My attempt with this guide is to provide useful information to the aspiring machinima maker who has little to no experience at making machinima movies. I have received an uncountable number of requests from fans on YouTube, my forums, WCM and by email for advice on how to make machinima, and I will answer the most commonly asked questions in this guide. This is in no way a guide for the advanced machinimator—I will only cover the very basics here.

Support

One of the best ways to get help is to ask the experts. Some of the best artists in the World of Warcraft machinima community frequent the following forums, and have areas designed specifically for those who have questions and need advice. If you are stuck and need help, go here and do not be afraid to ask:

• www.machinima101.com
• www.myndflame.com

Video Capture

In order to obtain footage for use in creating machinima, you must first shoot the footage yourself. Here are two programs that work well for capturing footage:

• Game Cam – www.planetgamecam.com

Game Cam comes in two versions, Game Cam and Game Cam Lite. Both versions limit functionality unless you register the product. Registration is a one-time fee of $25 for Game Cam and $10 for Game Cam Lite.

Game Cam is what I used to make all my movies up to Oxhorn Tells Off Xfire. I always had problems with getting it to work with World of Warcraft (but I should note that I used a much older version, and they have come out with a number of upgraded versions since then.) I hear that people can get Game Cam to work just fine, but I am not one of them.

• Fraps – www.fraps.com

I personally prefer Fraps. You can download and use Fraps for free. However, until you purchase the program, a watermark is placed at the top of everything you shoot. Registering Fraps is a one-time fee of $37.

I have been much happier with Fraps. The interface is simpler and all you have to do is load the program and start shooting, instead of associating it with certain programs. One of the drawbacks of using Fraps is that any footage you shoot will be saved as an .avi file that is ridiculously huge. You must have a lot of disk space in order to use Fraps. Also, the program can lag your machine down horribly, and some machines just cannot run it and World of Warcraft at the same time. If you use Fraps, be sure to turn off all other programs that are not necessary for your system to operate properly.

World of Warcraft Tools

• WoW Model Viewer - http://www.wowmodelviewer.org/

WoW Model Viewer (WMV) is a tool that allows you to pull characters, monsters, items, spells and other models out of the game. You can change their clothes, the way they look, and you can play with every emote and movement in the game. Advanced machinima makers use this tool to record characters doing things that they would not be able to do in the game, like grow 100 feet tall, fly through the air with the greatest of ease, or chase after beggars with a big wheel of cheese.

To use WMV, load Fraps and minimize it. Then load WMV, create your character, and decide upon a motion you want him to do. When you are ready, hit record and have your character do his motion. You can drag him around with your mouse, spin him with the arrows, make him grow with the mouse wheel or whatever.

If you want to record a character and place him into another scene when you get down to editing, you will need to shoot him against a blue or green screen. To do this, simply change the background color in WMV to blue or green. I will show you how to take this footage and make the blue and green disappear when I get into video editing.

• WoW Map Viewer - http://sourceforge.net/projects/wowmapview/

WoW Map Viewer (WMPV) allows you enter Azeroth and explore without any monsters, NPCs or limitations like gravity. You can fly around and record footage wherever you want to. You can change the time of day whenever you want, increase or decrease fog, make doodads, buildings and even land disappear and reappear, and explore places that would otherwise be inaccessible. You can also explore individual instance dungeons without those bothersome monsters who want to kill you, for some inexplicable reason.

There are many problems with this program and I have met few who have been able to get it to work. First, it appears to no longer be updated. This means that it will not work with World of Warcraft if you have downloaded and installed any recent patches. Second, it presents you with an imperfect version of the game world. You will often come across artwork in the game that has rough or black edges, such as the rope bridges connecting the rises at Thunder Bluff. You will also find some doodad elements that are in places where they shouldn't be, or which seem to rise into the air forever, such as the hanging chandeliers and spires of the Undercity. Lastly, the program is horribly laggy. Even though my computer runs WoW just fine, I cannot move very far or fast at all in WMPV without getting hiccups of lag, especially when recording with a memory hog like Fraps. Sometimes you have to come up with nifty tricks in order for footage to look right, such as shooting a scene at an incredibly slow speed and then increasing its speed in your editing program. I can still get WMPV to work, but it is fussy and does not give you consistent or quality results.

Video Editing

There are a number of programs out there that allow you to edit video footage. I am only experienced with two; Windows Movie Maker and Adobe Premiere Pro, and so I will only talk about these two.

• Windows Movie Maker - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/moviemaker2.mspx

Windows Movie Maker (WMM) is one of the simplest and least powerful programs to use. It functions well and gets the job done, but you are limited in what you can do. You cannot tinker with footage much—all you can do is insert footage into a timeline in the order that you want. There are a few things you can do to spice things up, like adding transitions (of which WMM has a plethora to choose from) and adding special effects. You can also use a number of pre-made text effects and transitions, though you cannot change them. You cannot use WMM to shoot characters in WoW Model Viewer against a blue or green screen and then place them wherever you want. You are also limited to one audio track, which means that you must edit your audio into one complete file using an outside program, like Cool Edit Pro or Wave Pad.

Despite its limitations, WMM works, and you can make good movies with it. I made many of my better known movies, including Inventing Swear Words 1, Red Snapph! and Racing the Grimtotem, with WMM. It is a good program to start with, and it is free, but if you want to do the fancy stuff, you need to get a more advanced program.

• Adobe Premiere Pro - http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/

Adobe Premiere Pro (APP) is a powerful program, but it is $800. From the Adobe website, you can download a 30 day free trial, with full functionality, but after the trial period you must purchase the full version or, if you have purchased a previous version of APP, you must buy the upgrade, which is $300.

APP is nice and allows you to do what you need to. It is still not the best out there, and if you want to do the really fancy stuff, you need Adobe After Effects (AAE). I will not get into AAE in this guide. I have made all my recent movies with APP alone, and even though it is harder, it is still possible to do some nifty tricks with APP. For now, I will simply cover the basics.

Keying

The number one question I get is, "How do I put more than one character into the same scene with footage that I recorded using WMV?" You do so with keying. Remember when you recorded your character against a blue or green screen in WMV? Now, start APP and import this file (File > Import and then browse for the file). Once you import the clip, it will appear in your Project window. Drag the file onto the timeline. The timeline is the large area with three video tracks and three audio tracks. Place the file on Video 1.

You should now see a preview of your clip in the Monitor window. You can view any portion of the clip you want by dragging the little red line up and down the timeline. Right now, we want to get rid of the blue or green screen. In the Project window, click on the tab that says Effects. You will see many folders. Click on the arrow next to the Video Effects folder. Inside this folder are even more folders, but we want Keying, so click on the arrow next to the Keying folder. You are now presented with many options. Let us assume that you shot your character against a blue screen. Select the Blue Screen Key effect and drag it onto your clip. Your blue screen should now disappear. You can now place anything you want behind this clip, like a background, simply by dragging your clip onto the track Video 2 and placing your background below it.

The problem with the Blue Screen Key and Green Screen Key effects is that they are not perfect. You may notice that your character is a little transparent. If you want to change this, go to the Effects Controls tab within the Monitor window. You will see the Blue Screen Key effect listed. Click on the arrow next to the name to see a number of options. Click on the arrows next to Threshold and Cutoff to see two sliding bars. Experiment with dragging these bars around until your character looks the way you want him to.

There is another way to do keying that I prefer (although it isn't suitable for every circumstance, which is why it is nice to know how to use the Blue and Green Screen Key effects). Delete the Blue Screen Key effect in the Effects Controls tab by selecting it and hitting the Delete button on your keyboard. Your blue screen should reappear. Next, select the Chroma Key effect from the Effects tab in the Project window and drag it onto your clip. The blue will not disappear yet, because we need to tell the effect which color we want to make invisible. To do this, go back to your Monitor window and look under the Effects Controls until you see the Chroma Key effect (it will be in the same place the Blue Screen Key effect was). Click on the arrow to show the effect's options. You will see a color box and a little eye-dropper icon. Click on the eye-dropper and drag it over the color in your monitor window that you want to disappear (in this instance, blue). Then release. The color in the box next to the eyedropper should be blue. Now, click the arrow next to Similarity and drag the slider all the way to the right. The blue should be gone!

Now, what we don't want to see happen is for part of your character to disappear too. In order to prevent this, drag the similarity slider back to the left. Now click the Mask Only box. The screen should turn white. Now slowly drag the Similarity slider left until the blue background is completely gone, and your character is still completely white. If portions of your character begin to vanish too, then this means that these portions will be transparent, so be sure to bring the slider back some so that your character is completely white.

You can also fiddle with the Blend slider and the smoothing option, if you want to try for a better keying job.

Motion

You want your characters to movie around, right? Let's suppose that the clip you recorded in WMV was of an orc in a pink Easter dress facing to the right and walking. You want him to walk from the left side of the screen to the right. We have to do this manually with the Motion control, found under the Effects Controls tab in the Monitor window.

Click the arrow next to Motion. You will see a number of options, such as Scale, which increases or decreases the size of the character, or Rotation, which will spin a character clockwise or counter clockwise. We want to play with Position. Next to Position are two numbers, 360 and 240. 360 is on the X axis (left and right) and 240 is on the Y axis (up and down). Bring your cursor over the number 360 and drag it to the left. The number should go down and your character should move across the screen to the left. Keep doing this until your character disappears off-screen. Now, you will see a white circle next to the Position effect. Click it. You have just added a keyframe, and a little diamond has appeared at the beginning of the clip.

Look at the Effects Controls tab and the Monitor window. You will see a red line going down, just like in the Timeline window. This area represents the entire length of your clip. Click on the blue marker above the red line and drag it back and forth. The Monitor should cycle through your clip. We want your character to start off-screen and end off-screen. We have already positioned him to the left off-screen and added the keyframe (which tells the program that your character starts off-screen at the beginning of the clip.) Now, drag the blue marker to nearly the very end of the clip. Once there, drag the number on the X axis (the one you changed earlier) to the right. Your character will reappear on screen and as you drag to the right, he will continue to move. Keep doing this until he disappears off-screen to the right.

Now go back to the beginning of the clip and preview it by pressing the play button in the Monitor window. Your character should look like he is walking from one side of the screen to the other.

That is all there is to motion! It is a little time consuming and awkward, but it works. AAE does Motion much better than APP, but you and I are too poor for AAE, so we will have to make do with APP. You can use Motion to do any sort of fancy maneuvering. In my The Anti-Elf Anthem, I made the singers jump off the balcony simply using this Motion control and adding keyframes wherever I wanted my character to be.

Conclusion

Those are the basics! There are a number of other things that you can learn, such as changing the color of clips to match background, adding transitions and blurs and so forth, but I will not cover them here. If you have questions, go to the forums I listed at the top of this guide and ask for help, or you can go to my own forum which you can find on my website (www.brandonmdennis.com). I hope this guide answered a few questions, and I'll be sure to update it as I feel it is necessary.

Good luck with making your own movies! It is very satisfying to see something you made enjoyed by others.

Oxhorn

You guys are great

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No you're great

No listen to me… you… you guys are great

Lurch

Walking towards kodo

Sings anti elf anthem

Reaches kodo

Hey busco. Oh you're so rough! Why are you so rough busco? And your hide is so leathery. Leathery hide! Hehe, you're a leathery guy.

Gets on

Whooo boy, ok, up! we can do this. Take it slow, just take it slow.

Trots off and runs off in a winding pattern

Woah! Weee! Go busco!

Siren

Pull the kodo over! Pull over right now sir!

Pulls over

Sir you seem to be swerving back there. Are you drunk?

Drunk? Nah, no I'm not…dunk…

Sir, would you mind stepping off the kodo?

Do… do you know who I am? Wait… who am I?

Sir just get off the kodo

Gets off the kodo

Ok sir, now can you recite the alphabet from z to a?

What? Sure… z..x..t… r…

Ok sir, you're under arrest for driving a kodo while intoxicated

What? Shut up you stupid blit, you bloitting orcs are responsible for all the wars in the world! Are you an orc? You're an orc aren't you!

News flash

New Orc Times, headlines:

Switch to Oxhorn speech

I want to apologize to the Horde for the way I acted last night. I shouldn't have been riding a kodo while inebriated, and I placed myself and others in harm's way. I also said some things that I did not mean and I deeply regret. I do not hate orcs, and I am not an anti-orcite.

Alcohol has a way of making a man do and say things he does not mean. This is no excuse for my actions, however, and I am deeply sorry. But to those of you who are set on hating me, I stand before you a humiliated and humble Tauren, speaking from my heart. Have you ever said something you didn't mean, even while sober? How much more likely is it to say something you don't mean when your mind is clouded by alcohol? As a token of my sincerity, and to prove that I do not hate Orcs, I will kiss an orc right here, right now, with the world as an audience!

An orc walks up. Ox looks at her for a moment and then turns back to the mic.

Never mind, I really do hate all the orcs in the world.

Black screen slides down with a subtitle message, "Oxhorn does not really hate all the orcs in the world. Though he does hate elves, so very, very much."

Credits

Scene 01

Associate Professor Evil

At last I, Associate Professor Evil, am ready to create a terrible concoction that will make me master of the world! I will find the most powerful herbs, crystals and magical components, grind them into dust and brew a potion that will transform me into a mighty warlock of incomparable power! Mwahahahaha!

Come Barnaby! Let us check the auction house for materials.

At auction house

Ooo, I'll have one of those, one of those, defiantly one of those, a couple of these—

Beggar

Hey. Can I ha gold?

APE

What?

Beggar

U got gold? Can I ha gold? I need gold. Can I ha gold?

APE

Oh. Uhm, yeah one second… here, don't spend it all in one place.

                                    Beggar runs off

What, not even a lousy thank you?

APE turns back to his browsing of the Auction House

Bah, stupid beggars, infesting cities, too lazy to work, damn hippies demanding hand outs…

Beggar

Hey! Can I ha gold?

APE

What? You already asked me and I gave you some. Get out of my face.

Beggar

I need gold. Can I ha gold?

APE

That's it, I'm going to Thunder Bluff.

Scene 02

APE is flying to Thunder Bluff on a zeppelin and mumbling to himself.

APE

Crooked beggars, get a bloiting job why doncha, mumble-grumble.

                                    APE lands and goes to the Auction House in Thunder Bluff.

All right, where was I. Ah yes, and I need one of those, and one of these…

Beggar

Hey, can I ha gold?

APE

What! How did you get here so quickly? No you can't have my gold! Do what we all do; start a trade, farm some monsters, get a bloody job you homeless hippy!

Beggar

Stfu nub, can I ha gold?

APE

ERG! I'm out of here.

Scene 03

APE is flying on a gryphon to Orgrimmar and muttering to himself mockingly.

APE

Can I have gold? Can I have gold? Yeah you can have some gold, I'll stuff it down your throat you lazy good-for-nothing bum, trying to take my hard earned money, grumble, mumble…

APE lands in Orgrimmar and goes to the Auction House.

Finally some peace. All right, there we go, my last ingredient! Now to make my potion… eureka! The most evil potion ever, mwahahah!

Beggar

Hey? Can I ha gold?

APE

ARG!

Beggar

Wtf nub? Can I ha gold? I need a mount. Can I ha gold?

APE

That's it! I'm sick of you gratting beggars infesting our cities! This world is filled with opportunity, and yet you filthy bums would rather beg for hand outs than earn an honest living. Barnaby!

APE turns to his pet crab and pours a libation from his potion.

Drink deep from my evil concoction, so that I might use you to smite mine enemies!

                                    The crab grows into an immense size.

Mwahaha! Now Barnaby, kill! Kill all the beggars in Orgrimmar, and I shall send with you all my hate, all my malice, and this… wheel of cheese.

He summons a wheel of cheese from thin air. Camera zooms in on his face.

Now kill them!

Barnaby roars and attacks. There is a big battle with the crab running around killing beggars. In one scene, many beggars run by. Then the wheel of cheese rolls past. In another scene, beggars jump in zeppelin to a hide. One asks for gold and the crab appears and destroys them.

The camera zooms in for a close up of APE's face.

Yes, yes! Destroy them all, mwahahahahahha!

Fade out.

Scene 04

Fade in. Thrall is standing in Orgrimmar and speaks solemnly.

Thrall

It has been three days since all the beggars in Orgrimmar were exterminated by a horrendous monster.

Thrall suddenly becomes more jovial.

And we have this fellow to thank for it!

The crowd applauds wildly.

Thank you, Associate Professor Evil, for ridding our fair city of such a horrible menace!

APE

Ah, it was nothing, really.

Thrall

As a token of my gratitude, I want you to have this key to the city. Three cheers for Associate Professor Evil!

Hip-hip, *crowd* hooray! Hip-hip, *crowd* Hurray! Hip-hip, *crowd * hurrah!

The camera zooms in on APE's face. The background darkens.

APE

Now that I hold the key to the city, the first phase of my evil plan is complete! Soon, the world will bow before Barnaby and me! Mwahaha, mwahaha, mwahahahaha!

END

I've just released a new movie called ROFLMAO! Check it out at warcraftmovies.com or on my main page here on Myspace :)

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=38010

I've just finished a new movie, "Krick in the Back!" It is a very short short, and I will try to make shorts like this one on a regular basis. This movie only took me two days to make, so I figure I might, key word MIGHT, be able to do one once a week. But no promises!

Anyhow, I hope you enjoy! You can find it on warcraftmovies.com:

Krick in the Back!

Or at the following places:

YouTube, FileFront, GameVideos, Google Video, Game Trailers

Enjoy!

Of all the men of Azeroth I must say,

That my least favorite race is the elf.

I'd rather have lunch with a fat ogre,

Than to spend one moment with an elf.

I'd rather take a slime to a homey pub,

Than to toast to an elf's health.

They tall and purple and all too skinny,

And of this you must be sure,

That elves are the sickliest things around,

And sadly there is no cure.

Ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo!

Stay away from those crooked elves!

They look like women and smell like hell.

So if you would take my sound advice,

Keep a distance of at least ten feet

.

I'd rather go fishing with Onyxia,

Than to go fishing with an elf.

I'd rather go swimming with a dead murloc,

Than boating with an ugly elf.

Their voices are fem and they don't resemble men,

They're bodies are void of hair,

And so I'm sure you can understand,

Why they give me such a scare.

Ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo!

Stay away from those crooked elves!

They look like women and smell like hell.

So if you would take my sound advice,

Keep a distance of at least ten feet.

Despite my better judgment,

I once went camping with an elf.

He stole my s'mores and dented my pots,

And made the campground smell.

Of lavender and rose buds,

Such nasty smells they be.

And so I threw him into the lake,

Then went and had some tea.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Ooo…ooo…ooo…ooo!

Stay away from those crooked elves!

They look like women and smell like hell.

So if you would take my sound advice,

Keep a distance of at least ten feet.

The 12 Days of Winter's Veil was very fun, but was my most complicated, difficult and frustrating movie to make, which is why I've decided to write a "The Making of" article. In all, the movie is composed of 567 different files totaling 20 gigs in size. I started it when I got back from the Machinima Festival in New York, around the beginning of November, and didn't finish until the afternoon of December 21^st.

            Because I had a heavy load at college this last quarter, I was unable to work on the movie except for on the weekends when I work. I took my laptop to work with me and created the movie when I was not driving guests to and from the airport. I've got to thank my coworker Mark Hockley (who did voice acting for me in "The Joy of Punting Gnomes") for forgiving my inattention while I worked on the movie.

            First, I recorded the music. In early November I went up to the music building at the University of Washington with my neighbor Sarah Grace, who is a music major, and I recorded her playing the piano portion. It took us a number of hours and by the time we were finished we were both a bit loopy from fatigue, as you can tell in the audio bloopers.

Once we finished with the piano, I recorded myself singing the lyrics which I wrote. Now, this was very frustrating to me, because the music was at a weird octave for my voice. It was not high enough and was not low enough—it was right at that place where I don't sing bad, but I don't sing very good either. But alas, since I had no other singer but myself, I suffered through it and sang the bloody thing. It took me a number of tries before I was satisfied, but my vocal chords were tired by then which you can plainly tell. Still, it was the best version I had, and considering I had to play the piano portion from my computer, run back to my microphone (since I don't have headphones) and sing the thing from beginning to end in one go without making any mistakes, it's not bad. I considered singing each day separately and just pasting it in to match the song, but that would have taken way too long.

Once I finished the music I was able to work on the video. I recorded the video in WoW Model Viewer using Fraps against a blue screen and then imported the clips into Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0, keyed out the bluescreen, resized each clip appropriately and animated them with the motion option when necessary. This was the most time consuming part, and it took me the better part of November to finish all the primary editing, from beginning to end.

I had ideas for an "easter egg" early on, and went to the University to borrow a video camera. My original idea for the easter egg was much different and shorter, but as I was walking back to my apartment with the camera the whole kodo eggnog thing struck me, and I had to do it. I then waited all night for my room mate David to get home so he could be my camera man. Since I was filming in the kitchen I had to wait for my other room mates (I have three in all) to finish making food, doing dishes and so forth before I could film. Still, I couldn't avoid all interruptions. If you listen closely you can hear someone closing a door in the background while I'm in the kitchen. It took about an hour to film it all, and it was much less complicated than the footage I shot for "4 Commercials for mtvu". I realized when I shot that footage that the camera microphone was horrible, but it was too late. This time I recorded the sound independently and just spliced it in over the camera sound. This whole thing took me one afternoon and only about an hour to put into the movie.

It was about then that finals struck me here at college and I was unable to work on the movie for a good couple weeks while I studied and made sure I didn't miss any class. When finals were done in early December I was very much behind on the movie (I had originally hoped to get it done by December 1^st) so I started working on it full time.

This was complicated, however, by my boss suddenly discovering that I had a Christmas break. He asked if I could work extra and I couldn't say no, so I started working full time at the hotel. I worked eight hours, drove back to Seattle and worked on my movie. I went through, clip by clip, and changed the RGB color of each file to match the background so that it was not so obvious that I was using WoW Model Viewer. Then I went through and placed in shadows. Now, I would have used the drop shadow effect to make realistic shadows, but I realized that since realistic shadows are not actually in the game, they would only make it more obvious that I used WoW Model Viewer. So I opted to make shadows that closely resembled the shadows in the actual game. I think I probably made the opacity to dark, but oh well.

After I was done with color and shadows, I went in and placed in the sound effects. Some of them I recorded myself (like the snoring sounds from "10 Orcs a-sleeping" and the screams from "6 geeks a-ganking") but the majority of them were taken directly from the game. I used WoWMPQ to extract the sound effects form the game and simply plopped them in where I felt it was appropriate in Premiere.

Now comes the hard, frustrating part. You see, I make all my movies on my little laptop, which I use to write all my papers and do all my research for classes. It isn't a bad computer, but it is hardly a professional tool for machinima making. Therefore my RAM is not quite up to par, and when I sit down to export a movie it takes FOREVER. If I run any program in the background while exporting, I get an error message that says, "Premiere failed to render a video frame" and the program shuts down. So then, when I export a movie, especially one as complicated as this one was, it takes over my computer for hours at a time.

Additionally, when using Premiere 7.0, entire sections of my movie would suddenly turn black for no apparent reason. This problem was not predictable, for if I shut down the program, restarted the computer, or even minimized and then maximized the window, different portions of the movie would turn black while others would become normal, which was reflected in the actual file when I exported it. I worked for days to correct this problem—redoing blue screen keys, deleting unnecessary tracks, letting my computer rest for a day before exporting—and nothing seemed to work.

So I went to Tristan Pope for help. He told me that instead of exporting the entire thing as one bulk file that I should try dividing the movie into sequences, and then dragging the sequences into the main timeline and exporting. So I did, but it did not help. He then told me to get Adobe Premiere 2.0 (which is a newer version than 7.0, which I was using) to see if it would solve the problem. I can not afford the program, however, so I downloaded the trial.

And it worked! It solved all my black screen issues. However, it presented me with some new ones. I was unable to export the movie in any format.

By this time I was beating my head against the wall in frustration. The deadline for the WCM contest was rapidly approaching, and I really didn't want to spend my entire Christmas break working on this one movie. Besides, I still had to release Inventing Swear Words 2 and The Anti-Elf Anthem officially. So I went to a Premiere help forum and was told to try making a new project and importing the project containing my movie. This ended up working about half the time. It worked with ISW2 but did not work with TAEA and my Christmas movie. So I had to go back to the drawing board.

The deadline was days away. The days remaining for my trial of Premiere 2.0 were swiftly ticking away. The movie was completed but I had no way of exporting it. I was also waiting on Michael Carson, the animator who I hired to make " An Oxhorn Brand Movie" title logo for me, to actually finish it. The title screen was going to be great! A branding iron would come down and brand my logo into something, and then the screen would zoom out and it would be on a Tauren's thigh. Michael emailed me and said he was working on it and would have it to me by the 10^th, so all I could do was wait. But the 10^th came and went and I still did not have it. He too had had some rough finals and was just sitting down to work on it, but he told me not to worry, that I would have it soon.

So I spent the next few days working and trying to figure out how to export my movie. I decided to just start fresh. I went through the Adobe Media Encoder option and clicked setting after setting, turning some on and others off, until I finally, after many days, found a setting that allowed my movie to actually render without an error message. The only problem was that the quality was horrible. So I fiddled with it for another day until I found a setting that worked! I got small portions of it to export and the quality was great. However when I tried to export the entire movie my system would get bogged down and the movie would be lost.

It was the 18^th and Michael still had not finished the title slide. He was up in Sieg Hall working from the University of Washington computers and hadn't slept in days. I decided to join him and he set me up with a computer that had Premiere Pro 2.0 installed on it. With the increased RAM of this university computer, I was able to export my film! And yet now things were not being read properly.

For some reason the university computer was saying that some of my files were corrupted. I ended up having to re-film a few scenes and re-compile them. I also had to convert all sound effects in the movie to 44kbps instead of 48, file by file. My sound was still not exporting properly for some reason, so I had to go through Premiere, turn off all video and export all sound effects into a single file, which I in turn imported back into the project and put in place of the individual clips.

As I was previewing one of my renders, I noticed that some things were off just a bit. The shadows were all in wrong places and the ears in every single "2 night elf ears" segment were off. It was then I realized that converting the Premiere 7.0 file into a 2.0 file had messed with the positions of all my .bmp files.

It was one o'clock in the morning on the 10^th. I had not been able to export my movie and Michael still had not finished my title slide. Due to the time consumption and complexity of the title slide, he was no longer able to have the branding iron come down and brand the Tauren's thigh. Instead we were just going to have the logo change colors and then smoke would come out. That would be fine, as long as I got it in time. We were both working from the university computers when Michael stood up quickly. Suddenly he remembered that all the computers in the lab were going to shut down at two o'clock in the morning and erase all non system files! Quickly he and I ran between all the computers using ctrl+alt+del to turn off the background program that would restart the computers. He was using all of them in a network in order to render the smoke for my title screen, and just as it turned two o'clock, we got to the final computer.

But we had forgotten to fix the main computer that was sending the render job through the network! It shut down and the files were lost.

As you can imagine, we were both frothing at the mouth. I felt like hitting something and looked around frantically for a gnome, but then Michael sighed in relief. One of the computers had finished rendering the file just before the primary one went down, and it happened to save all information. We toasted our luck with a couple of cans of warm Sprite, and got back to work.

I sat down and reanimated all the motion effects for all the shadows, and readjusted all the ears. Just as I finished, Michael finished the title slide. He was not happy with how the smoke turned out but by that time I didn't care. It was four o'clock in the morning, I had to work in three hours, and I had not slept in 72. So I got the title slide, put a sound effect behind it, threw it into my timeline and hit "Export".

I took a cat-nap for a few hours and woke up to find that my movie had finally rendered completely with no errors whatsoever. The perfectionist in me kept on pointing out minor things here and there that I could improve, but the exhausted, hungry and annoyed curmudgeon in my told the perfectionist to kindly shut the hell up. I raced home, plopped the 300-plus megabyte file into Windows Movie Maker, set the program to export the file under 100 megs for sites like YouTube, and left for work.

Now, a funny thing happens when you lack sleep for nearly three days straight, live off of sugary soda and cookie dough and then go to work where you drive a hotel shuttle van for eight hours. You start falling asleep at the wheel. I really don't remember much of that shift—a heavy bag here and there, a few guests asking me if I was all right, a few cars honking as I swerve over the white line—but evidentially I survived the shift without causing any harm. Here's a tip: drinking four shot Americanos, blasting late 80's hard rock (Blind Guardian), rolling down the windows in freezing temperatures and smacking yourself in the face repeatedly helps a lot.

I arrived home on the morning of the 21^st, the deadline of the Christmas contest, and decided that I would check my movie before I went to bed. I played the file and it looked good. But something was missing. I played it again and realized that all the sound effects except for the murloc noises were missing. I quickly opened up Premiere to see what was afoot. Nothing. The files were all there. They all worked. I exported a small segment to see if the render would work, but it didn't. None of the sound effects would render, and there was no good reason.

I would have blown my top right there, but was too tired. So I deleted all sound effects, re-imported them and put them all in place as fast as I could. A couple hours later I was ready, and I set the thing to export. It was now past noon and I put in Robin Hood: Men in Tights to keep me awake while I waited for the thing to export. It did, sort of. I think I drifted off here and there and I had funny dreams about tight-wearing archers with guns running around London looking for gypsies and boxing matches, forever talking about how bad milk was for you whilst squeezing dogs that sounded like mice. Maybe it had something to do with me having watched Snatch the night before. Anyhow, I awoke to a ding! And watched the movie to make sure it was all right.

You'll never guess. It was! I watched it three times just to make sure and then started uploading it to the internet. I had it uploading to FileFront, Google Video and WCM at the same time that I was exporting a low-res version for YouTube, Game Trailers and Game Videos.com. Once I had a mirror for FileFront up there I turned off the lights and went to bed. It was the best sleep I can ever remember having.

Sometimes I ask myself why I bother making little machinima movies. After all, it's not like I make any money doing it. I don't have a production studio, I have no sponsors and I work and go to class full time. Every time I finish a movie I tell myself that I am done and that I'll be taking a long break. But I never do. I don't know why it is, but I just can't help making movies. An idea will come to mind and I'll have to do it. Why? I don't know. As for right now I am exhausted and don't plan on making a new movie any time soon. But I am sure I'll find myself working on something new any time now regardless. After all, I just finished the script for Inventing Swear Words 3.

When I received word that one of my movies had been nominated for a "Mackey" by the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, I was pretty thrilled. It was about then that I got sucked up in a whirlwind of machinima activity; the Xfire contest was drawing to a close, mtvU was having me make some commercials, and I was invited to attend the Xfire contest award ceremony at Stanford as well as the Machinima Festival in New York. In the end I could only pick one, and I chose to go to New York.

            Now, I really didn't know what to expect. I'd never been to a machinima festival before and I really had no desire to go to New York. But I got on a plane with my friend Mark who did voice acting for me in Inventing Swear Words and we flew east to see what would happen. Mark insisted that we explore the city (much to my chagrin) and so I relented, as long as our explorations didn't interfere with the Festival.

            We made it to New York fine and we found our hotel easily enough. We even became adept at using the subway system. But when we tried to find the Museum of the Moving Picture, where the festival was being held, we got rather lost. You see, it was on 35^th street and 36^th avenue (or was it 35^th avenue and 36^th street?) and we walked around in circles for nearly an hour trying to find the place. But, after a number of phone calls to the museum, we found it and checked our coats.

            There were a number of lectures that took place at the festival, all of them on the nitty-gritty of machinima making. The problem was that the lectures were taking place at the same time as the screenings of the nominees, and, being the megalomaniac that I am, I really wanted to see my movie on the big screen. So we spent the day running between the first and third floor, catching a few words from the lecturers downstairs and then hoping to see my movie upstairs. It wasn't until the day was nearly done that I realized, genius that I am, that a list of each movie and the time of its screening was available in the lobby. Brilliant.

            So then we had a chance to catch our breaths, and we got to actually pay attention to the lectures. I must say that, not knowing what to expect when I arrived, I was terribly impressed. The organization of the festival was fairly smooth, which was, as I was told, a significant improvement from last year's festival. Some of the presentations were rather boring, and poor Mark had to sit there rolling his eyes and tapping his foot, being not at all interested in machinima (well, not as much as me, at least) but most of them were genuinely interesting. I think that one of the most interesting presentations was the demonstration of iClone, a software created by Reallusion, which is pretty much a machinima making studio wherein an author can create his own characters, creatures and monsters, items, clothing and even worlds where he can shoot footage for machinima movies.

            I was very much impressed by iClone, but I do have my reservations. One thing that drives machinima, I think, is that people are seeing dramatic or comedic movies made with games that they are familiar with. So those who play World of Warcraft go and download WoW machinima that they find entertaining, but if they never played the game, how entertaining would they find the machinima? I think part of the enjoyment is that players are familiar with the world and with the game's storyline and enjoy seeing races, monsters and areas that they are familiar with used in ways that they would have never imagined. I can't help thinking that the lure of machinima might be lost if artists start to make machinima with tools like iClone that fans are unfamiliar with. But I'll get more into this in another article.

            One of my favorite presentations took place on the following day, and it had to do with sound design and foley recordings. One thing that my movies often lack is good sound, mainly because I have not had access to a good library of sound effects, though this is a problem I am soon to rectify. They also gave great tips on recording your own foley sound effects, and hopefully I'll be able to replicate these skills in the future.

            There were a number of other great presentations, but the highlight of the festival was, of course, the award's ceremony at the end. I put on my snazzy black suit coat, but I forgot to bring my top hat. I sat in the back with the other WoW machinimators and then the ceremony started. The host was great and incredibly funny (albeit, crass) and it was wonderful seeing my movie as well as the movies of my friends displayed on that huge screen. There's nothing quite like it. It's hard for me, because on one hand I take great delight in seeing people laugh at something I made, but on the other hand I can't help but feel guilty at being so engrossed with me, my movies, my songs, me, me, me! Pride is a dangerous thing, and it is hard finding the fine line between the humble acknowledgement of gratitude on the part of the fan along with the urge to create something even greater, not for ones own glory but for the entertainment of the fan, and doing so solely for ones own pride. But that is, again, another article for another day.

            My movie didn't win. There was one movie which swept the Mackies, and it deserved it. The Adventures of Bill and John was made by a couple of French fellows from KBS Productions, and it was genuinely funny, well made with great music selection and wonderful writing. It won a number of awards, as it should have. But I must admit that I was more pleased to see Jason Choi, the creator of Edge of Remorse walk away with two Mackies, simply because he is a WoW machinimator like myself, and nepotism is such an instinctive thing.

            Though the award's ceremony was great, my favorite part was getting to meet all my fellow WoW machinimators, guys I have been competing with in contests and whose work I have been admiring for ages. One thing that I walked away with from this festival was the realization of how broad the genre of machinima is. I sit at my laptop and make WoW movies and watch WoW movies, but there is a whole world of machinima out there made in games like Tribes, Halo 2 and other games that I've never heard of before that are all hilarious, well done and otherwise impressive. I hadn't really given this any thought before the festival, and while I was there I felt rather lost amongst my peers, which is why I was so glad to run into fellow machinimators who use WoW to make their stories. I met with John and Ryan Ebenger from Red Sky Foundry (of The Brothers Tauren fame). It's funny that they live so close to me, only a few minutes' drive north from my house, and yet I had to go all the way to New York to bump into them. Terran Gregory and Tristan Pope (who was fascinated with my suspenders, by the way) were both there (authors of the Return and Switcher series respectively and who worked on the South Park WoW episode), as well as Jason Choi (Edge of Remorse) and the fine fellows at WarCraftMovies.com. I found out later that Eriyanna from Myndflame was there also, but much to my dismay I evidentially missed her.

            I think my favorite image from the event was of all of us standing outside the museum smoking. I had forgotten all my pipes, but luckily I found a nice corncob pipe at a store in Queens that came in handy for the occasion. I was surprised and pleased with how genuinely nice everyone was. Though few of us had met before, we all prattled on like chums and talked about our favorite WoW machinima, and it was often someone else's, not our own, that we liked the best. It was great to see Jason standing with two glass Mackies. There were five of us who got nominated this year; my own little movie The Anti-Elf Anthem for Best Original Music; Jason Choi of Riot Film's Edge of Remorse for Best Picture, Best Direction, Best Virtual Design, Best Original Music, and Best Independent Machinima; The Hackleman Brothers of Myndflame's Illegal Danish: Super Snacks for Best Direction; The Ebenger Brothers of Red Sky Foundry's The Brother's Tauren 2 for Best Virtual Performance: Puppeteering and Tristan Pope of Crafting Worlds' Converse Commercial for Best Editing; and out of all of us Jason was the only WoW machinimator to win one (he won for Best Visual Design and Best Direction). So here is a challenge: I want WoW machinimators to sweep the Mackies next year! I will do my part and try to come up with something great (if I can find the bloomin' time), and I want to see something that will win a Mackey from a number of authors in time for next year. Get to work lads!

            After the festival, Mark and I stayed an extra day just so we could explore the city. We went to Central Park, Times Square, the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, ground zero, a number of really cool churches, and we took the Stanton Island ferry which went right past the Statue of Liberty. Before I came to New York I really had no idea why there was such a fascination with the city, and arriving at my hotel in Queens, I was even more baffled. But when I got to explore Manhattan I finally understood. The city is like a sculpture in its own right, only one that breathes and is functional. I think there are plenty of wonderful places out there besides New York, and Seattle where I live certainly has its fair share of them, but Manhattan definitely has a sort of addictive appeal which I had to experience for myself to understand.

Ahem.

Oxhorn's Tips on Making Machinima

One might see an essay on making Machinima and think, well then, this fellow has it all figured out! But alas, I don't—indeed I have it far from all figured out and am in debt many of my Machinima film making peers for their advice and trouble shooting. So then, you may ask, why should I listen to you? Well… good point.

            Regardless, I get emails every day from people asking for advice on how to make their own movies, and after making a handful of little movies I've learned a few things that people might find interesting. I suppose that's as good of a reason as any to read on.

On Movie Composition

One important aspect of movie making is the actual composition of the movie. This composition dictates the flow of the film, how coherent it is and encompasses dramatic and comedic timing and stylistic touches. Now, every would-be film maker has his own style, and style is nothing I can write a guide about. There are certain things, however, that one can do in order to make his movie less cumbersome and more appealing to viewers.

Credits

            One thing that has always bothered me with these short Machinima movies is when directors start out their film with long-winded and oftentimes quite vain credits. This can take many forms. The first is the more common and consists of some sort of dramatic music accompanied by long, sweeping shots of scenery from a video game with text fading in and out listing every single person who could possibly be credited for helping with the movie.

            Now, there is a place for this, and it is at the end. The beginning of the movie is one of the most important parts because it grasps the audience's attention and will convince them either to continue watching or to click the little "x". I have always found that it is best to either jump right in to the actual plot or, if you have an opening title screen at all, to make it very short and containing only information immediately pertinent, like the title of the movie and, maybe, its author. It is incredibly redundant to place credits both at the beginning and end of a film, especially in a little internet movie which is more often than not five times as short as a full length feature film.

The second, and more annoying, is when a movie is made by pretty much one person, and the film maker then decides to list every possible role he could have played and then attribute it to himself. Nothing is really more annoying than to open a movie file and the first thing you see is a long list of "Directed by: Johnny Bloviator. Edited by: Johnny Bloviator. Choreography by: Johnny Bloviator." If you are the only person involved in the making of your film, just simply say, "Made, produced, edited, directed" or whatever else have you "by Johnny Humble".

Lastly, when the end of the film has arrived and it is time to do the credits, be creative with them. Don't simply have a list of the credits flash by, unless pressed with a time restriction. Also, don't have them drag on slowly for half the length of your actual movie with dramatic music and flashy lights. If it is a comedy, have something funny going on during the credits. I always enjoy doing bloopers. If it is a drama, keep the credits short, functional and maintain the mood of the piece. Don't have flashy credits that fly by, and then lightning strikes and the screen flashes a million colors. Keep your credits short and have them contain only what information is necessary. Or, if you have a moody song that captures the mood of the film that you would like to end with, have this play during your credits and end them when the song ends.

Humor

The easiest humor that can be achieved is vulgar humor and humor involving swearing. One of the reasons I made my Inventing Swear Words movies is because I have found that people fall back to swear words when they need a laugh instead of actually coming up with something creative. In addition, swear words have become so prevalent in our language that you can hear them a dozen times in a steady stream of dialogue from the average person. I think that this is completely unnecessary and disrupts the foundation of our language. Instead, I think it is much more creative and funny to make up swear words or use other euphemisms in their place. It is far too common and way too easy to just have a character say, "Aw f*** it". And we don't want to be like everyone else now, do we?

            People define vulgarity a number of different ways, and my definition will surely be different from yours. So instead of going down the list of humor I find vulgar, I'll just say that using vulgarity in order to elicit laughter is easy and cheap. It is much harder—and infinitely more entertaining—to elicit such laughs using circumstances, dialogue and whatever else have you. This is the sort of humor that will stay with people. Crass movies about drunken binges with men peeing in parking lots, doing practical jokes on the unsuspecting and finding loose floozies to score with abound. They come out, people go to them and laugh, and when they leave the theater they are forgotten. But what are the sorts of comedies that we remember? The Princess Bride. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Even comedies that are classics and contain vulgarity at times, such as Monty Python or Office Space, would have fallen off the face of the earth if not for the things that truly make them funny, such as witty quips, hilarious dialogue and ridiculous circumstances.

            Humor is its own strange beast, but it is similar to drama in this respect: the story of a comedy must be consistent within itself and all plot elements must be explained. Monty Python is famous for being rather abrupt. But they were only abrupt because they felt that the best parts of a good gag were in the middle, and that conclusions usually ruined the joke—thus they left many jokes without conclusions. Surely this is legitimate, but it is also possible to make a good comedy with a strong and funny conclusion. Everything must have a reason. If the whole point of the plot is to obtain the Fantastic Gelatin Mold of Grumpyland, the audience must be told why this gelatin mold is so fantastic, and why it is being held in Grumpyland. We must also refrain, whenever possible, from just inexplicably throwing into our story some funny gag which distrupts the flow of the story and has no reason for happening other than that it is funny, because this suddenly makes it unfunny.

Drama

There are certain dramatic storylines that have been used over and over again. It isn't necessarily bad to use these tired storylines, and I have seen many great machinima movies that have used old stories and done them well, pumping new life into them. Racing the Grimtotem, for instance, was hardly a unique plot—in the end it was a "woman gets killed, man seeks revenge" story. But even when one uses a story that is tired, it can be reinvented in a way that suddenly fills it with life. In Racing I decided to make it a silent movie, shot completely in sepia tone and film grain. I also went into great detail explaining the relationship between the characters and built up a reason for Lanalee's death before simply having her killed. Racing is far from the greatest machinima drama, but it has been popular to some degree because the first half of the movie is a love and survival story, not a revenge flick.

Here are plots that are old and tired:

1) Man is in love with a woman but for some reason dies. He comes back as an undead member of the Forsaken and now has to deal with his love in some way.

2) For some unexplained reason a man's love interest is killed by some thugs and so the man goes on a murderous rampage.

3) The classic love tragedy: Men A and B love woman C and fight for her.

4) The hero is the prince, king, or regent of a land, and his land is besieged by the Alliance, Horde or a tribe of evil murlocs, and so he must rally his troops in order to defend their lands.

5) A boy lives his life as a peasant and then, through a series of interesting coincidences, realizes he is really heir to the kingdom or whatever, just in time to lead his nation against the Great Evil that threatens it.

6) Any combination of these plots or any others with the motive for heroism being a woman.

And the list could go on and on. Now, it's not bad to use any of these plots if it is done right; indeed, I am working on a movie that loosely (very loosely) follows the first one I mentioned above. But if these plots are done, there are things that must be addressed or else it simply becomes another movie to be shelved with all the others like it:

1) Villains must always have a motive. You cannot have some bad guy do a dastardly deed for no reason whatsoever, or simply because he is "evil". Tell us why he is evil, what event in his life made him evil, what lucrative possibility has tempted his greed in order to make him evil, etc. Or perhaps the villain isn't evil at all and the great tragedy of the plot is that the hero and the villain are both good men who fight each other due to a simple misunderstanding.

2) There should always be conflict within the main character. A hero who is the shining beacon of goodness and justice is downright boring. We want to see a hero who is flawed like all of us and has to fight his own demons.

3) Plot elements must always be explained. They just can't "happen". They need to have a reason. If the hero has a pet kodo that he hops upon in order to save the day, show us where that kodo came from or at least bring him up previously so that we know that the kodo isn't just conveniently there when the hero needs it. The same can be said for a sword, best friend or whatever.

4) That said, we need not bog ourselves down with details that don't pertain to the plot. If we have a pet kodo that becomes important later, we don't need to tell the kodo's life story at the beginning of the film (i.e. Busco was found as an orphan on the plains of Mulgore. He was taken as a baby and raised on Tauren milk until he became big and strong. He is the fastest kodo in Azeroth because he has an itch and the best way to scratch it is to run really fast, etc.) Instead, weave the kodo into the story creatively before he is actually needed during the climax.

On Editing

And now we come to the point I am most weak in. I would completely refrain from even addressing this topic due to my meager abilities in video editing, but of all the questions I am asked, editing is the most frequent. So I'll give as much info as I am able.

I used Windows Movie Maker for the longest while, which is a free program for Windows, and I used Game Cam to record footage, which has a free version you can download from www.planetgamecam.com. For image editing I use The Gimp which is also a free program, and I use WavePad to edit audio, again, a completely free program. You don't have to be rich to make little movies, just creative.

Recently I have advanced to using Fraps in order to record footage and Adobe Premiere to edit my movies because Fraps is a much less fussy program and is easier to use, and Adobe Premiere is simply more powerful (though I need After Effects and haven't been able to secure a copy yet). Fraps is fairly inexpensive, but Adobe Premiere will break the bank. Well, my bank, at any rate.

Some of the things I have done in my movies are impossible to do in Windows Movie Maker, which is why I switched. In order to get the undead guy to hold the sign and do emotions in Oxhorn Tells off Xfire I had a friend of mine, TMWC (you can download his movie The Man Who Can from www.warcraftmovies.com) render each frame. I then simply plopped them into Premiere.

Blue and green screens are fairly easy, once you figure it out. Just record your character against a blue background, and when making World of Warcraft machinima, the program WoW Model Viewer is wonderful for this. After making and dressing your character, save him and then go View > Background Color and choose either blue or green. Be sure to choose the pure blue or pure green (255 blue or 255 green). Then simply record your character performing a motion. Import the clip into Premiere and then choose Video Effects from the Project window (after clicking on the "effects" tab) select Keying and then choose Blue or Green Screen Key. Drag the effect onto your clip and presto! the background goes transparent.

Now there are a few problems that can sometimes crop up when using a color screen key. For instance, your actual character might be semi-translucent. What you need to do is go to the Monitor and choose the tab "Effect Controls" (be sure that you have the monitor set to Dual View). You will now see a list of effects that are currently on that clip. Click the arrow next to Blue or Green Screen key and you will have two options: Threshold and Cutoff. Click the arrows next to each and drag the bar that appears in order to adjust the attribute. Cutoff will make your character less translucent, but will also, if you bring it too far up, make the edges around your character hard and even give him a black, blue or green border. The trick is to make the Cutoff high enough so that your character is solid but low enough so that it doesn't have a colored outline. Then what you can do is lower the Threshold in order to make the background around your character lighter (so that you don't have a dark box following your character around) and so that the black outline can be diminished. This helps make screen keys look real, and just takes some fiddling.

To make shadows of a character in Premiere, select a clip to which you have already added a screen key and copy it, pasting the copy on a track below the original. Go to the Project window, click the Effects tab, select Video Effects, choose Perspective and click on the Drop Shadow effect. Drag it onto your copied clip. This will become the shadow. Now do what you did with the Screen Key in order to edit it: go to the monitor, select the Effects Control tab and look to find the Drop Shadow effect. Click on the arrow to view its attributes. Select the button entitled "Shadow Only" and this will turn the clip into a black shadow, the darkness of which you can adjust by fiddling with Opacity. I always make the Distance 0 and the Softness 5, but this is just personal taste and you can fiddle with this as you please.

Now, in order to make it look like an actual shadow you have to do some tweaking. Go back to the Project window and find Basic 3D under the Perspective list. Drag it onto your clip. You have two options in the Effects Control section of the Monitor window here that can define the shape and direction of your shadow; Swivel and Tilt. Depending on how you want your shadow to look, change these two attributes until you are satisfied. Then use the Motion control at the top in order to place it in the right spot.

Motion is annoying, a bit tricky, and yet very useful. You can pretty much make any clip you import into Premiere go anywhere on the screen, at any angle, and at any size. Much of this is rather intuitive and you just have to fiddle with it. But here are a few hints: let's say you want your main character to kick a gnome across the screen. Select the clip of the gnome and then in the Effects Controls tab select the arrow next to Motion. Next to Position you have two sets of numbers. The first moves your gnome right or left, and the second moves him up or down. Drag him over the Tauren's foot. Once you have done so, click on the little gray circle that rests between two opposing arrows (if there is no gray circle, click on the little white round icon nearby to "Add a Keyframe"). This is a "Keyframe" and basically tells the program where this clip is and at what time during the movie. Then drag your little red line along the timeline to where you want your gnome to end up. Go back to Position and move the gnome to where you want him to end. A new Keyframe is automatically added at this point. Now preview it and your gnome should move from one side of the screen to another. This same principal can work with Scale (the size of the clip) Rotation (the way it is turned) and many other effects you can place on your clip.

These are all fairly basic and there are many more advanced things you can do (most of which I do not know yet) but this should get you started, and is really all you need to know in order to make a simple movie. So heed Uncle Oxhorn's movie making tips, and above all, enjoy making Machinima!

Inventing Swear-Words 2

By Brandon M. Dennis

Scene opens to one Tauren standing near a stone in the middle of Mulgore, White Tauren. RP Tauren and Ubar l33t d00d arrive and wave at him.

White Tauren

Ah, I'm glad you guys could make it! Did you have any troubles finding the place?

RP Tauren

Nay, considering it is the exact same place we met last time. Why can we not meet elsewhere like… Ferelas or Winterspring or Ironforge?

Ubar l33t d00d

Yeah Mulgore sucks you chakkin n00b.

White Tauren

Hey, I like Mulgore. It's very homey. I like seeing the kodos.

Ubar l33t d00d

Your mom's a kodo.

White Tauren

Shut it you blit. Look, the reason I called you both again is because I'm afraid our swear-words aren't being used as much as we'd like. Did you both advertise them?

RP Tauren

Verily! I didst tell my guild, which leads Molten Core raids, and we told everyone that came that they must speaketh with our new swear words.

White Tauren

That's good. And what about you?

Ubar l33t d00d

Nope.

White Tauren

No? What do you mean no?

Ubar l33t d00d

I was grattin' busy.

White Tauren

Doing what, might I ask?

Ubar l33t d00d

Spending time with my girlfriend.

RP Tauren

You have a girlfriend? I find that hard to believe.

Ubar l33t d00d

Course I do n00b. She's hawt.

White Tauren

Sighs. Whatever. I think we need a new swear word to add to our repertoire. I've been mulling it around a bit and I've come up with… bloit.

RP Tauren

Bloit?

White Tauren

Bloit.

Ubar l33t d00d

Bloit?!

White Tauren

Bloit!

RP Tauren

Why bloit? It doth sound too much like blit, one of the ones we made up last time.

White Tauren

Well "blit" can really only be used as a noun or substantive; for instance, "Wow, Timmy's mom sure is a blit," or "Did you eat that sandwich all by yourself you blit?" I'm thinking we need another word that can be more flexible, more along the lines of f*** and sh**.

RP Tauren

Oh, I see. So it would be like… "I bloited your blit in the wolsh last week."

White Tauren

Exactly.

Ubar l33t d00d

This meeting is bloitting dumb ftl.

RP Tauren

That's all well and good, but how wouldst we advertise our new words?

White Tauren

I'm one step ahead of you! Everyone, I'd like you all to meet Hat the Singing Turtle!

Enter Hat

Hat

Greetings gents!

RP Tauren

This is how we are going to advertise our swear-words?

White Tauren

Yep. You see, people remember stuff better if it is in lyrical form, so I figured we could have someone sing a little jingle. Ok Hat, and… takes us there!

Hat

Weeell!

If you want your gratting blit to chak your wolshing flak,

But you want to see his wolsh bloit you in the chak,

You should treat him kindly and of this we must agree,

Lest that wolshing chakking blit go bloit you in the back.

Hey!

Pause

RP Tauren

That was horrible.

White Tauren

Truly awful.

RP Tauren

I want ten seconds of my life back.

White Tauren

I feel physically sick.

Ubar l33t d00d

N00b.

Hat

Go bloit yourselves you blits.

Hat exits.

White Tauren

Well that was my idea. Any others?

Ubar l33t d00d

I could get my girlfriend to model in a bikini for an ad campaign.

White Tauren

Ah, that's a great idea! Everyone likes a bikini-clad woman. Go get her!

Ubar l33t d00d exits

White Tauren and RP Tauren speak quickly, a little bemused and to each other.

White Tauren

Nothing like using sex appeal to sell a product.

RP Tauren

Right, and we're being so original, for surely no one has ever used sex to sell anything before.

White Tauren

Mmm-hmm, and we aren't compromising our morals by caving into marketing norms at all.

RP Tauren

Nope, no-sir, not us. It's not like we're exploiting women to achieve our aims or anything.

White Tauren

Exactly.

Enter Ubar l33t d00d

Ubar l33t d00d

Here she comes you blits. Everyone, meet Lacey.

Enter Lacy, a large female Tauren

Lacey

(gruffly) Hello boys.

RP Tauren

Um… this is your girlfriend?

Ubar l33t d00d

Duh, roflmao!

White Tauren

Yeah this… isn't exactly what I was imagining.

Ubar l33t d00d

Isn't she hawt?