Crab Away

This is the first project out of three done for my Machinima class. We were to use the Half-Life 2 game engine and everything else that was included to make a short animation. For this first project, it was basically get used to the software that were going to be used so quality of the animation was not particular part of the graded criteria. We were to be working in a small group of 2 or 3 people for this project. My partners were both Computer Science Majors so I thought I would be alright, hoping they know the programs and such.

Boy was I wrong. They may be CS students but they have never dealt with programs that refuse to do what you tell it to do. I can tell you, the project was an absolute nightmare for me. Being a film student, I'm not completely familiar with computer software that are outside of the normal software I use. The engine we were using was an absolute nightmare to work with. I tell the program, or command or whatever the computer term for it, to do something after x-amount of time has passed and the program was usually like "I'll do whatever, whenever I want." Was so frustrating. The program, Faceposer, was used too so we could do lip-syncing and such but when we recorded the lines for the characters and imported them into the program, it was like "What language are you speaking?" Can't tell you how many times I wanted to throw the computer for giving me so much troubles.

For the division of work, we all worked on everything equally from animating, lip-syncing, and post production. The mic we used was a low quality type mic you can pick up at your local retail store and unfortunately so there wasn't anything to stop the popping sounds. Didn't help either when the mic doesn't get quality sound unless it's right next to your mouth either. Overall, it wasn't bad working with my group members. I just had some anger issues with the programs being...uncooperative to put it nicely.

As for the story, this is basically just a commercial about getting rid of Head Crabs, creatures from the Half-Life 2 games. Yeah, I had absolutely no idea what they were when the idea was proposed by my partner having never played the game. I don't even know the characters' names that we used for this animation. It was some of the models that were already built in. My partners knew the game so I was pretty much the odd one out.