Some background: I am in the process of creating a new movie which is tentatively titled - Voyages of the Sojourner - a steampunk themed movie set in 1880's with some of today's technology. With this thread, i wanted to start a diary on how i put together the movie. Note i'll assume you are familiar with the user interface. WARNING I expect this thread will be graphics intensive so be warned.

How i approach movie making in iclone
Obviously everyone approaches movie making differently. I have always focused more on visuals first, story second (sacrilege!) but i typically would fart around and design a set or character and suddenly a story idea emerges. This is true with this Steampunk movie. I first designed some characters and the idea emerged. But hey whatever works for you


IDEA # 1 : A Movie is a bunch of scenes connected by the plot
The sentence above pretty much sums up how i approach the movie. i break the story down into a bunch of scenes. One key point is the visual style, costumes etc.. must sort of be the same through out. One of the scenes for my movie involve a captain sitting in his cabin contemplating the journey - so we will use this diary to describe how i approach this

IDEA # 2: Each scene might involved many different projects, or might require rendering many different footage, requiring an external video editor to assemble them all later

First Steps -collecting the elements
1) i determine i need an ocean scene where i can show the ship bobbing in the water, this establishes that our character is a captain of a ship

2) I need an interior scene where the captain is in his cabin. I go over to images.google.com and search for images that help guide me. I go to 3D Warehouse to see if one is already created to my satisfaction. If i can't find anything my options are to create my own using 3D blocks or buy one already made. Head over to RL's store or coolcreators.com or clones2go

in this case i found a galleon cabin at clones2go

I also needed a ship for external shots so found one at 3D warehouse

I also needed some crew members and to save time creating my own, went to coolcreators and got Alley's Medieval pack that can double as crew members

3) i need to decorate the cabin - to personalize it for the captain - so back to 3D warehouse i go and download some props which i convert using 3D exchange. I could not find a photo frame i liked so will make my own using 3D blocks

so now we have almost all we need but do need to make a few ourselves
Here's a list of various elements that I'll be making for this scene

1) make the ocean scene - sky, waves, water, ship and set up the camera
2) decorate the cabin, create photo prop
3) set up lighting for the cabin
4) set up the camera angles i will be using to film
6) edit the captain's motions
7) design the captain's costume