084 - I'm So Sick: The Making Of

Let's start from the beginning once again :)

Few weeks ago, I got my hands on the soundtrack for the latest Resident Evil movie, "Resident Evil: Extinction". While the soundtrack was mostly full of shitty screamo, two tracks stood out there a lot: "My World" by Emigrate and this "I'm So Sick (T-Virus remix) by Flyleaf vs The Legion Of Doom.

Originally I wanted to make a video to "My World" using the traditional line-up of L70ETC but then "I'm So Sick" started to play in my head too :)

While ISS is not so metal-ish as "My World" it provided a cool challenge: a female singer. I did not even have to look very far for that singer, my soon-to-be twink rogue had the looks.

So I remade the belf in WoW model viewer with rock-credibility in mind. She had to look like a singstress for a rock/metal band and imho I succeeded quite well. It is yet to be seen what the big crowd thinks about her and the music video..

Making her to sync with the music required sometimes a bit of trickery. Playing an animation backwards worked a lot better in some cases.

And now a tip for people planning to do their own music video: there is no point trying to sync a singing animation to a long sentence. Instead, try to sync the singers animation to words. It needs more angles and work, but in the end it looks better.

Oh snap, she does not even have a name. If someone comes up with a name which has a) something rock-credibly and b) something blood-elfish - spank it in the comments! Kthxbai :D


Onto the editing next. I approached this video from the Unlimited Escapism perspective: IT HAS TO LOOK COOL. In order to do that the video needs some rock'n'roll clichés: explosions, raining, speed (not the drug), fire, playing and singing in dangerous places etc.


From the beginning I decide that I wanted to use model changes as well. Finally the works of Snoman, Dopefish and Lev are used as an actual stage for machinima.

I tried to make it so that all of the band members have an equal amount of screen-time, in terms of the song. But as you can hear, the majority of the song is played with the bass/drums/vocals combinations so there is not that much room for the guitarists to show. This is something I intend to fix in my next L70ETC video - whenever that will be.


While making the video, I learned to do some new and cool things in various programs. I now know how to load new emitters and how to keyframe in Particle Illusion 3. I have come to terms with the masking tool of Vegas (though it sometimes is a bit clumsy). With the masking tool I managed to create one of the coolest effects - a fake Depth of Field, just like in the image below:

As you can see (click the image bigger and look closer ;) the objects that are far look blurred and those close to the camera are clearer.

I have no idea what the next L70ETC music video by me will be, but most likely it will be to a song by Ministry, Turbonegro or Turmion Kätilöt (Finnish band).

If you survived this TLDR critical strike, relax yourself with some links (and an exceptionally shitty YouTube stream):

Stage6 Stream
Filefront Download
Everything at WarcraftMovies

p.s. How many of you noticed the Edge of Remorse & Ergo Proxy posters? ;)
(they are both on the same scene)