The Making of “The 12 Days of Winter’s Veil”

The 12 Days of Winter’s Veil was very fun, but was my most complicated, difficult and frustrating movie to make, which is why I’ve decided to write a “The Making of” article. In all, the movie is composed of 567 different files totaling 20 gigs in size. I started it when I got back from the Machinima Festival in New York, around the beginning of November, and didn’t finish until the afternoon of December 21st.

Because I had a heavy load at college this last quarter, I was unable to work on the movie except for on the weekends when I work. I took my laptop to work with me and created the movie when I was not driving guests to and from the airport. I’ve got to thank my coworker Mark Hockley (who did voice acting for me in “The Joy of Punting Gnomes”) for forgiving my inattention while I worked on the movie.

first, I recorded the music. In early November I went up to the music building at the University of Washington with my neighbor Sarah Grace, who is a music major, and I recorded her playing the piano portion. It took us a number of hours and by the time we were finished we were both a bit loopy from fatigue, as you can tell in the audio bloopers.

Once we finished with the piano, I recorded myself singing the lyrics which I wrote. Now, this was very frustrating to me, because the music was at a weird octave for my voice. It was not high enough and was not low enough — it was right at that place where I don’t sing bad, but I don’t sing very good either. But alas, since I had no other singer but myself, I suffered through it and sang the bloody thing. It took me a number of tries before I was satisfied, but my vocal chords were tired by then which you can plainly tell. still, it was the best version I had, and considering I had to play the piano portion from my computer, run back to my microphone (since I don’t have headphones) and sing the thing from beginning to end in one go without making any mistakes, it’s not bad. I considered singing each day separately and just pasting it in to match the song, but that would have taken way too long.

Once I finished the music I was able to work on the video. I recorded the video in WoW Model Viewer using Fraps against a blue screen and then imported the clips into Adobe Premiere Pro 7.0, keyed out the bluescreen, resized each clip appropriately and animated them with the motion option when necessary. This was the most time consuming part, and it took me the better part of November to finish all the primary editing, from beginning to end.

I had ideas for an “easter egg” early on, and went to the University to borrow a video camera. My original idea for the easter egg was much different and shorter, but as I was walking back to my apartment with the camera the whole kodo eggnog thing struck me, and I had to do it. I then waited all night for my room mate David to get home so he could be my camera man. Since I was filming in the kitchen I had to wait for my other room mates (I have three in all) to finish making food, doing dishes and so forth before I could film. still, I couldn’t avoid all interruptions. If you listen closely you can hear someone closing a door in the background while I’m in the kitchen. It took about an hour to film it all, and it was much less complicated than the footage I shot for “4 Commercials for mtvu”. I realized when I shot that footage that the camera microphone was horrible, but it was too late. This time I recorded the sound independently and just spliced it in over the camera sound. This whole thing took me one afternoon and only about an hour to put into the movie.

It was about then that finals struck me here at college and I was unable to work on the movie for a good couple weeks while I studied and made sure I didn’t miss any class. When finals were done in early December I was very much behind on the movie (I had originally hoped to get it done by December 1st) so I started working on it full time.

This was complicated, however, by my boss suddenly discovering that I had a Christmas break. He asked if I could work extra and I couldn’t say no, so I started working full time at the hotel. I worked eight hours, drove back to Seattle and worked on my movie. I went through, clip by clip, and changed the RGB color of each file to match the background so that it was not so obvious that I was using WoW Model Viewer. Then I went through and placed in shadows. Now, I would have used the drop shadow effect to make realistic shadows, but I realized that since realistic shadows are not actually in the game, they would only make it more obvious that I used WoW Model Viewer. So I opted to make shadows that closely resembled the shadows in the actual game. I think I probably made the opacity to dark, but oh well.

After I was done with color and shadows, I went in and placed in the sound effects. Some of them I recorded myself (like the snoring sounds from “10 Orcs a-​sleeping” and the screams from “6 geeks a-​ganking”) but the majority of them were taken directly from the game. I used WoWMPQ to extract the sound effects form the game and simply plopped them in where I felt it was appropriate in Premiere.

Now comes the hard, frustrating part. You see, I make all my movies on my little laptop, which I use to write all my papers and do all my research for classes. It isn’t a bad computer, but it is hardly a professional tool for machinima making. Therefore my RAM is not quite up to par, and when I sit down to export a movie it takes FOREVER. If I run any program in the background while exporting, I get an error message that says, “Premiere failed to render a video frame” and the program shuts down. So then, when I export a movie, especially one as complicated as this one was, it takes over my computer for hours at a time.

Additionally, when using Premiere 7.0, entire sections of my movie would suddenly turn black for no apparent reason. This problem was not predictable, for if I shut down the program, restarted the computer, or even minimized and then maximized the window, different portions of the movie would turn black while others would become normal, which was reflected in the actual file when I exported it. I worked for days to correct this problem — redoing blue screen keys, deleting unnecessary tracks, letting my computer rest for a day before exporting — and nothing seemed to work.

So I went to Tristan Pope for help. He told me that instead of exporting the entire thing as one bulk file that I should try dividing the movie into sequences, and then dragging the sequences into the main timeline and exporting. So I did, but it did not help. He then told me to get Adobe Premiere 2.0 (which is a newer version than 7.0, which I was using) to see if it would solve the problem. I can not afford the program, however, so I downloaded the trial.

And it worked! It solved all my black screen issues. However, it presented me with some new ones. I was unable to export the movie in any format.

By this time I was beating my head against the wall in frustration. The deadline for the WCM contest was rapidly approaching, and I really didn’t want to spend my entire Christmas break working on this one movie. Besides, I still had to release Inventing Swear Words 2 and The Anti-​Elf Anthem officially. So I went to a Premiere help forum and was told to try making a new project and importing the project containing my movie. This ended up working about half the time. It worked with ISW2 but did not work with TæA and my Christmas movie. So I had to go back to the drawing board.

The deadline was days away. The days remaining for my trial of Premiere 2.0 were swiftly ticking away. The movie was completed but I had no way of exporting it. I was also waiting on Michæl Carson, the animator who I hired to make ” An Oxhorn Brand Movie” title logo for me, to actually finish it. The title screen was going to be great! A branding iron would come down and brand my logo into something, and then the screen would zoom out and it would be on a Tauren’s thigh. Michæl emailed me and said he was working on it and would have it to me by the 10^th, so all I could do was wait. But the 10^th came and went and I still did not have it. He too had had some rough finals and was just sitting down to work on it, but he told me not to worry, that I would have it soon.

So I spent the next few days working and trying to figure out how to export my movie. I decided to just start fresh. I went through the Adobe Media Encoder option and clicked setting after setting, turning some on and others off, until I finally, after many days, found a setting that allowed my movie to actually render without an error message. The only problem was that the quality was horrible. So I fiddled with it for another day until I found a setting that worked! I got small portions of it to export and the quality was great. However when I tried to export the entire movie my system would get bogged down and the movie would be lost.

It was the 18^th and Michæl still had not finished the title slide. He was up in Sieg Hall working from the University of Washington computers and hadn’t slept in days. I decided to join him and he set me up with a computer that had Premiere Pro 2.0 installed on it. With the increased RAM of this university computer, I was able to export my film! And yet now things were not being read properly.

For some reason the university computer was saying that some of my files were corrupted. I ended up having to re-film a few scenes and re-​compile them. I also had to convert all sound effects in the movie to 44kbps instead of 48, file by file. My sound was still not exporting properly for some reason, so I had to go through Premiere, turn off all video and export all sound effects into a single file, which I in turn imported back into the project and put in place of the individual clips.

As I was previewing one of my renders, I noticed that some things were off just a bit. The shadows were all in wrong places and the ears in every single “2 night elf ears” segment were off. It was then I realized that converting the Premiere 7.0 file into a 2.0 file had messed with the positions of all my .bmp files.

It was one o’clock in the morning on the 10^th. I had not been able to export my movie and Michæl still had not finished my title slide. Due to the time consumption and complexity of the title slide, he was no longer able to have the branding iron come down and brand the Tauren’s thigh. Instead we were just going to have the logo change colors and then smoke would come out. That would be fine, as long as I got it in time. We were both working from the university computers when Michæl stood up quickly. Suddenly he remembered that all the computers in the lab were going to shut down at two o’clock in the morning and erase all non system files! Quickly he and I ran between all the computers using ctrl+alt+del to turn off the background program that would restart the computers. He was using all of them in a network in order to render the smoke for my title screen, and just as it turned two o’clock, we got to the final computer.

But we had forgotten to fix the main computer that was sending the render job through the network! It shut down and the files were lost.

As you can imagine, we were both frothing at the mouth. I felt like hitting something and looked around frantically for a gnome, but then Michæl sighed in relief. One of the computers had finished rendering the file just before the primary one went down, and it happened to save all information. We toasted our luck with a couple of cans of warm Sprite, and got back to work.

I sat down and reanimated all the motion effects for all the shadows, and readjusted all the ears. Just as I finished, Michæl finished the title slide. He was not happy with how the smoke turned out but by that time I didn’t care. It was four o’clock in the morning, I had to work in three hours, and I had not slept in 72. So I got the title slide, put a sound effect behind it, threw it into my timeline and hit “Export”.

I took a cat-​nap for a few hours and woke up to find that my movie had finally rendered completely with no errors whatsœver. The perfectionist in me kept on pointing out minor things here and there that I could improve, but the exhausted, hungry and annoyed curmudgeon in me told the perfectionist to kindly shut the hell up. I raced home, plopped the 300-​plus megabyte file into Windows Movie Maker, set the program to export the file under 100 megs for sites like YouTube, and left for work.

Now, a funny thing happens when you lack sleep for nearly three days straight, live off of sugary soda and cookie dough and then go to work where you drive a hotel shuttle van for eight hours. You start falling asleep at the wheel. I really don’t remember much of that shift — a heavy bag here and there, a few guests asking me if I was all right, a few cars honking as I swerve over the white line — but evidentially I survived the shift without causing any harm. Here’s a tip: drinking four shot Americanos, blasting late 80’s hard rock (Blind Guardian), rolling down the windows in freezing temperatures and smacking yourself in the face repeatedly helps a lot.

I arrived home on the morning of the 21st, the deadline of the Christmas contest, and decided that I would check my movie before I went to bed. I played the file and it looked good. But something was missing. I played it again and realized that all the sound effects except for the murloc noises were missing. I quickly opened up Premiere to see what was afoot. Nothing. The files were all there. They all worked. I exported a small segment to see if the render would work, but it didn’t. None of the sound effects would render, and there was no good reason.

I would have blown my top right there, but was too tired. So I deleted all sound effects, re-​imported them and put them all in place as fast as I could. A couple hours later I was ready, and I set the thing to export. It was now past noon and I put in Robin Hood: Men in Tights to keep me awake while I waited for the thing to export. It did, sort of. I think I drifted off here and there and I had funny dreams about tight-​wearing archers with guns running around London looking for gypsies and boxing matches, forever talking about how bad milk was for you whilst squeezing dogs that sounded like mice. Maybe it had something to do with me having watched Snatch the night before. Anyhow, I awoke to a ding! And watched the movie to make sure it was all right.

You’ll never guess. It was! I watched it three times just to make sure and then started uploading it to the internet. I had it uploading to fileFront, Google Video and WCM at the same time that I was exporting a low-​res version for YouTube, Game Trailers and Game Videos​.com. Once I had a mirror for fileFront up there I turned off the lights and went to bed. It was the best sleep I can ever remember having.

Sometimes I ask myself why I bother making little machinima movies. After all, it’s not like I make any money doing it. I don’t have a production studio, I have no sponsors and I work and go to class full time. Every time I finish a movie I tell myself that I am done and that I’ll be taking a long break. But I never do. I don’t know why it is, but I just can’t help making movies. An idea will come to mind and I’ll have to do it. Why? I don’t know. As for right now I am exhausted and don’t plan on making a new movie any time soon. But I am sure I’ll find myself working on something new any time now regardless. After all, I just finished the script for Inventing Swear Words 3.

About Oxhorn I’m an author, songwriter and movie-​maker who lives in Seattle, WA. I earned my BA in history from the University of Washington and have been interested in arguments, reasoning, research, writing and history ever since. I’m best known for my animated comedy machinima movies and music which you can find at oxhorn​.com. Visit brandonMdennis​.com for more about me, and be sure to subscribe, follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Watch my weekly live show, Scotch & Smoke Rings, at 7:00 PM Pacific for more classiness.