GTA4Machinima

Removed YouTube video Live! again

2009-03-28T04:23:00.000-07:00

You all may know about the huge amount of YT videos that have been and are still removed due to copyright claims from music publishing companies. Unfortunately this had hit some Machinima even very popular ones like Jaydee's music video Helena which had several million views. I never expected this will hit one of my videos who never received such visibility and are well hidden in the far end of the long tail. I was really surprised when I noticed one of my music videos Psycho (Big Love Remix) had been removed due to a claim from Warner Music Group. Looks like there are indeed scanning everything. For sure automatically. In my case that was easy since I mentioned the song title (Big Love by Fleetwood Mac) in the description and tags.
Great YT offers an easy way to protest against the removal. They offer three option. First,they falsely identified the song. Second, you have a license to use that song. Third, you claim 'fair use'. Even not seeing a real chance they even look at those protest mails, I decided to give it a try. For sure they identified the right song, so I deceided to try the second option.
Not because I want to lie on them. For sure not. But due to a not widely spread information I had in mind, I indeed have a license to use that (and other) songs in my YT videos.
When starting YT here in Germany in 2007 they made a deal with GEMA (a group like RIAA in the US) which grants us the right to use every music that GEMA represents (and that is nearly every commercially distributed music). There is some recent discussion if this contract is still valid, but I tried. I mailed them back their press release to see what happens. I was quite sure they'll ignore anyway. I can't tell you how surprised I was when the next time I checked (just about 1h later), that video was LIVE! again. :))
I never ever expected that. I still even don't believe someone really read that protest in person. For me it looks like they just take the protest and assume you are right (sounds crazy) and set that video online again. But maybe I'm wrong.

Intervention - noitnevretnI

2009-03-16T02:38:00.000-07:00

You really have to watch this new movie by Overman:

Intervention

What he calls 'An experiment of music and story' is more than just an experiment. It's a surprising movie and it introduces a new and intereting concept to show us how 'time' could used creatively in a movie. It reminds me a bit on his movie Reveal just this time using 'time' instead of 'space' to reveal and unfold the story.
The music for this film is so well crafted and performed and worth listening for it's own sake. I enjoy to see directors using machinima for experimenting with all aspects of the filmmaking. This opens new doors for all of us, extending our range of expression in movies. I don't want to go as far as to say this will become a new trend, but who knows.
After watching the film you should watch the 'reverse' one as well to see how marvelous this film was laid out in both story and music:
Noitnevretni
Now you can try experimenting on your own. How about adding the two parts together and stitch an endless loop. Or maybe add a twist and build a Moebius strip. Open a door for us and make your own movie. Liberty City is a great place to start and explore filmmaking.

[Movie] You and I

2009-02-17T03:08:00.000-08:00

Overman at zarathustra studios just released another very nice GTA4 movie:

You and I

"Sometimes fate conspires to keep two lovers apart. And sometimes stupidity saves fate the trouble."

Social Club TV Video Editor Contest: Valentine's Special

2009-02-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

Social Club TV is holding a special Valentine's Day themed Video Editor Contest. Enter the Valentine's Day Special Contest by uploading any kind of romance-themed clip to Rockstar Social Club TV anytime between February 10th through February 17th inclusive, using the tag “Valentine-Contest”.

Best in Class 2 Winners Announced

2009-02-07T05:03:00.000-08:00

Rockstar finally published the winners of their second machinima contest, this time movies up to 3 minutes lenght were submitted:

Best in Class 2 Winners

Rockstar Games has posted 6 new developer videos to Social Club TV:

New video creations from Rockstar Games

Unfortunately nothing in there that really impressed me so far. Is this because of some limitations of the editor tool? Maybe, but I just don't want to believe that right now. Maybe there are some gems hidden in the 6000 movies submitted so far which got over 13 Mio views in total. Let me know if you have found one, I'll be more than happy to watch it myself an feature it here.

Best in Class 1 Winners Announced

2009-01-24T02:42:00.000-08:00

Rockstar finally published the winners of their first machinima contest:
Best in Class 1 Winners

Movies

2009-01-20T01:19:00.000-08:00

First the winners of the Journalist Video Editor event at SocialClubTV
Gold medal: "The Bellix Reloaded."
Silver medal: "My Weapon"

Having fun when playing the game is always good start for a Machinima movie:
Grand Theft Auto : Music to the Madness by chaosPerfection
What the Fork? by Zarathustra Studios

And finally looking for a style that they hadn’t tried at before:
Burgeur Shotte by LitFuse Films

Best in class 2 contest

2009-01-16T02:21:00.000-08:00

Rockstar Games is running another film contest on SocialClub TV. This time your video (up to three minutes in length) needs to be tagged “Best-In–Class-2-Contest”. Deadline is January 19, 2009. The winner will receive an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX + graphics card. Good luck!!

More GTA4 Modding

2009-01-10T06:30:00.000-08:00

Overman has put together an extensive list of links of GTA4 mods:
Overman’s links to mod stuff

Modding GTA4

2009-01-04T02:51:00.000-08:00

GTA4 PC is just out a month but we already see some great modding tools published. Not everything is perfect and useful for filmmaking but there is some great stuff out.
The most useful for filmmaking might be tools to view/edit textures and models like:

SparkIV an IMG/RPF Archive Viewer/Editor for GTA:IV

OpenIV a multi-purpose editor for GTA 4

Of course there are a lot more things that can be modded like weapons, cars, etc.
Most of those tools need Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 installed.
More infos on modding GTA4 and tools can be found at:
gtaforums GTA4 mod tool thread
gta4 category at gtamodding.com

And don't forget modders first rule: Always backup your original files.
Happy modding.

Happy New Year + contests

2009-01-02T01:05:00.000-08:00

First I would like to wish everyone a very Happy New Year. I think 2009 is going to be an amazing year for GTA4 and Machinima. I can't wait to see what movies and talents will show up this year.

Right now we have already around 3000 movies on SocialClubTV getting 3 Million views so far. That means and avarage of 100 new movies released with an average view of 1000. Not to count all the movies published on other platforms. For the end of this year we might hit 100.000 movies and over 1 Billion views. And maybe even one or more movies that get over 1 Mio views.
Although the winners of the first movies contest on SocialClubTV have not been selected yet, they announced to run another contest soon.

The German computer magazine GameStar is running a GTA4 video contest right now. Unfortuntaley you'll have to send in a CD/DVD and no music allowed. Deadline is January 8th.
No price money, but your film will be distributed with the magazine.

Movies

2008-12-15T03:15:00.000-08:00

The flood has started. Right now we have already 1000 movies on SocialClub TV which got viewed 500.000 times. I counted around 150 new movies and around 50.000 new views per day. Most of them are gameplay, stunt or frag style videos, but we start to see some 'story' based movies already. Two movies that got on my radar.
Confession by Overman
Rise by Buddy of DoQ
I can't wait to see what intersting movies come out of the recent contest.

Command line arguments

2008-12-14T02:30:00.000-08:00

You can indeed add some intersting command line arguments when starting GTA4. The list of arguments is found in the readme file in the install dir of GTA4 or here.
You can now define your graphics resolution and parameters as well as start in windowed mode.
Just add them to the GTALauncher call. For example: In order to set maximal details indented of the available video memory you need to extend the shortcut targeted at the "GTA4Launcher.exe” with the parameters "-norestrictions" and "-nomemrestrict".
Another option should be to create a file commandline.txt and put them there. Has to be placed in the install directory (not tested that myself yet).

The overcast features GTA4

2008-12-13T05:15:00.000-08:00

Main topic of this weeks Machinima podcast 'the overcast' is GTA4.
Phil and Ricky discuss the latest in machinima happenings and software updates, and then settle in for an extensive discussion of their first impressions of Grand Theft Auto IV for PC. They cover interesting topics like, installation problems, clip capture, filmmaking in single and muliplayer game mode, EULA and IP issues, and graphics cards and more. A must listen for everyone interested in filmmaking with GTA4 PC: the overcast #045

PC Video Editor Contest

2008-12-12T02:18:00.000-08:00

Rockstar is running a PC Video Editor Contest during it's Rockstar Games Social Club Weekend Fri Dec 12th through Sun Dec 14th.
To enter, create a video using the Grand Theft Auto IV PC in-game Video Editor suite of tools and upload your clip any time between December 12th through the 14th using the tag ‘best-in-class-contest’. Chance to win a Grand Theft Auto IV prize pack and a $300 shopping spree at our Rockstar Warehouse online store.
Contest Rules

Finding locations

2008-12-10T01:56:00.000-08:00

Liberty City is huge. Found this Google Maps style interactive map that helps a lot for finding nice spots where to shoot your film:
GTA4 Liberty City Map
Nice feature is that you can highlight 'Points of Interest' like, buildings with a sight, stunt jump places, buildings with interior and 'interactive' areas.

Clip Capture Part2

2008-12-10T01:24:00.000-08:00

Second interesting concepts of clip capture is that this "effectively, brings back 'recamming' power in a way that is reminiscent of Keygrip 2 (Quake 2)" as Overman already commented before on my previous post.
Clips do not captured only the actual view you see during gameplay as video file, they indeed capture a part of the 'world' and all the action around the character.
A step later in production you can then change the default camera viewpoint and even better, you can add several different camera views for that clip.
As already mentioned this production method is unique to Machinima, was there at the beginning and util now was missed by a lot of filmmakers. Rockstar Games cannot be praized high enough for bringing 'recamming' back.
The advantages are amazing. You don't have to tweak your camera views before and later are no longer able to change them if you the find out how to get a better shot. With GTAs video editor you have all the fleixibilty you need after recording the clip, you can experiment around with different camera views as much as you like. And you don't need to convince the actors to just do another shot or setup and record the scene over and over again. Just think of that what effort it would take to setup the same complex action scene twice to record views from different cameras. Difficult, when you just can record the gamecam and capture to video file.
Easy and fun with 'recamming'.
Having the opportunity to easy experiment a lot with different camera views etc. makes it an excellent tool for learning a lot about filmmaking. As has been pointed out earlier by an excellent article by Matt Kelland.
Machinima is great for learning and to teach film.

Clip Capture Part1

2008-12-09T02:30:00.000-08:00

Your first task when starting to make a movie with the GTA4 video editor is caturing some game footage. This is simply done by pressing the F2 button. This implements 2 interesting concepts for clip capture.

First, caturing is done 'backwards' in time. That means the action that occurs PRIOR to pressing the key. The clip length is limited to about 30-40s depending on game settings and computer specs.
On the first look this is somehow confusing when being used to the standard way film footage is recorded: Defining the start and end point of your recording and always record forward in time. After some thinking it is indeedan amazing concept. For recording interesting scenes during gameplay it's great.
You don't have to record everything and then later select these parts and save. You never know exactly what might be look great before it had happend. This way everything is recorded by default (but not saved) and when you recognize something unique an useful had happend in the game, just press F2 and you have it saved.
And even if you are a forward thinking person, plan and setup a scene in advance this feature is not as bad as it looks. This way you only save when the scene happened as you have planned. No need to save several takes until you got the right one. Just press F2 when you are satisfied. This saves some disk space and time for selecting and organizing all the takes later.

Biggest drawback is of course that they have a fixed clip length we (yet) have no control of that length. That hurts. It's not possible to capture longer scenes (e.g car chases etc.) in one clip or even be able to save disc space and worktime to adjust clip length later for recording smaller clips.
I hope this will get fixed soon by either the game company itself or some clever modders.

Reinventing the wheel

2008-12-08T02:09:00.000-08:00

Why are they always trying to reinvent the wheel every time a game company adds movie making capabalities to their game (and mostly fail getting it right)?
Having had a first look at the GTA4 video editor, I'm asking myself why they didn't have a look what has been done with GTA San Andreas by modders before. Great tools like San An Studios and other mods made this game a great tool for Machinima filmmakers. Excellent movies have been made with this:
The great machinima intro 'What is Machinima?' , the amazing 'The Days After' and the comedy/drama series 'PEDS' just to name a few.
Machinima has been around since 1994. Most of what is needed for filmmaking and how to get it right is easy to access and could have been used to create a much more usable tool than what I see implemented in GTA4 now.
Ok, it's not that bad as it might sound, but I see a lot of missed opportunities for filmmakers. I'm optimistic the modding community will to help again. Guess one still has to be happy that a game company includes any Machinima tool with the game at all.

gameplay4filmmakers

2008-12-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

Filmaking can be much easier when speeding up gameplay and using cheats.
Why playing the game at all? First it's fun and second you need to play through the missions to get access to all the areas of Liberty City (Bohan, Algonquin, Alderley). Of course you can access those areas while using multiplayer maps but that is a different story.
So until there are no 'saved games' available from others and could be used you have to play the game at least to some level.
What helps is using the cheats available in the game. The cheats acivated by typing special phone numbers in the phone. Later you can use them from the cheats menu of the phone.
The most important one are to get health, armour, weapons, cars, bikes, helis, and to change the weather. Yes, you can make a call (to whom?) to change the weather :).
List of cheats
(Those are for Xbox, but will work for PC as well)
I've used those to speed up work for my GTA4 movie Liberty City a lot. Although this movie didn't depend on using any cheats it was very handy to use them. Having a car, bike or heli ready when and where you need it was great help. And changing the weather was useful as well. Not to talk about getting rid of the 'wanted level' when you accidentially hit a police car or shot people too much while shooting your film.

But be careful, using cheats will disable soem achievements in the game you need to get to complete the game at 100% for

Using a taxi during the missions helps speeding up gameplay as well. You can instantly go to the destination by paying some extra fee. Even better after some missions done for 'Roman', he'll send you a private taxi when calling him for this service. That helps, because it's often hard to hitch a ride with a taxi in remote areas or exactly then when you need them. And it saves money as well.

Installing the beast

2008-12-05T02:44:00.000-08:00

It took me over 2 hours to get everything done. Wasn't it GTA4 I would have stopped the process and bought another game.

Hint: Download and read the Movie Editor and have a read through it while installing

My firewall send me never ending notices to which sites that game want's to getconnected during installation (didn't allow most of them to get through) but I'm still puzzling what those connects are for and what data they want to send.
In addition you need to create 2 accounts and the additional software and the recent updates for
a) Game for Windows-Live (for multiplayer gaming)
b) A Social Club account to publish and share your movies made with GTA4

And I just noticed GTA4 PC uses SecuROM as well. Search the Web for what SecuROM can cause.

After finally installing everything. I just got a simple error:
GTA4: FATAL ERROR RMN40

Browing the web relvealed:
RMN40- Windows XP: Need to have Service Pack 3 or higher to proceed.

Ok I didn't RTFM before, but I've really not planned to update to SP3.
Fears are high other (older) software might not work.

Ok, made a backup disk and then installed SP3.

After that I finally got it to work. Now I have to start playing the game to get the phone (you need that to get access to the movie editor) and get access to all areas of the game. Great to have some experience by playing the game on my Xbox before.

About this blog

2008-12-05T01:36:00.000-08:00

GTA4 for PC is out now and opens this new world for Machinima Filmmaking. Yes, this version comes with a Movie Editor that helps you making your own movie with it.
See Ricky's post for what this could start:
The Great GTA IV Machinima Flood 0f 2009

I decided to start up this blog to write about a bit about GTA4 and Machinima filmmaking. And to get into blogging a bit as well.

Stay tuned.

P.S. If you have found out something intersting about GTA4 filmmaking, please let me know. I'll be more than happy to add it here.

P.P.S As you see I've just used one of the standard design. I'm not good at design at all. It would great to give this blog a nicer GTA style look maybe. If you like to help, please let me know.