Song choice

Or was it more like the song chose me? I stumbled upon My Chemical Romance accidentally somewhere on the net and I fell in love with Helena song pretty quickly.. so i just had no other option than to make my new video to it. Coming up with the main theme was pretty hard, because any idea which came into my mind seemed not good enough for the song. The final movie seems very connected... but in fact the storyline was made of separate bits and pieces inspired by different things. I took some elements from one of my short stories called 'Ghost' , the wedding was inspired by official Helena video and Gerard's character by some songs in the 3 Cheers for Sweet Revenge album. Also the whole storyline was evolving while I was shooting the movie, as for example I changed my mind about the ending too many times, as I would listen to a new song.. it would give me a new idea

Making of

There was alot of preproduction work involved and the hardest part was perhaps to find the patience to build that church, as I don't really enjoy building too much..

When making Helena I started to spend more and more time in SimPE (program for sim modding) trying different things. Some things did work, some didn't. but in the long run, it was totally worth it, as the extra time I spent on hacking the game allowed me to tell the story exactly how I pictured it in my mind and illustrate some things in a way I could never do just having to work with the raw game only. almost every interaction there was in the game was used with the help of my hacked box with interactions

How I did 'it':

Camera Work
I got slow rotations/smooth camera movements by modifying the firstpersoncameras.txt and livecamera.txt files which contain camera parameters. I tried to explain how these work in this thread on my forum

The shower

Sitting in the shower animation was custom made by me. you can find out more about custom animations here.


The mirror
The words on the mirror came from another MCR song which plays during the credits(It's not a fashion statement, it's a deathwish) How did I put the words on the mirror? In fact, words were a separate object same size as the mirror:


The moon

Sims does have a moon by default.. but it's really small and somewhere way up in the skies, so the moon in a video was a self illuminated plane object made by me. It's available for download on my forum.


The Kiss
The kiss was a regular kiss/romantic interaction. now the first kiss 'cinematic' effect (this is the one which you see when the special event movie plays). what i did was put the invisible sim behind helena and gerard, then play 1st kiss interaction on the invisible sim at the same time when they kissed. it was tough to synch up the animation of but somehow i did it.
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g295/_jaydee/pic2.jpg


The Taxi
alot of people were asking about it. How I got Gerard to be a taxi driver? well the answer is simple.. i didn't do it. First, I recolored taxi windows to be black, so that you couldn't see the default driver when the car was driving. And then you just see Gerard sitting in the car, which starts to move slowly forward, but in fact it didn't move at all - the camera did. And the smile was made with Shaklin's facial expressions hack while I made him hold his hands on the steering wheel by using a hacked box



Helena House Movie Set#1

And ppl even get surprised why I prefer to not share my sets lol...

EDIT: feb27.2010: Oh well for the longest time i thought I had this uploaded. but i didn't. in fact from what i remember I had this page almost finished, it just needed a bit of proofreading. And then my hard drive died, so this is an older version of it, which doesn't look finished but right now i'm kinda confused about what else was supposed to be on here anyways lol.. but it's better than nothing right.