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[Gordon108]

Or at least, a series of short videos.

I love making short videos, especially comedy (to be honest I fail at anything else). Im going to be attending school soon, and I have 2 class periods that are video production. As well as friends willing to help with it.

Now the thing is.. how do we do it?

We have a very very very low budget, considering my family, and my friends familys, are generally incredibly poor.

The biggest problem is really just materials, and how to do certain things (like burning a forest down with magma).

Right now though, how about some suggestions that will make this idea more likely:

How do you think I could go about making beards?

Clothing? What should it look like?

Blood.. anyone have any cheap home made recipes for the fake variety?

Shortness.. how? I had one thought.. cut out the backs of boots, stick your knees in them, and only do front angle shots. Anyone have any other ideas on how to accomplish this?

Also. Voices. Accents or no?

Those are the biggest problems I can think of at the moment.

Remember though, if this does get organized, you wont see a result for quite a while.

[Akroma]

why not simply make in in flash ?

[Dasleah]

I for one suggest browsing around an indie special effects site like IndyMogul for the more technical questions. Lava and blood are generally just glucose (corn) syrup with various thinners and colours added (I seem to remember seeing a very nice recipe for magma floating around somewhere that they used for Episode 3 model shots) In general, model shots would be your friend for this, and for the love of god, don't just put shoes on your knees to replicate shortness. It doesn't work, looks stupid, and just screams 'immature amateur'. You can't make your actors smaller, but you can certainly make everything around them bigger, through selective camera shots, mattes, trick perspective, etcetera.

[DarkAvenger]

While I do suggest flash, It does take an extremely long time depending on how much detail you want to put into it.

[the_taken]

While I do suggest flash, It does take an extremely long time depending on how much detail you want to put into it.

Attention to detail is time consuming, period.

---

If you do wish to pursue flash animation, you may wish to make it a sprite movie. By having a dwarf/goblin/elephant animated walking once, you can reuse the frames.

To do this, you make each character it's own movie in the big movie, then assign which sprite's frame appears in the big movie's relevant frame.

There's probably other shortcuts, but I have yet to figure/look them up.

---

For added bonus points, go the the forumns of a flash portal and declare it a succession project! Every turn of the original players is an animator's turn.

[Helmaroc]

Accents, nah. Just maybe rough/raspy voices, if possible and realistic.

The knee-in-boot idea is good, and always worth a laugh. You can always do this with already short people, and make accurate dwarves.

Beards, you can usually buy cheap props at Party City or something. Homemade beards aren't usually very beard-y. Construction paper works though. Heh. Or one of you could grow a beard if you were that dedicated. Or get a grandfather/uncle/father etc. who already bears one to act for you, but that could be a little tougher.

Another thing is arms, short dwarves don't have human-length arms, I guess you could wear short sleeves and keep your elbows in your shirts, but that would look a little weird.

Armor and such could be made with tin foil, or paper, or plastic or whatever. Cardboard would work.

For the magma, you could film at night and light some candles/make a little campfire and the flickering effect could be used.

Dunno.

[Magnnus]

Whatever you do, for the love of god don't turn it into a crappy comedy. No knees in boots or elbows in sleeves. Try to make the effects at least realistic enough that it doesn't detract greatly from the quality of the entire picture.

If you know any real actors or at least people with acting experience try to get them into the film rather than just friends trying to be silly.

Basically what I'm saying is that I don't want to see another home video filled with people trying to force laughs by terrible acting and bad effects.

P.S. I know its a stretch but if you live anywhere near Cape Cod M.A. I could help you out (being a professional actor), and I could get some of my friends in the biz to help out. I have some close friends that might be able to contribute some time to provide professional clothing, effects, and filming. In addition I can likely get some of my actor friends to be in this film (though unfortunately none of them are DF fans).

[moocowmoo]

Haha this has the potential for extreme awesome. I love Boatmurdered.

[Haven]

I'd say this would have to be animated. It's just not Boatmurdered without all it's extras, and they jack the production cost of a live-action shoot through the roof.

With animating, everything from a frog to a lava pressure cannon takes exactly the same type of resources in proportion to only size and complexity... And you can scale down size.

[Gordon108]

Thanks for the replys, especially the Indy Mogul site.

As I said, this will, if made, be absolutely terrible quality. Ive made very few videos, all of them short. Ill do what im capable of, but dont get your hopes up for anything special.

I thought about flash animation, but realized, its just not my thing.

I mostly want to do this because its a challenge, and its possible to do, although hard with my resources. That and boatmurdered is just awesome.

[SHAD0Wdump]

Live action will be your LAST mistake.

Ok kiddin...

But seriously,Can't wait to watch the elephant scene.

[Capntastic]

You should contact all the people involved in the original updates to see if they're okay with it.

[Default Settings]

why not simply make in in flash ?

You could do a realistic depiction with a typewriter and a flip book.

[Angellus]

Why wont you use a program like vue to make the magma and shizzle?
Just blend it into the video afterwards.
 (I dont know if you are planning to make a boatmurdered real-life movie or animated?)