watching people go by, that sort of thing. If you want to show him 'alone' (as you appear to be doing when he's doing kata in the base), have him leaning on a wall or sitting on the stairs in an alleyway, or crouching in different locations, not just that one shot of him backlit by the moon.

3) Your end credits font needs to be bigger - on YouTube they are SMALL!

4) Practice camera sweeps - yours (like everyone else who starts out) tend to be very jerky. Best place to practice - Atlas Park and Fort Darwin. You're high enough level you can pound on stuff without thinking, and you can focus more on how to swing the camera around or do zooms. It takes a while, but you'll get much better at it, and it pays off in the end.

5) Also more of a 'cinematography' thing - careful when doing closeups - you tend to get a lot of 'empty' space behind you, which detracts from your character. (You'd have to learn how to edit democode to drop the camera during your static shots, but it might be worth your time.)

6) Don't use Windows Movie Maker. UGH. If you've got access to Adobe Premiere (or Sony Vegas), use it. WMM sucks, especially once you start making longer videos with bigger files.

Don't get disheartened by all this - everything that's here is how you can improve. If there were no hope for you, I'd say so. (And trust me, I've seen BAD videos.) Keep at it, and don't forget to put your links in the Fan Videos thread so others can see.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Nice. I hadn't heard that version of the old Who song before.

I second D_R's suggestion about lowering the camera a couple of ticks when filming your own character. By default, the in-game camera centers pretty much on your toon's head, which leaves a lot of empty 'head space" above them. It looks weird and sometimes creates the illusion that the character is tiny. If you use Balshor's Demo Editor, it is fairly easy to fix. Just add a filter for CAM, then use the "Translate POS" with -2 or so as the Z co-ordinate adjustment. That will center the camera more around their chest or torso. If the camera is very close to the character, you may have to adjust the Pitch (1st PYR value) up (-) a bit, but that is a little more advanced especially if the camera is moving. The good news is that this little adjustment is a good way to start working with demorecordings and makes a big difference in how your vids look.

You've made a really good start, very creative. The technical stuff can be learned, but the creativity is the one thing that can't really be learned - its a talent thing. Looking forward to your future vids.

[ QUOTE ]
I'm hardly the last word on videos, but here's my take:

1) VERY cool song - to improve your hits to your video, list the song's title and artist both in your YouTube and tags (folks like me enjoy knowing who some of that cool music belongs to)

2) you've got the foundation for a very good video as far as a character tale goes, but you do need a) a lot more camera movement, b) a lot more shot variations, and c) more of a 'storyline'. Your character may be an assassin martial artist, but he's got to live somehow - you might show more about he makes his living on the streets, dealing with contacts, fighting others, watching people go by, that sort of thing. If you want to show him 'alone' (as you appear to be doing when he's doing kata in the base), have him leaning on a wall or sitting on the stairs in an alleyway, or crouching in different locations, not just that one shot of him backlit by the moon.

3) Your end credits font needs to be bigger - on YouTube they are SMALL!

4) Practice camera sweeps - yours (like everyone else who starts out) tend to be very jerky. Best place to practice - Atlas Park and Fort Darwin. You're high enough level you can pound on stuff without thinking, and you can focus more on how to swing the camera around or do zooms. It takes a while, but you'll get much better at it, and it pays off in the end.

5) Also more of a 'cinematography' thing - careful when doing closeups - you tend to get a lot of 'empty' space behind you, which detracts from your character. (You'd have to learn how to edit democode to drop the camera during your static shots, but it might be worth your time.)

6) Don't use Windows Movie Maker. UGH. If you've got access to Adobe Premiere (or Sony Vegas), use it. WMM sucks, especially once you start making longer videos with bigger files.

Don't get disheartened by all this - everything that's here is how you can improve. If there were no hope for you, I'd say so. (And trust me, I've seen BAD videos.) Keep at it, and don't forget to put your links in the Fan Videos thread so others can see.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

[/ QUOTE ]

1) Thanks on the title tip....I've hosted hardly anything on YouTube, so I'll remember that tip and change the title.

2) I think I should clarify on that; I'm not really trying to tell a story there so much as convey a mood or aspect of the character....I'll change that part of the text as well.

3) Duly noted. A little hard to tell when I'm doing it at the time. Any suggested font size?

4) I wanted to do much more and can....I just have an unreliable cheap mouse that's not very responsive. That'll be an operating expense I'll be looking into. That jerkiness is a direct result of that, I couldn't get any fine control.

5) Yeah, I had no end of trouble with that, really. I'll look into it, thank you.

6) *nodnods* I'll start doing that from now on, I just wanted to get this video out of the road and get the vision out there...I still have all the raw footage to work with so I can do a better version in Premiere Pro, thanks to being able to move the camera frame and such.

Thank you for all the input!

S.