I’m running it on a four year old 1.7 GHz Pentium machine with a Radeon 9000 video card. Everything works except for an occasional frame-rate hiccup and the fact that my extras annoyingly seemed to be naked until I got to color films.
It took me about four restarts but finally Big Brother Studios (our movies are double-plus good!) seems to be running smoothly. Actually won highest rated studio in 1925! (And I seem to be producing a surprising number of gay cowboy films.)
A question for the rest of you. Should I tear down my older sets once their novelty factor wears off? The game seems to like using the same ones over and over and it drags down the ratings.
Along the same lines, should I keep the basic screenwriting building around once I have the advanced building?
Also, when giving an actor/actress a makeover, how can you tell how they feel about their new look? The costume effect is obvious but how do you know what effect (say) hair color or style has?
One or two things I discovered. When a movie first starts filming you can double-click on the set to get a “director’s view” of the film and can make some basic changes to it at this point, even if you don’t have the custom screenwriting or post production buildings yet. Unfortunately it seems as if you only have one chance at it as when I try it a second time I just get the flythru of the set.
Finally, from the “obvious to everyone but me” department, I just realized with my latest game that I can place buildings, sets and landscaping while the game is paused. :smack: Helped my studio attractiveness a lot!
I got rid of my wild west settings, once I lost interest in making movies there.
I like to keep a lower level one around, to churn out cheaper, faster B movies. (Just like Hollywood, I’ll sell crap just to keep the company in the black!) Not that this game makes it hard to stay profitable.
Okay, so I’ve finally started to play around with the custom movie maker. My first magnum opus? A 1970 sci-fi thriller entitled THEY CAME FOR YOUR BRAIN.
Nice first try… beyond the ‘Alien with guys in chicken suits’, I really wasn’t too clear about what was happening at some points (particularly around the 2 minute mark). Inserting subtitles would have been nice, but I’m sure you were just getting the hang of it.
Oh, definitely. And I had only gotten to 1945 in the actual game, so the sandbox didn’t let me use sets/techs beyond 1970… which kind of limited my options. The feedback I got online was consistently “Nice costuming, good editing, but really needs more dialogue.”
I’m working up a longer script based on that. See, the crew gets infected with bird flu, see, which makes it topical…
I’ve created a music video for “In the Name of the Father”, a song by Taiwanese rapper Jay Chou (viewer discretion advised due to some violence and sensuality). It was rendered in The Movies and edited using Windows Movie Maker.
Having some problems with Putfile, so I’ve got a streaming version here: http://www.ourmedia.org/node/108125 (on this site, the aspect ratio is a little bit off)
You can see my previous music videos for “Cannot Speak” and “Nun-chuks”: http://www.putfile.com/mediacircus (best viewed on ‘Wide’, which you can select at the bottom of the video player)
I know you are all eagerly awaiting the heart-wrenching “Til Death Do Us Part” but due to a vacation and Thanksgiving, the shooting has yet to wrap. Soon though, soon
Then “Superguy 2: The Neverending Battle” is next on the agenda, though I’d prefer to shoot it when I have all the technology I can amass.
Ok, I’m finished with “Until Death Do Us Part” so it’s shameless plug time. Check it out at my studioo (http://movies.lionhead.com/studio/RaySmo) and tell me what you think. I’m pretty proud of it. I don’t care for the music except the first and last scenes, but I’m pretty amazed at how well the music matches the actions in Act 1.
Now that I’m done with that magnum opus I have time to watch everyone else’s and give those glowing reviews!
Did you create different actors to represent the couple at different ages, or did you find something in the makeover options that allow you to age the actors?
Decided to focus on learning more about the editing tools in Windows Movie Maker this week, and so I put together this rags-to-riches music video for “In Childhood”, a song by Nan Quan Mama, a Taiwanese band that became famous after getting backing from rapper Jay Chou.
For a free download, Windows Movie Maker is a pretty decent editor. All of the titles and inserts (e.g., newspaper, television broadcast) come with the basic editor, as does the ability to use grayscale, dissolve, slow motion, and to use stills. The only thing that it doesn’t do ‘out of the box’ are any of those shots where you seen the camera panning/zooming outside of the game (e.g., the stills)-- those are an add-on from Pixelan’s SpiceFX, which I bought online.
Anyone know the best way to get viewers for your posted films? I enjoyed my number 2 and number three spots in the Top 25 Romance for a day or so, but then other films were posted and seemed to immediately get dozens of reviews. Assuming they aren’t all one guy with tons of accounts, what am I missing?
You could try posting it in every forum you can think of. For some of the movies, I’ve seen the same post in almost every major Movies board. And some of these boards have ‘post and rate’ topics where everyone reviews everybody else’s work.
I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to top this, but here is a music video I created for “Happy Birthday to Me”, a song by Taiwanese songstress Landy Wen (and penned by Jay Chou).
It’s one of my wife’s favorite songs, and the original music video was pretty disappointing, as it featured 3 minutes of Landy sucking face with some guy all over her house. So I decided to try and make a better one ‘starring’ Landy and Jay Chou.
It’s about a woman (Landy) who’s having a birthday dinner alone, agonizing over a lost love. Pay particular attention to what’s going on in the background, and you might figure out what’s revealed in the ‘gee whiz’ moment near the end. It gave my wife goosebumps when she watched it the first time.
Good, as usual, but I guess I couldn’t figure out what was going on in the background. I didn’t like the song as much as the others, but that’s probably because I prefer what I’ve heard of Jay Chou’s own stuff. (Not that I understand any of it either way.)
Thanks Deadly… actually, what happens in the background is…
Both Landy and Jay had crossed paths on multiple occasions while they were in their previous relationships. Though it’s hidden by the use of grayscale in the flashback sequences, the still images shown after both of them leave their respective restaurants highlights this. It’s supposed to show that their fated for one another… yes, it’s a girly MV for a girly song!
Plus, there are some things in the lyrics that I really couldn’t visualize within the limitations of the game-- for example, the lyrics mention the lighting of candles (there are no candles or birthday cake props in the game) and giving her cellphone a rest (though there are prop focus scenes, none of them allow you to focus on a cell phone!). I hope they come out with expansion packs soon or patches to let you do more things!
On the other hand, there are some little things in the lyrics that I purposefully edited to that would be lost if you don’t understand the language. For example, the lyrics mention about sitting alone in a theatre twice, and at both points is a shot of Landy eating alone in the diner and Jay sitting alone at the bar. And the chorus ends with the phrase ‘kwai le’, which means happy (as part of the phrase ‘happy birthday’), and I had scenes of both Landy and Jay bawling their eyes out on that phrase.
Oh, and you are right… Jay’s songs are catchy! I don’t understand them either (my Chinese sucks), and even for those who speak the language, they can’t understand what he’s singing either because he mumbles and deliberately mispronounces words for effect (similar to how you won’t hear perfect diction/grammar from Ja Rule or Eminem).
