How to make stop-motion battle reports.

[Chardar]

Special thanks to Onacara, Filthy the Clown, Rogue Assassin, and Thatguy0715 for their contributions to this tutorial.

Remember those flipbooks? If you flipped the pages fast enought you would get a "video" of a big fish eating a little fish. Now let's try to incorporate that into heroscape. Of course technology has evolved beyond fish books, but the concept is still the same.

Materials. Heroscape, camera, windows movie maker, patience, and a youtube account or other video hosting website. Another program that was recommended to me was Anasazi. I haven't used it yet, but it looks good.

Step 1: Take pictures. This may seem obvious, but it has to be done carefully if you want the best results possible. The area that you are taking the pictures in artifical light such as a lamp. Sunlight varies too much, and will create odd colorations. When moving figures take a picture for every hex they move. When moving a squad move each figure before taking a pic. This will give the effect of the entire squad moving at once. When attacking, if the attack destroys the target take a pic of the figure standing up and then another pic of the figure knocked down.


Take another pic from the same angle, this time with the figure removed from the map. When played back one after another it will look as if the attacking figure actually did destroy the target. If the attack did not destroy the target you may (I didn't. The flashing back and forth was a little too much) take a picture of the army card with the appropriate amount of wound markers. However the flashing back and forth from the battle and the card can get a little annoying.

Step 2: After taking the pictures (there will be a ton). Import them into windows movie maker or another suitable program.


It's important to take the pics in order, otherwise they you will have to insert each pic manually, which would most likely take a couple days. To put it in perspective about 50 pics will get you about 30 seconds worth of video. It's important to import the pictures all at once. Otherwise you risk messing up the order.

Step 3: Assemble the video from the pics.




Before doing anything with the pics we need to set how long we want each of them to play. After much experimentation I've found that it works best to have each pic last for about 0.625 seconds and transition to be set at 1.25. For more natural movement you can speed it up to 0.5 seconds, but at that speed it becomes hard to keep track of the battle. You can change the other settings if you want, but it's not necessary.

Step 4: Make the video. Now that we have the pic's duriation set it's time to make the video. Select all of the pics.



Copy them into the timeline. If you took the pics in order as the game progressed and imported them at the same time they will already be in proper order. After pasting them (this will take a few seconds, that's a lot of pics) preview the video to ensure that they are in order. If you want you can use the "make titles or credits" button to add in notes and predictions. Just click on the button and decide where you want the note.

Step 5: Save the video.



Windows movie maker has several options for saving videos. It doesn't make a huge difference, but I've found that "high quality video large.wmv" works best. In comparison this will be a large file, but a series of pics really isn't going to take up much memory. I'd feel safe saying you'd have to play on a weirdscaper map to get any higher than 10 mb. A normal BoV, 500 point game should only take up about 5 mb, and you can always delete the video from your computer after uploading.

Step 6: Upload the file. After uploading the video to YouTube you need to get it on the forum. This is actually a very simple start by opening the link to the video.



UPDATE:

Slight update to this. YouTube has changed the way that videos are shared. This is an example of the new form of code.

http://youtu.be/KGscNz80JmU

Previously the code would begin after v=. Now the code ends after the / on the code. Everything else is still done in the same way.


When you are finished you should have something like this.


Your stop motion battle report thread is now ready for posting.

Final result: This is a video from a small playtest. It's very basic and isn't the best quality, but it should be enough to convey the basic idea. The quality of the video will depend on the quality of camera, how good your lighting is, and how much work you actually put into the video.



Stop motion videos created by other heroscapers.

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
Rogue Assassin's Stifika fight.
S
T
Thatguy0715 lego stop motion video.
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Thanks for reading.

[rednax]

Awesome!

~Rednax

[Killz]

Cool, I should try this.
But about how much memory does it take?

[Fen_Hydra]

Looks cool! Great job.

[Chardar]

Originally Posted by Killz

Cool, I should try this.
But about how much memory does it take?

This particular video is about 3.5 MB. The pics will take up a lot of space. I'd recommend deleting them after you make the video. There's really no reason to keep them, and after you get enough they will clog your computer. So memory isn't a huge issue.

I also updated the OP with some better snapshots.

[MegaSilver]

Awesome! I've been wanting to to this some time but afraid I would screw it up. But now with this tutorial, the risk is lower

MegaSilver

[Filthy the Clown]

Cool concept! I recommend adding some notes between turns (general strategies, predictions, etc). And AC/DC tunage for inspiration, of course.

[Chardar]

Originally Posted by Filthy the Clown

Cool concept! I recommend adding some notes between turns (general strategies, predictions, etc). And AC/DC tunage for inspiration, of course.

That's not a bad idea. With windows movie maker you could quite easily add in some subtitles. I'm going to add that to the tutorial. Also I'm not sure about ACDC, but quite a few artists don't allow you to use their music in a video. So be careful about what you use. You don't want it to get rejected for that.

[Gulp]

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Chardar again.

[LordEsenwienIV]

Very nice!

[Chardar]

Originally Posted by MegaSilver

Awesome! I've been wanting to to this some time but afraid I would screw it up. But now with this tutorial, the risk is lower

MegaSilver

Well I'd think that there'd be no risk. (Well you could always drop the camera or something but that doesn't really have anything to do with the video).

I updated the OP with instructions for uploading and embedding the videos. I know most of you probably know how to do this, but the tutorial just felt incomplete.

Also if anyone spots a typo or mistake let me know and I'll correct it. I want this to be useful.

[Mossman]

Pretty cool. I kept getting distracted by the dog in the background, but that made it more fun.