Lit Fuse Films Blog

Machinima. Is it worth all this work? and just how much work is it?

Well, I’ve mentioned before about how with the last few movies I’ve made have seen exponential jumps in the complexity of my faceposer scenes. You can really see it in the difference beween combine nation episode 2 to the music commercial to melon 3, an of evolution of sorts. Especially with Melon 3, during production of That I learned six or seven Tricks with faceposer that I didn’t even know till then. Well. I’m Knee deep in a new movie and I’ve gotta say, Melon3 is nothing. it is rubbish on the side of the road. The complexity is taken up to such a ridiculous level for me, that it’s just boggling. I’m not going to post any in-editor Faceposer pictures until the movie is released for spoiler reasons, but I will when it’s out. So for now, I’ll just go through some basics.

The scene centers around a single long monologue from a single character. To create the monologue I first split it into 4 Large “acts” and dedicated a sub-scene to each “act”.

4 acts.

For each Act I divided each segment of dialogue into Manageable, 5 second chunks for Lipsyncing. 5.9 minutes of Dialogue Broke down into 57 , roughly 5 second clips.

57 sound clips.
I synchronized these 57 sound clips with each of their respective “Acts” and made choreography scenes out of them. Once I did that I removed the Master clips so that I was just left with the trimmed 5 second segments. After that I created Timing tags for the individual scenes. These are basically Markers that give me a visual representation of where specific phrases are located, to make things easier to edit in the Node Graph. I counted them up, and There’s 210 timing tags in my 5 minute scene.

210 Timing tags

And finally, with the clips and tags all in the proper positions, I set about Animating the facial flexes. Here’s the big one. Here’s how flexes work. They control the strength of a facial feature, as well as which side of the face it effects (left, right, or middle). For this movie I animated the features Very methodically. Basically doing the whole clip for Just Eyebrow movements, then going back and doing the whole clip for just eyelid movement, then doing nose, lips, cheeks, head up/down, head left/right, head tilt, head forward back, etc etc etc all the way down the line. In the node graph it tells you how many points of animation a given flex has for a given expression. I counted how many flexes there were for each flex animation by scene, and added them up for each act. each and every single point was set by hand.

(scene3: 822 + 559 + 465 + 232= 2078) + (scene2:157 +273 = 430)+ (scene3: 73+89+596=758) + (scene4:124+263+362=749)

so that’s 430+749+758+2078 = 4015

4015 flex points.

Machinima. It’s not easy. Thems the numbers. for the The questions I posed before, How much work is machinima? the answer, A LOT. And is all that work worth it? . . . Yes. Yes it is. completely.

The Movie in question is coming along very nicely. Filming and editing on Friday and saturday, sound edit on saturday and sunday, release thereafter.