Ring Wars: Reloaded

NEW THREAD:
http://boards.theforce.net/Fan_Films/b10015/16005977/

RWR home page

Hey all.
My friends and I have been working on our fan film 'Ring Wars: Reloaded' for the past 4 months and with only 3 more to go I decided to create a thread where people could offer suggestions, negative criticism, etc.

Basic movie info:
We wanted to make a film aabout 'possibilities', something that you could NEVER see in a real movie. How kick *** would it be to see Anakin and Neo go at it? 'The Chosen One' vs. 'The One'. Thus, 'Ring Wars: Reloaded' was created. We took two characters from each movie.

Star Wars
Anakin Skywalker (Episode II) / Corey Vidal
Padme Amidalla (White Battle Outfit - Episode II) / Paige Gillespie

Lord of the Rings
a Ringwraith / Brian Lewis
a hobbit (generic, not a specific hobbit) / Mark McDermott

The Matrix: Reloaded
Neo / Bob Mallen
Trinity / Kait Farrar

With cameos by:
Mace Windu
Harry Potter
and others...

Plot Synapsis:
6 teenagers suddenly find they have powers of their favourite movie characters, and are sent on an adventure by the Architect, and if they succeed they will be able to keep their powers. (You can read the script on the RWR homepage.

Right now the only thing you can really look at are some pictures (so you can check out our costumes), and the theme song I made called Fealty, which is a work in progress. It contains the themes from all 3 movies.

I'm also going to add a list of all the different fight sequences soon, ex. Anakin vs. Neo, Padme vs. Trinity etc. so keep looking for that.

So how 'bout some suggestions? Comments? Insults? Anything. I'm excited to answer anyone's questions, so don't be afraid to ask.

 

That fanfilm looks awazing. The costumes look excellent. I can't way to see some footage of this.

 

The song has potential. Because its 1.8MBs, it's pretty crappy, so I couldn't hear all the nuances, but it's a great start. I'm so amused by these "vs." songs I've been finding.

 

This sounds like what Scary Movie 3 was supposed to turn out like. It was originally going to be titled "Scary Movie 3: Episode I: The Lord of the Brooms" and be a LOTR/HP/SW parody.

 

The costumes are great

Can't wait to see more

 

Got this error message:
FW-1 at proxy3: Access denied

 

release date??

 

Nice pics.

one small nag though.

And I had a problem with the site too. No video in the video link.

BTW - dont tell anyone your release date. If you tell them, they will come back later and haunt you if you go over scedule. just give a round - a - bout date, like this year, next year.

Cant wait to see it thoug!

 

Looks great... although something has to be done with Padme's boots...

 

LOL yeah, the boots ARE pretty hurting, some of those costumes were put together in the matter of 2 days (The hobit one thrown together in 5 minutes from whatever he had in his guys closet!!!)

Video will be up soon.

Quick question though. Were doing our movie at 720 x 420 resolution at 29 frames a second, so the files are pretty big. How can I shrink video size? I want to make "crappy" qualities of our video files, maybe smaller, less framerate, w/e. How do I do that? Is there a program I can use?

EDIT: Another quick question: I find that the audio in our clips has a slight buzz which I think is caused by the camera. How can I reduce this 1) By getting a microphone and 2) withOUT getting a mic?

And BTW, if you read my first post, I said we had about 3 months to go, because we'd like to hand it in for our school film festival.

AND ONE LAST THING, IS THIS FAN FILM APPLICABLE FOR THE ATOM FILMS / STAR WARS FAN FILMS? We obiously have Matrix and LOTR content... is that allowed? Are we able to submit it?

 

Were doing our movie at 720 x 420 resolution at 29 frames a second, so the files are pretty big. How can I shrink video size? I want to make "crappy" qualities of our video files, maybe smaller, less framerate, w/e. How do I do that? Is there a program I can use?

Most of compressing software that does a good job costs a lot of money. For example, Premiere Pro and the Adobe Media Encoder do a great job with WMV, and MPEG-2, but nothing else. WMV's can have great quality and be small, being MPEG-4, but have the unfortunate state of being a Microsoft product.

Adobe After Effects and the Render Queue are less buggy than the Premiere exporter, and can do a decent job of Quicktime (see Fig's tutorial or something similar), and this has all the details to do exactly what you mentioned.

The best solution is something like Sorenson Squeeze - what you need is 2 (or more) pass variable bitrate encoding. (Premiere Pro does this for WMV).

I find that the audio in our clips has a slight buzz which I think is caused by the camera. How can I reduce this 1) By getting a microphone and 2) withOUT getting a mic?

1. Plug the mic into the camera, or a separate audio mixer, and record illustrious high-quality audio.

1. It's probably caused by internal noise to the camera. Adobe Audition (or a similar audio program) may have some luck removing the buzz with it's noise removal tool... though eventually, if the buzz is too loud, will introduce reverb/echoey type artifacts.

-Spiff

 

IS THIS FAN FILM APPLICABLE FOR THE ATOM FILMS / STAR WARS FAN FILMS?

Probably not, because of the unauthorised use of the different movie themes. But I have to say that the song is pretty damn good!

 

Apprentice_Anakin - The idea of combining movies, could be enertaining, if properly pulled off. But unfortunatly I don't think this will be as successful as it could be.
But hey, prove me wrong.

 

The Anakin looks pretty much dead on haha

 

Cool.

 

excuse me for seeming rude........i apologise if i do...

but what the heck ever happened to it being illegal for someone to make a fanfilm that incorporated anything to do with PJ's Lord of the Rings Trilogy?

I've seen alot of posts about doing LOTR films lately.....so if this is no longer illegal....well.....Middle-Earth here I come....

 

Illegal? To make a fan film?! Am I missing something?

 

*bangs head against wall*

 

This may be able to be considered a parody, in which case I imagine it would be okay.

 

i hate to say it because i would love to make a LOTR fanfilm but they are very VERY strict...so I am pretty sure that making this film could land you a hefty fine or just get you in a lot of trouble.

 

Or you could just make the movie, and not worry about a multi-billion dollar company coming and suing a couple of friends making a non-profit movie for fun...

 

Didn't I run into that Anakin at San Diego Comic-Con 2004?

Sounds like a pretty awesome fun idea for a fanfilm, let's see if it works out man. And PLEASE tell me you'll do a killer action trailer.

By the way, you're giving me a ton of ideas... can't you see that Hobbit in one of those big burly robots (mimicing the hobbit in the army in "Return of the KIng")? Or Anakin waking up in Mobil Ave station? The Wring Wraith calling Skywalker "Mr. Anakin?" Padme with twin blasters in slow motion like Trinity? Or best yet: Mount Sidious.

Chris

 

As for Star Wars Fanfilms, you absolutely cannot use any Star Wars music, it says so. You would have to get permission for the other music which I think would be hard. And your movie can only be 15 minutes max. I looked into the whole thing. You can use sound effects from the star wars games though, I asked. Other than that, the music sounds great, I would put a little more work into the website though.

 

Did I miss something...I could have sworn that even TFN hosts fanfilsm that use official SW owned music...and as for the 15 minutes....??? DId you not see To Know A Jedi? It clocke din at like 1 hour and 38 minutes...

 

(looks around) does anyone else want to take this one, or can I go ahead?

Those rules were talking about the AtomFilms Star Wars fanfilm contest, not TFN fanfilms.

Chris