umlaut
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Posts posted by umlaut
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Yeah, that´s pretty much what I did too (except the obilisk)
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No, I meant how much did BF pay "Faktafilm" to make this video for them.
I googled Faktafilm and it seems they are a company in Denmark.
E-mail address with .dk is Denmark right?
Yes, Faktafilm is indeed a company from Denmark - namely mine. :-) Unfortunately, I can´t tell you about the cost of the film.
Then there's the time involved:1. Time required to play a battle and and save each turn for capturing later. Probably want to play in Hotseat mode.
2. Then you get play and replay and replay and replay and replay and replay and replay and replay and replay and replay and replay each turn until you get the "camera work" just right. Then replay it one more time while capturing it on FRAPS.
That is pretty much spot on
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3. Time required to patch each movie sequence together using Windows Movie Maker.Windows Movie Maker is in my opinion by far the worst and most useless video editing software ever. In my experience WMM would - literally - crash before I had edited 45 seconds of the movie. I used Final Cut Pro 7.
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Happy you like the "movie", guys - it took a long time to make. More or less all my spare time in seven weeks.
To obtain the best "camera" angles and backgrounds I had to make a map practically from scratch (not entirely from scratch, though. It is actually Clearing the Niscemi Highway - but so heavily modified that I doubt that the designer, Christopher Nelson, would be able to recognize his own map).
The movie is a forty minute battle condensed into four minutes. So a huge part of the action had to be left out.
I guess I have used no more than a few percent of the Fraps footage I´ve recorded. Due to Fraps´ uncompressed video files, the project ended up taking up around 350 GBs (!) of my hard drive.
The footage was edited in Final Cut Pro 7 - the professional video editing programme I use in Faktafilm (my little video production company)
Any chance we can find out what graphics card settings they use? My in-game images don't quite that nice and I hope it's just that I have not got optimal nVidia settings.My graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce GT 9800. All my in game setting are set to "best", "quality" etc. I cannot tell you the settings of the Nvidia panel, as mine is in danish. And since I don´t understand most of it - neither in danish nor english - I wouldn´t know how to translate it :-P
I think they shot a lot of it with quite a bit of "zoom" magnification to get that close-up effect.I tried to avoid zooming as much as possible, as you lose a lot of the background when zoomed. But unfornately I often had no other option than to zoom to get the "camera" in the right position for a "shot".
As for the tanks shooting on the move:
Yeah, I did anticipate the comments. But even if most of the tank in the promo are in fact firing while stationary, there were a few shots of tanks firing on the move that were definitely better looking than the others. So I chose those, purely for visual reasons - and sacrificed historical accuracy for dramatic effect!
It was actually quite funny that at the time when I was "shooting" the video there was a lively debate on the forum about the (lack of) historical accuracy in "Saving Private Ryan" and other WWII movies. And I found myself facing the same sort of dilemmas on whether to choose visual clarity or historical accuracy - not that different from the ones discussed in the debate.
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Thanks a lot from me too, Marco.
I am one of those non-groggish CM players that have next to no clue about whether the 52mm rounds are for the Berettas or the Bredas. So your weapons range and caliber mods were a huge help to me in CMBN
- and I´ve missed them in CMFI. Untill now.
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Sorry, but I can only see a GI firing a rifle grenade - and the grenade hitting (the ground?) at the exact moment the turn ends....?
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When it comes to developing free content, if you're not primarily self-motivated, you will inevitably be let down by users who have no vested interest in providing useful feedback.
You´re absolutely right, IMHO (and you can use that in your signature, if you like):
Let me use my latest (of two!) scenarios as an example: It has been downloaded 110 times, but as of yet no one has commented or rated it. I can only guess at what this means, but based on my own way of using scenarios I can imagine a number of reasons for not commenting/rating:
1. I downloaded the scenario, but then I forgot all about it
2. I downloaded it, had a look at it, and decided I didn´t like it (or didn´t feel like playing it today)
3. I downloaded it, played it, thought it stank but was too polite to say so (!)
4. I downloaded it, played it, loved it - but forgot to comment/rate.
There are probably more reasons, but these are based on my own way of using the repository.
I admit I am not very good at writing feed back myself. But all the same I do think that the lack of feedback is a great discouragement for scenario designers.
Speaking from my own experience again: Having spent around three months designing and testing a scenario - and then having zero feed back. Do I feel encouraged to upload another? Take a guess.
That doesn´t mean I might not still design scenarios for myself - that is afterall my main motivation for designing them in the first place.
But the step from playing them yourself and then to uploading them on the repository is actually pretty steep: Not only do you normally have to playtest the scenario vs other players. You also have to write a briefing, create a tactical map, make a few screenshots and so on. Chores that aren´t necessary when no one except youself are going to play the scenario. So why go through that extra hassle?
Mind you: I´m not complaining, only trying to explain why lack of feed back is a problem - in my opinion.
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Well, CMFI has been out for less than two months.
The couple of scenarios I´ve made for CMBN have taken considerably more than two months to create and playtest.
I think that is at least part of the explanation.
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I agree, eltorrente. I think SPR is a fine movie, even though it certainly has it´s share of flaws.
My biggest gripe with the beach scene in SPR was in how close to the sea wall and the base of the bluff they landed. IRL, the first waves at Omaha had to cover over 200 yards on foot before there was any cover, 200 yards and they were heavily laden with everything from extra ammo to extra rations to extra equipment. In the movie, it looks like barely a quarter of that distance.I´m pretty convinced this is due to a practical problem when making movies: Actual distances are often too great to make sense for the viewers when they are transformed to the screen: In real life the GIs standing in the surf would have no problem identifying firing slits, MG nests and the such in the german defences. But if SPR had been filmed from the same distance these would appear as no more than dots in a blurred line in the bottom of the screen.
Directors have to move things closer to each other to in order to make them discernable on the screen.
Think of a pirate movie: When the lookout shouts "ship ahoy", the ship he has spotted is always so close that he should actually have spotted it an hour earlier. But if the distances had been real there, the viewers in the theater would see nothing but the tiniest of specks on the horizon.
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@kohlenkau:
Yes, I should of course have mentioned when I saw the clip. I guess it must have been sometime between 1972 and 1976 (I guess that rules out 1941). And it is definitely not A Bridge too Far, I´ve seen that several times.
:-)
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Dont know the film - but I have a similar question:
When I was a kid it saw clip on tv from a war movie. As I remember it, an old lady is sitting in her living room when a tank comes crashing though the wall. She stares at it stunned, but unharmed.
I remember thinking: "Wow, this must be the coolest film in the world. I have to see that". But I have no idea which film it is. Anyone here that knows it?
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And while we are mentioning all-time-stinkers, let me tip my hat (and the garbage pail lid) to Battle of the Bulge.
Well, I haven´t seen Battle of the Bulge, but I think I can pull an even fouler stinker out from under that garbage pail: Terror on Wheels (from Sven Hassel´s novel).
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Captain KaLue (played by Brad Pit) must take his U-boat through the Gibraltar Straight. However, his fiance (played by Jessica Simpson) has stowed on board. .... Now, torn between his mission for the Home Land and the safety of his fiance ... he must make a choice.
LOL
She is of course disguised as one of the crew, right?
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The new Stalingrad movie seems to be the most interesting, IMHO. Though I fear that the story will drown in russian patriotic pathos. I have a similar problem with many american films and their shed-a-tear-and-salute-the-flag moments.
I my opinion the best WW2 movies have been made by the germans. Stories like:
Stalingrad, Das Boot/The Boat, Der Untergang/Downfall and Die Brücke/The Bridge.
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I believe there is one important reason for jamming love stories into war movies that has been overlooked in this discussion so far: Identification.
Indentification is a fundamental ingredient in storytelling because you need to know and feel for the characters in the movie in order to care about what is happening to them. You need to have some background info on the characters or they will be of no interest to the viewer.
One of the things that has always puzzled me about the Band of Brothers series is the lack of exactly that background story on the GIs. This meant to me personally that I could not maintain an interest in many of the characters when watching the series - and I had a hard time telling them from each other.
For this reason I think The Pacific was a much better series: Fewer - but more developed - characters that also had a life before (and during) war. This made a lot of difference to me - even though I´m really not that interested in the Pacific theatre. Of course Spielberg and Hanks didn´t leave of the background stories in BoB by mistake - I just can´t figure out why they did it.
That said, I agree that in most war films the love stories seem to be pasted into the script at the last minute by the "human interest" writing team.
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I´ve read Stalingrad and D-Day. I think Stalingrad is brilliantly told and manages to get the story across on both the perpective of the generals and the grunts in the rubble.
D-Day disappointed me, as I think he neclected the grunts´ perspective.
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Great pic, Rembrandt - sorry - Sergei ;-)
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Welcome back, Eric.
Good to hear you´re well - and playing CM again :-)
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10:35 and I hope I've made the right decision...
Brilliant one, Mord
(I´m still waiting for the Husky-invasion)
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Hey, care to make a new version? This one doesn't work with the new patch and module.
It works fine for me
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I can sympathize with your problem: Being the (mute)Penguin, seeing batmen must be scaring the sh*t out of you.
;-)
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That's why I been thinking for a while that maybe we should be able to split crews for scouting purposes. When a TC scouts a position they don't usually take every man in the vehicle with them.
That'd be a nice new feature to have by the time we hit Russia.
Mord.
+1 to that. A feature that has also been high on my wish list for a long time.
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I agree with most of the points Womble made in his post above.
However, if some people want to play without a time limit (or just an extended one), I say: Let them have that option (if it is not too resource consuming for BFC to alter the game - I have no idea about that part).
Personally, I don´t think the time limits are a problem and thus I would never play that way. But each to his own.
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I´m pretty sure that Fraps is not a viable option here.
One thing is that Fraps doesn´t alllow you to watch the game from every angle - only from your own POV while playing. Just as womble said.
Another problem is that Fraps doesn´t compress the video while recording. Thus, the avi-files Fraps produce are huge compared to "normal" video files.
A one hour game would (based on the size of my own Fraps files) take up somewhere between 50 and 100 GBs of disk space.
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Well, playing with trees on is certainly a problem at times. Just like playing with trees off can be.
I guess, that is why BFC introduced a - in my view rather ingenious - compromise.
Normally, when I make scenarios I place light forest or heavy forest tiles under the trees in forests. Because that is the most realistic thing to do.
But when making orhcards or plantations, I dont. Because that would be wrong.
And sorry: I have no intention of changing my way of designing maps, simply because you "don't like to see the tall stumps"
Hey Battlefront, how about some contests/drawings?
in Combat Mission Fortress Italy
Posted
Please do - and please let me know what you think of it. But you should be aware that this is a very assymetrical scenario - and H2H only. I recommend reading the briefing carefully :-)