Machinima Pre-Production
A solid, intensive and detailed pre-production process is sadly all too negelected in contemporary media production; particularly at an indie level. Too often we get focused on Camera, Location and Edit and forget that for every minute you spend in pre-production is 5 minutes you save in shooting and post - that kind of saving is time and money - both of which add up to more creative flexibility if accounted for properly. For Machinima makers the culture of neglecting pre-production is even more widespread and sadly it shows all too often in under-developed scripts and poorly planned production of many Machinima movies..
In an effort to address the issue the good folks over at
ILL Machinima Production have put together a very fine article outlining the pre-production process of traditional filmmaking applied to the production context of Machinima. They even supply a set of well thought out documents to download and use in your next Machinima project....
But something about this article bothers me.... How could 21st centruy machinima cretaors working in computer-generated virtual environments have missed the bleeding obvious...? Whilst their PDF and Word DOC templates are well made surely it would be better to just load up the free, open-source screenwriting and pre-production software system
Celtx ???! A software tool that handles every possible angle - from a database script breakdown system, to scheduling, storyboarding, production items and media asset management.!
If you're going to work in an all-digital 21st centruy medium such as Machinima then surely there's room to work with an all-digital pre-production software enviroment. I cant believe the guys at Ill Machinima dont know about
Celtx.!
Posted at 12:00AM Jan 19, 2008
by Mike Jones in 3D graphics & gaming |
I've been using Celtx since early 2006, and it just gets better and better. I have to confess that I resisted the "extras" that Celtx provides for a long time. I wanted to use it to format my scripts and nothing else. Eventually I realised that I was thinking about script-writing in totally the wrong way. Since then, I've started using Celtx properly!
saument, a user on the Moviestorm forums, has recently written a tool that generates a Moviestorm movie from a Celtx script, complete with characters and scenes - there's some fascinating machinima potential inherent in that sort of tool.
Posted by Johnnie Ingram on January 19, 2008 at 04:40 AM EST #
-Ricky
Posted by Ricky Grove on January 19, 2008 at 04:43 AM EST #
I think it was just around this time that Celtx was just starting to get traction within the machinima community.
Ken
Posted by Ken Thain on January 19, 2008 at 08:27 AM EST #
Now that i gotta see... Please tell me more!
Posted by Mike Jones on January 19, 2008 at 01:18 PM EST #