So after we got the matte working we had to add the world, which included all the cut away shots, the backdrop and effects.
To get all the footage out of the game we used the record demo function that is accessible through the developer's console. So first we had to play the game in such a way as to make the recorded demo useful, ie set up the shots in game. The demo records every action in game so the entire level can be played back at a later time using the console. While playing the demo we could export frames and .wavs whenever we wanted, allowing us to import the footage into After Effects and Premier. Another cool feature of the demo is the Camera smoothing tool which allows us to take the player camera (there is only one camera and its default is the FP view of the player who recorded the demo) and move it freely through out the map and set key frames. This lets us do tracking, crane and dolly shots. EPIC!
That being said it is still very difficult to get the right shot because the environment is very filmmaker unfreindly. We had zombies jumping in everywhere! On easy difficulty there is usually enough downtime between hordes to grab shots, but often times the special zombies would show up and mess everything up. We also had to kill the AI characters because they would often run into shots, disturb zombies too early and when we were recording foly, yell stuff and mess the sound up.
The demo tools are not very user friendly either and it took us sometime to figure out how to use them effectively. One of the problems with the smooth tool was that even tho the camera could be moved freely around the environment, the jiggle from the player was still translated for somereason. So if the player was running, walking, shooting, or being smacked by zombies the keyed camera floating far away would shake around and jiggle too. This made things extremely difficult because the person recording the demo would have to crouch and stay absolutely still while a shot was underway. which means they could not be an "actor" and participate in any of the actions that were needed, and also had to find a safe place to sit, usually in a closet so stray zombies wouldn't attack him while a shot was being acted out.
Some other issues were the muzzle flashes and the flashlight. They track to the camera too and often times we would forget to turn off the flashlight while shooting so we'd have to back and re-record. The good thing is we found a way later on through the console to drop there intensity to 0. Unfortunately we still haven't found a way to turn off the camera Jigggle.
So, while shooting we also were able to turn off various parts of the hud. In order to record we had to turn off the Gun, but the cool part was since our screen resolutions were 1440X900 and we shot 1280X720 we had extra room, so we either masked out the hud or removed it all together and had extra real estate to work with.
These are frames taken from the demo recordings of the care alarm shot. we had one person film and another named =A$$= L33T[FTW] shoot the car from off screen. We had to leave parts of the hud on in order to get the ! Car Alarm alert.
The red box shows the crop for the screen.
Besides capturing raw footage for the short we also had to capture content for the effects.
To make our live action heroes look like they were in game we needed to ad a couple of UI effects. One was the floating player names above peoples heads. Valve uses a special font for L4D so we had to take some screen shots of the names to use. We were lucky enough to find a really dark, practically black room. We changed our screen names and stood in the room and took screen caps. It was really easy to pull a mask and recreate the text.
We also were able to pull a mask of the UI so we could photoshop it and add our faces to it.
For the muzzle flashes we recorded them in the same room and then screened them in the same way they ad real ones.
We also captured the sound too because the game does such a great job of mixing them already, like adding echo and doppler effect, that it was much more efficient to folly most of the sounds in game rather than mix them ourselves later. Plus it makes it sound like the real game cause it is.
For the hunter we had to use 3ds MAX because there is really no way to get it to act the way we wanted especially with the live action characters so we had to export the model and textures from the game and import them into MAX to animate and light. It was a simple match move. I played with the cameras focal length till i got it right and then just dropped the hunter in and Ryan lit and rendered it.
All the layers were comped in After Effects and sent over to Premier for final editing, sound, and music. All the music used was from the actual game. And yeah that's it!
I'll post the link to the video once we get it up.
