Official minimalistic website: http://ghosts.cafegaming.fr/
Nine Inch Nails' Ghosts website: http://ghosts.nin.com/
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MaxOfS2D/68718298715

The critic I agree the most with: http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?p=19301860

——— Download

• The movie itself (encoded with Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 @ 3700kbps VBR)
• Choreography files (VCDs, which you can edit and use within the Source engine)
• Voice files (lipsynching data is embedded)
• Wallpapers for each chapter (sizes: 1280*1024, 1680*1050, 1920*1080)

——— Watch it online

View HD YouTUBE video http://youtube.com/watch?v=Zw1uSxPyczc

View HD YouTUBE video http://youtube.com/watch?v=Caywf0O2Xl4

View HD YouTUBE video http://youtube.com/watch?v=PojnfcYmpZ4

There's a full-length, uncut stream on the website, as well as Dailymotion: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbofr0

——— Jolly good show, old chap! Would you mind telling me what this is all about?

It's basically a submission for (the endless) NIN Ghosts Film Festival, which is meant to give the possibility to videomakers to illustrate the songs from Ghosts I-IV. I had already tried to do a similar thing a few months ago, with this video, so I figured I'd do all the nine songs of the first volume this time around. The story is going to be coherent, as the tracks gently (at the exception of the fourth?) caress your ears in a delightfully gentle manner. I'm not saying much more, due to the story being unveiled all at once in a very short amount of time around the two thirds of the video.

tl;dr: otherworldly skies in a machinima

I'm looking forward to this. I really like the HD in this.

It's not HD, I'm mastering it in 864*360

It's going to be nicely upscaled (just like in the second huge screenshot) for the online video services though, which don't convert in HD unless they are given a file which has a 720p resolution.

Looking foward to it.
A hard slap of avant garde in the face of the "random movie".

This Shit be sexy, Yo.

Gentlemen, here is this week's progress. Amusing fact: I have done exactly one third of the movie in one third of the time, since the project start date to 12/21/09.

I just updated the website since it's been one month already, by the way

Edited:

Wait, why no automerge

Really looking forward to this! Btw what map are you using in the trailer?

sola_night

It has a texture glitch here which greatly reduced the filming angles. you may notice that I never filmed the snow on the ground :p

Just want to say again, this looks like it will be really succesful.

Just one question, how do you get such a beautiful FPS?
I have a pretty good PC, however Fraps destroys the FPS when I'm recording.

Well im guessing he uses source recorder.

Source Recorder + motion blur faking = smooth

Does this have any plot?
or is it just meaningless clips to music like a previous video of yours?

Read the thread instead of jumping straight to the Reply box

Yes, it does. It has voiceover during the first and last part, the nine chapters are seamlessly linked, and we follow the same, unnamed guy.

By the way, callout for voice actors: http://voiceacting.proboards.com/ind...d=16503&page=1

Do you use any colour correction?

Also, sorry to sound like a noob... But what is motion blur faking?

Basically, what happens with computer-generated content is the fact that you don't have motion blur. A real camera lens is always open, capturing the image, but in the Source Engine, it's like if you had a camera that opened its lens for a nanosecond, captured the image, then closed, and this goes on for every frame.

There are two solutions to fake motion blur;

1) Capture your game at 500 fps, then merge all the frames together. I don't do this.
2) Capture your game at whatever frame-rate you want (I use 50, personally, so the software can still detect the vectors properly), then use a vector-based motion blur detection. It takes quite long, though, so I skip that part when clips don't need it. And I never ever use it if the clip gets used for chroma keying, as not having motion blur is actually a strength when performing incrustation.

-----

About the color correction, I use it a lot, to reproduce the look of real movies; I haven't uploaded any comparisons since September but there are still these two.

Here's my effect pipeline: Image -> Cropping and Panning -> Clip-specific effects -> Master effects

The most important part of my CC pipeline is to create a... well, bloom. It's meant to erase hard edges and soften everything up. After that, I apply soft contrast, which cancels the muddiness of the image, then applies vignetting (nowadays I really make vignetting less intrusive though). The versions of the effects located at the end of the chain make everything warmer.

The abandoned concept for Chapter 4 (the first few seconds) actually used this pipeline TWICE. The normal pipeline is integrated at the end of the global effect chain, but I made the image cooler (as in, cold) by applying a different variation of the same effect before the former. What's quite cool (pun unintended) is the fact that, even if I make the clip colder, the end of the chain will always modify that, so it doesn't look bad. It's a bit hard to explain.

Gosh, I sound confusing.

Any more questions?

Weekly update, duh nuh nuh nuh

In game motion blur works too.

No no no no no

Are you crazy

It just creates a 'ghost' (eh, unintended pun) of the previous frame! It doesn't BLUR at all.

Damn, nice job, you're real good at editing videos, I'm looking forward to watching this whenever it gets released.

The voice actors have been cast! A real trailer will be online tonight or by Sunday.

New trailer up!

View HD YouTUBE video http://youtube.com/watch?v=v3ki5zDIKXs

Awsome

Great effects.

looks great, can't wait untill it's finished.

Also, 21th? lol.

That's three years before the APOCALPYSE

and you are 12 years old? damn your on your way to Hollywood at this rate

No he's not 12, he's just using a meme.

Nah, I am almost 17, and still, there are people doing much better than me out there :p

Ew

You're not thinking of leaving that color bleeding effect in the movie are you? It looks horrible

I tuned it down after having noticed how the black diffusion was way too high on this scene. But otherwise, such an effect is needed for a more "film-like" look...

I think your colour effects need work. Some places it looks OK but other places it's just icky.

No update last week, because it's holidays and I've been procrastinating like cra— no, actually, I'm processing the dialogue and planning shit.

But films don't look like that (except porns from the 1970s) because it looks horrible. Not only have you blurred the detail and removed contrast from an already low-contrast image, you've destroyed all the color definition and left the viewer with a kind of slushy brown. Films use things like color correction, but it's extremely rare for them to use a soft focus effect.

My map's lookin' good.

There isn't anything such as blur in this image, only diffusion, meant to mimick the behavior of an old film reel; a recent movie used this on one of its supports (not the DVD), but I don't recall the name...

This is a bad screenshot to begin with, indeed. I'm going to reduce the second pass... 'cause there's a better variation of the same one a few seconds later.

Weekly update. Still progressing, but quite slow. I really ought to remember that with good ol' me, 50% of the work is having the courage to start making stuff.

Heh, your editor management skills are a lot less messy than mine. This is pretty ambitious, so I give you credit all ready- I would personally never even attempt to make something this long.

good stuff

Edited:

automerge

I'm progressing a lot this week, since it's all about dealing with Faceposer and very simple scenes... then, on top on that, 11/11 is a no-work-day