If you don't know who Stu is, then you don't know much! Stu is one of those annoying actors who have a massive ego, large fan base, and are always credited first in movies they appear in no matter how small their part (unsurprisingly, George Clooney and Stu are good mates). He dreams to one day win the prestigious industry i-think award (yes, three Oscars is normally enough for most people, but apparently not for Stu). He is rumoured to be starring in an up and coming 3D computer game, although if the past is anything to go by he will probably only have a minor role. Stu is cousins with the more down to earth, clever (and far less wealthy) TBS.
The 3D animation for Star Wars In Melbourne (SWIM) was done in 3D Studio MAX 6. Video editing was done using Adobe Premier. It is presented to you in MPEG Layer-4 format, encoded using QuickTime.
The Star Wars models were gratefully obtained from the Star Wars Modelling Alliance web site. The STU and TBS models are my creations, as are the tram and rope barrier (around the Tie). The photos for the buildings were taken from here. I would have preferred to shoot my own photographs of real Melbourne buildings but time did not permit. All other textures were of my creation. The photo of Melbourne on the front page is one of mine, and I got the star wars font here.
The video is PAL encoded (i.e. 25fps). I have used depth-of-field and motion blur to give a nicer, more realistic feel to the movie (3DS Max can certainly improve it's depth of field support, but what it has is a good start I guess). Unfortunately this meant multiple passes when rendering each frame causing the video to take about 35 hours to render. Using my custom render farm (chuck and chuck2), I was able to halve the linear time taken to render the movie which proved helpful. As usual, after the final render I still wanted to make a few tweaks - delaying the launch by 24 hours. The project was initially rendered to an ultra high quality MJPEG video file. The same format was used when creating the final cut, ready for compressing to MPEG Layer-4.
The soundtrack consists of Metallica's heavy metal rendition of The Imperial March, Homer singing his own lyrics to "Little Spanish Flea" in The Simpsons The Otto Show, and ends with the original Imperial March
You may download the video to your HDD if you like. Please select either the main version (11MB) or the high quality version (19MB).
See you in Melbourne on May 19!
Will.