Ice cracking sounds

FYI, in order to get a movie to play in ToEE, it must be converted to and exist as a BINK (.bik) movie file. A 30 second BINK movie will translate to a size of about 15MB with the neccesary quality settings. This size is prohibitive for inclusion in the official modpack. That's why you don't see a lot of movie or animation modding - they all have to be stand-alone mods, like the various ones I've done for ToEE's 'first arrival' scenarios.

 

I'd leave the ship out altogether and just do a slow zoom (in or out) and/or moderate pan on the sea picture itself.

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I'd also do away with the subtitles altogether. It's much better to make people feel afraid through sensory input (audio/video) than to tell them "you are afraid."

 

Ax - stand by and I will do a short video for you in Windows Movie Maker, along with a V_P style tutorial.

 

I'll just do it here so others can benefit from it if they're interested.

Okay, we'll start at the end. Below we have a frightening video of Ted sitting at his desk. Check it out:

http://files.co8.org/others/ted_movie.wmv

Up next: the making of our masterpiece

 

First, fire up Windows Movie Maker. On the left side of the screen you'll see a bunch of hyper-links. Click 'import pictures' first, navigate to your rough sea picture, and import it. Next do likewise with your restless boat audio by clicking 'import audio or music.' You'll thus see both of these items under the 'collections' heading to the right.

 

Next, drag the picture from 'collections' to the leftmost tab of the storyboard below. Do likewise with the audio. They will stack, along with a variety of other effects. Adding audio will automatically switch you to 'timeline view,' but we don't need that now as we won't be altering times. (The default duration for a static image seems to be 5 seconds, which is fine for our tutorial purposes.) Click 'show storyboard' above the timeline to return to storyboard view. Also note that in the preview pane to the right, your picture has magically appeared. You can click play and watch your picture sit there for 5 seconds if you like, but we want to make it more exciting.

 

Next, click the 'Tools' drop down menu and select 'Video Effects.' From the thumbnails that appear under 'Video Effects,' drag 'fade in, from black' and 'fade out, to black' to the same storybaord tab where you see your picture. This will make the movie look professional with a dissolve fade-in and out effect at the beginning and the end. Now, drag 'ease in' to the storyboard tab. This minor effect will make the video slowly zoom in over its length, but in itself it makes a world of difference in making your movie seem animated and alive instead of boring and lifeless. Lastly, drag 'film grain' or some other visual effect to the tab for a dash of flare. I chose film grain for Ted, because he wasn't scaring me enough and I wanted to evoke impressions of old silent horror flicks.

Now click play in the preview pane and watch your movie come to life.

 

The last step is to 'render' your movie, although Movie Maker doesn't use that terminology. From among the hyperlinks on the left side of the screen, select 'save to my computer.' In the resulting box that pops up, select a name and save location for your movie and click 'next.' In the following box, select the 'other settings' button and pick 'DV-AVI (NTSC)' from the dropdown menu. This will save your movie in lossless AVI format, which we can later convert to something else, and ultimately to BINK for ToEE. We don't want to compress anything now though, becuase that may marginalize the quality of the video and we want the highest quality possible for ToEE. Anyway, click 'next' and Movie Maker will render and save your movie in the location indicated. You're done - yay!

The trick now is to play around with all the options you've encountered along the way and make this thing your own. A word of warning though: resist getting too cute. People are easily put off by movies that are presumptuous or too busy. :thumbsup: