011 - The making of "Sin City Azeroth: The Customer Is Always Right"

Originally I had the idea for SCA: TCIAR in late 2006. I tried filming it with humans in Stormwind. But I did not get the scenes and the overall idea functioning as I wanted it to so I scrapped the damn thing.

But this weekend I gave the idea an other go. I played the clip on my laptop and edited the machinima in my main pc according to the scenes from the movie. There was no point making a 1:1 copy, since the original Sin City has long shots which would be totally boring to watch in WoW. Mostly due to the lack of facial expressions.

For the actors I chose gnomes. Gnomes are imo one of the most controversial races in WoW - you either love them or hate them. They either are the comic sidekick or the next tasty, juicy meal of an undead r0ug3.

The machinima was made using only the viewer programs. I did not consider using an emulator this time, partially because getting one to work is hard at the moment (thanks to the 2.1.0 patch). There are workarounds but just now I did not want to bother :)

The advantages of using an emulator would have been a whole lot more realistic looking rain effect. The seen on the movie is made with Photoshop using two different layers. One for the back, one for the front.

In the end SCA: TCIAR was quite fun to make. It provided enough challenges and again I learned some new things.


What next then? No idea. I'm gonna keep a creative break till I get a good enough idea for something. The break shall last from 2 seconds to eternity.

Watch Sin City Azeroth: The Customer Is Always Right at warcraftmovies.com (clicky clicky!)