8th
Challenges with Machinima
With the many difficulties of Half Life-2 and steam, we as a group had to chagne to a different game in order for this scene to coem out a little better. Where multiplayer failed and it almost looked like we were taking stills, we turned to Team Fortress 2 to help the flow of animation and it had another plus: set terms for the players to speak. However while it did come with a lot of help, there were many other problems we faced with this project.
Team Fortress 2 was no problem to play online, however now we had to incoporate another member to the team. We had Tom on camera as a spectator, myself using the demo-man to represent Jackson and Jeff as a scout to represent Brad. The first problem was immediate: it wasn’t that the characters were a little over the top for said roles, but they could not sit, only kneel.
We didn’t have the freedom with objects like tables or chairs as we did in Half-Life, but we made due with the surronding area. We also needed to get teh shots we needed quickly or just move around because we noticed if Jeff and I stood still for a given amount of time we would enter spectator nmode with Tom and we would have to re-spawn and find the area again.
Finally the problem came with my character: the demo-man. This was a problem we worked around and overall gave a sort of parody feel to the scene from Pulp Fiction. The demo-man has three weapons: A grenade launcher, a sticky-grenade launcher, and a broken beer bottle, all of which obviously don’t give off the same effect as a pistol. Making due however, we launched a grenade at Jeff’s character “Brad” and while he exploded rather than falling after a pistol shot, it did offer a sort of comedy to the scene and we felt the rest came out great. The commands could easily be edited to fit the dialogue between the two and the camera was a lot easier to use with more people working as opposed to the limits we experienced in single player for Half-Life 2.
