Just saw a couple shorts created with the game and they look pretty cool. Has anyone used it to actually make a story? If so, how easy is it to use and how much work is required to produce say a 5-minute clip? What’s rendering time like? I’m working with a 1Ghz PIII, so that may be a consideration.
Here’s an older thread on the game. aleong’s videos are very well done.
http://movies.lionhead.com/studio/RaySmo
Here’s my studio. “Til Death Do Us Part” took me a good week of editting and plotting, but it’s 11 minutes long. No dialog though so that part was easy. Still it was rewarding. Stayed in the top 25 romances for a couple or three weeks.
If you go to the game producers’ website, you can see a lot of films that people have posted. Some of them are pretty funny.
So, if I get this, how long should I expect to spend making a something?
You can spend as much time as you want. You stitch together scenes to create a cohesive story (or not, if that floats your boat). There wide variety of scenes available, as well as the different positions of characters, give you an incredible about of leeway in what you can do. It is a finite number and you can’t have anything you imagine. Often the ummoveable positions of characters, especially for dialogue and close-up shots, is really irritating.
Depending on how you play (real-time or sandbox) a scene gets shot in real time. Your actors, set crew, and director have to walk along to the set and film each scene. After the filming, if you want to edit or add sounds (and you’ll want to edit) you need to throw it in post-production and spend some time in there tweaking away.
It usually took me a few hours to get a four-minute clip I was happy with uploading, but filming is a tricky business when your stars wander off to get drunk between takes. Note that this is after having written the script, which can take several hours in itself as you root through the scene selector looking for just the right one.