This post, in case anyone’s confused, was started on 27th August – long after the last episode was released. So excuse me while I excavate my memory to talk about the filming of episodes 7 and 8….

Episode 7: Musical Tastes Vary

Confusingly – especially as I’m trying to retell it to you in episode sequence – this was shot after Episode 9 (One More Thing) and 10 (Subliminal Messaging). It was squeezed in over a weekend, where I was lucky to get help from everyone involved.

By the time we came to shoot this I was very, very aware that we were running out of shooting days (and editing nights, as it had pretty much come down to). So this one was pretty much a case of just get in and get it done, and as a model of that, it’s almost flawless.

We shot everything on a Sunday morning, starting with Spaff’s exit from our staff ‘rec room’, Monkey Ranch (which I was surprised no-one asked about, considering the sign is pretty prominent in the video). In case you haven’t guessed, we were trying to emulate the classic Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer style of slo-mo entrance, with of course zero budget and no California setting sun behind us. I just shot away with various angles and distances, not entirely sure what I’d do with it when I was finished, but hey – I’d have it anyway.

In case you’re wondering, the entire idea for this episode – apart from just being a trailer for the Community party at Leipzig – was almost entirely born of Spaff’s strange love of Top Gun. Well, we all love Top Gun to a greater or lesser degree, but he’s the only one of us who owns a Top Gun t-shirt, a pair of suitable shades, and doesn’t mind responding to the callsign ‘Maverick’. When we’d decided that he would be the only person who would volunteer a mix CD entirely made up of Top Gun tracks for a community party, well – the rest just wrote itself, really.

With Spaff’s entrance in the bag, I filmed the cutaway shots, which of course had to be someone playing guitar in a high wind with big hair. Marek took the role and made it his own. We are of course using a Guitar Hero guitar in the shot, but just for authenticity, Marek did mime to the Top Gun anthem on the day.

With that done, on to the meat of the shoot; Martin dealing with rejected CDs, and Volker bringing him the ‘Ultimate Mix CD’. This was pretty easy to do, especially after we realised that Monkey Ranch held a whole shelf-full of CDs that would fill our ‘Fail’ box. (The ‘Epic Fail’ bin, by the way, was Spaff’s idea.) With those full, I shot the initial ‘throwing’ stuff from a couple of different angles, experimenting with reverse zooms to get the look right. It didn’t take too long, although we did damage a couple of CDs through repeated throwing….

Next it was on to the main dialogue exchange. As we had two German speakers in the main roles we were able to shoot two different language versions, so after we nailed one shot in English, I asked the guys to do it again in German. If we’d been really prepared we might have localised the English script in advance, and have a German one to shoot from – but there wasn’t much time, so the guys just translated their lines on the spot. The advantage there was that they would bounce different ‘takes’ off each other, and come up with whatever they thought was funnier, which was obviously what I wanted.

What I found interesting was that even though usually when translating into German you see the word count expand, when I edited the German language footage together it was often the same length, and sometimes even shorter. Either the guys spoke quickly, or we got lucky, I guess. In case you haven’t seen it though, feel free to compare and contrast:

In this case, shooting was pretty damn fast. I knew pretty much what I wanted in terms of shots, and we proceeded quite quickly – except for the inevitable goofs here and there. Poor Martin was suffering from a slight cold, and his voice was a little hoarse, but he did great as always. I should also give special mention to Volker, who did such a great job, especially with his terrible dancing and his nice descent into whimpering cowardice. He also had no qualms about looking totally camp in the last shot of him, which really sold that joke. C’mon, it’s the most gay-but-not movie ever…

Oh, in case you’re wondering, I’d have to choose “Military marches… you can dance to??” as my favourite line in this episode – partially because I just like it, but partially because Martin delivered it so well. (It’s actually even funnier to my ear in German.) Here’s the script, anyway, if you’re interested:

Quest for GC Episode 7 script

All told, the shoot was so smooth, I almost expected a nightmare in post-production – but it didn’t happen. In fact as I cut this one together I was laughing harder than I ever expected to, which is why when I posted it I said it was my favourite to date. Unfortunately it’s one of the least-watched episodes, at least to date; some other Aion-related news pushed this right off the front page of the main Aion fansites, where a lot of our traffic had been coming from. Ah well – it’s still a favourite, and was a walk in the park in comparison to what came next….

Episode 8: The Quest System Explained

This episode was a nightmare, and very nearly brought the whole series off the rails.

The idea was to shoot an ‘educational film’ explaining how the Quest System worked. (Which I’m not going to explain here. Obviously you can either watch the film, or read Seb’s version on the Aion site.) Honestly, the Quest System isn’t that complicated – but how to explain it while also making the explanation enjoyable (and preferably, funny) was something I wrestled with for weeks.

The script took an age to write. Originally it was titled ‘Levelling Up’ (in fact, the shooting script still was) and was going to be an explanation by myself and Martin to an audience of staffers just how the Quest System worked. The vague idea was that it’d be a military style briefing, complete with pointers, mock-seriousness, and probably more than a few references to Aliens. (Specifically, “How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?”) There was also going to be a final joke about Chinese gold farmers being employed to get the most out of the Quest System.

However, it started to become obvious as I wrote it that to explain things this way – with appropriate Q&As scripted in there, too – would take a damn age, both in running time and also in shooting. Just getting everyone together would be hard, then doing various shot setups and so on… we just didn’t have the time.

(I guess you can tell that by this point, I was becoming very aware of just how long it took to shoot things. Unless it was a very, very simple setup (like, say Episodes 9 and 10) an average episode would take three or so hours to shoot. That took people away from work and occupied space in the office, so, I was conscious of trying to not do that too much.)

So, I changed direction with the script fairly radically. Taking a concept from another, discarded episode (fully scripted – it’s called The Correct Address, and may resurface sometime) of a hapless player, I combined that with the idea of using graphics to explain the concepts behind the Quest System. I actually left in the ‘briefing’ opening and ending, but as you know now, those got ditched too. In fact you might find it educational to read the script before we go any further:

Quest for GC Episode 8 script

I seem to recall that I was starting to get so concerned about finishing this behemoth – as it runs to 16 pages of dialogue, as opposed to the two or three of some other episodes – that I decided to just shoot the dialogue scenes and then get on with cutting it together. So, one night I corralled Tom and Martin together and shot both of them larking about in our boardroom.

The shoot was easy enough, especially as I had Tom’s incredibly expressive face to work with – really helpful when all I could direct him with was “Look happy! Happier! Even happier! Now sad.” Martin also came up with some inspired stuff, and they improvised a ‘fight scene’ that was definitely better than what we had in the script. All good; now I just had to make it into some sort of narrative.

The plan in my head, such as it was, was as follows:

• Use Keynote (the Mac OS PowerPoint-beater) to create animated slides to go under the narration
• Export those slides into QuickTime movies, then edit them into the main movie
• Get Spaff to record his patented 1950s-style voiceover, and edit that into the soundtrack
• Use suitable music under the entire thing
• Run the edited movie through some sort of filters to give it the correct ‘aged’ look
• Oh yeah… then do subtitled versions for French and German

I knew right then it was going to be one long, hard slog to get it done. All I could do was start.

So first, I spent a very long weekend trying to pull a rough cut together. Using a Keynote presentation that a few of you may have even seen in its first form (at UK Games Expo) as my basis, I started hacking together slides to represent our ‘educational film’. I had the imagery for the Quest Cards themselves, so it was just a question of figuring out how to visually represent the voiceover I’d written.

This was harder than it sounds. One problem is that while Keynote is very good at many things, there are still issues with the timing of slides when they’re exported as QuickTime movies. (There’s a way around this – record a voiceover – but I didn’t think of that at the time. Next time….) As I began to finish my first few slides and export them, seeing that they were generally shorter than I knew I’d need, I had to come up with some clever workarounds to make sure that the narration (which I didn’t yet have) could fit over them, by using freeze frames, cut aways, and so on. Before too long, I realised this was going to be near-impossible without some sort of narration to cut to; so, alone in the office, I bust out a microphone and recorded a very tired temp track to cut to.

At the same time, when not dealing with Keynote, I was still cutting together the actual performance part of things. Generally that was all good, except for a few short takes that I had to elongate with cuts elsewhere. The other big question mark was over the final ‘aged film’ look. For a while I experimented with a built-in Final Cut Express plugin called ‘Bad TV’ which could have given the entire thing the look of some sort of out-of-sync TV broadcast, but it was too complicated.

It took a long time, but gradually I began to beat the rough cut into shape. Keynote was proving to be good at providing the visuals, and once I had Spaff’s voiceover, I didn’t have to do a whole lot of re-jigging to make the edit work alongside it. I actually started to think I could pull this off. I handed a version off to Spaff, who ran the whole thing through iMovie’s ‘Old Movie’ filter (which strangely, isn’t part of Final Cut Express) and we had a finished cut.

Then I had to do the subtitles. The final nightmare.

Previously I’d found myself able to subtitle one of our episodes in about 90 minutes per language. For episode 8 though, I hadn’t counted on two things: one, an extended running time of five minutes plus. Two: the Keynote slides, which also ideally had to be translated.

Put it this way: what I hoped would be a three hour task turned into nine hours.

Eventually though, it did get done. A lot of people liked the episode, too, and I think it did what we hoped it would – educate people while making them smile. Honestly though, it’s hard for me to even tell; I was so steeped in this one I couldn’t see the outside world for a while.

After I’d finished episode 8 I almost didn’t want to do any more. At this point we’d filmed ‘One More Thing’ and ‘Subliminal Messaging’, but hadn’t shot any of ‘Boot Camp’ and still had several other episodes I wanted to film. I didn’t know if I could handle it. Far too many late nights and long weekends had been spent staring at Final Cut Express, my mouse hand gradually turning into a misshapen claw, my eyes turning bloodshot from the monitor. Quite clearly, I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and episode 8 almost made me choke.

I was reckoning without the inspirational power of Bill Conti, though….