First thing’s first. Click on this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sj4A22VVTk. You might be asking yourself, ”What is this?” Well, to answer your question, it is an animation I made using Valve’s Source Filmmaker program on my computer. This is just the latest bit of work in progress in a long line of videos, which I am near completing. I just need to touch up a few bits here and there before it is ready to stand out with music, lighting, and all that special jazz. There are many videos and animations like this, but this one is mine.

            I am no animator, even though I made this video. I am a storyteller, and I like that SFM (Source Filmmaker) allows me to use it as a medium for my stories. If there is a way for me to show emotion in a character that transcends the written word, then I will take the opportunity and animate. I want to show you readers the intricacies of animating and what it took for me to make this video, and if you watch it from the link provided above, I will point out specific times that I would like you to focus on. If that is not enough, I have also provided a few annotations in the video, but you will have to pause the video to read them.

            Before you go and say that putting the animation together and doing all that manipulating was hard, let me tell you something. It is actually easy to do once you get the hang of it. It is the idea behind the animation that is the hardest thing to conceive. If there is no big idea, there is no story, and if there is no story, there is no filling. Desire and curiosity are great fuel for ideas, as I thought to myself, ‘I want to show how a team recollects itself after a defeat’ and ‘I wonder how they’ll react if I made a teammember say this or that.’ So, after a lot of thought, I decided I would make a video of the RED team from Team Fortress 2, picking up the pieces of their shattered winning streak.

            Let’s talk specifics, and I’ll give you an example. From 0:01 to 0:20, all the characters that you see have been recorded ingame. Using Team Fortress 2’s game engine, I controlled the characters and manipulated them as I saw fit. I made the BLU Scout run through the base, the RED Pyro attack with his/her/its flamethrower, the Soldier fire rockets and the Sniper shoot, reload, twist and turn. When ingame, the takes that I had performed earlier appear as afterimages, but when I start recording, the afterimages take off and move as they have been recorded to do so. So, I was able to track and fire at the afterimage of the BLU Scout as the Sniper, even though I could do nothing to stop it.

            When the basic movements are laid down, I get into the intricate details. I have added a sentrygun to the scene, which you can see at 0:05. It was not recorded ingame, and since it could not fire on the Scout as he ran past, I had to ‘spawn,’ or create, the sentry as a model. After selecting it and the amount of time that I wanted an animation to happen within, I gave it a few turns to look at the Scout and wiggle as it tried to fire bullets that were not there. If that was not an indicator of something going wrong, I added clicking sounds to show that the sentry’s reserves were depleted.

            This brings me to dialogue. Head to 0:51 and look at the Spy and Engineer’s mouths as they speak their lines. Using their lines as a reference, I took their face and manipulated it so they would part their lips when forming a ‘W’ or ‘Oh’ sound, drop their jaw at an ‘Ah’ sound, or smile when there needed to be extra stress on an ‘Ee.’ What this accomplishes are natural mouth movements when they speak. The same goes for their eyes, which I can manipulate to look in four directions and follow a target that I may have locked to a model’s head. Since I cannot write down and describe how a character feels, I have to show it with subtle movements of the brow and lips.

            For the sake of cutting things short, there are many tutorials on SFM that cover things I have overlooked, like how to animate bones, pose-by-pose animation, lighting, and particle effects. I hope to get this animation done by midterm week, and I hope that you have gained some insight into what I am doing.