Choreography + Warcraft Movies

Being a huge fan of films that incorporate choreography, especially in fighting, into their animations, I did a little research into how this is done through animation, if it came to the circumstances that I would animate my ninja character to do a fighting scene with the guard.

I realise now that it would have been a heavy time investment, but I'm still keen to animate something like this and it's probably something I'll do in my own time at some point.

I found a stop-motion of a fight between two dolls to be both entertaining and inspiring in it's choreography. It was made by Oliver Trudeau

So I looked up machinima that have fight scenes but from what I found, there arn't any with the same caliber; which is quite confusing given the number of attack animations typically found in most games. However, these animations are little more than swings through empty air, where your are to place your character in a location to make such an attack seem like it hits.

The animation above is fully choreographed and thought out, and overall just seems better in how it is developed and made, and I attribute this to the fact that everything was done by hand and so had to be planned out.

As far as Warcraft machinima goes though, it is still a brilliant piece.

Now for another resource of machinima that I have found great over the years.

http://warcraftmovies.com/ is a brilliant website in which many machinimators and movie-makers upload their works to for the world to see. All content is exclusive to World of Warcraft machinima so if you're looking for a variety of games, it isn't the best place to go; but I reckon there is more WoW machinima produced than anything else, not only because of how many players there are, but because it is so easy to produce with tools such as WoWModelViewer.

The tool allows to to load any model, equip them with any in-game gear, and have them perform a particular animation at a slowed down, normal or sped up pace. The background can be changed to green to chroma-key the character with a green screen effect, making it brilliantly easy to record the characters doing the animations and drop them into a background.

This is exactly how Divided Soul by Martin Falch - the machinima above, as well as his other work, Tales of the Past III, was made. Nearly all WoW machinimas are made this way, though that's not to say it's the only way they are made.

I have downloaded WoWModelViewer myself but because of a lack of certain software to greenscreen, etc, I haven't been able to make machinima of my own this way. I have used it to make some art, but I recognize it is a powerful tool and making machinima with it is certainly on my to-do list.