Wing Commander movies

No, and after seeing TheForce.Net, hopefully no one ever will.
 
Come on, it would be cool to have "Pink 5" on the Kilrah attack. But I don't think WC has the same appeal. And by appeal I mean lightsabers.
 
If someone had the funds and the time to make it look nice and have at least somewhat good acting, I wouldn't mind seeing a fan film.
If I still had access to get on an Air Force Base, I wouldn't mind shooting a fan film there.
 
Speaking of FanFilms, have you seen Troops ? This has to be the best (and one of the funniest) SW fanfilm ever. It proves that fanfilms can be quite good.
 
At the absolute very least, we'd have to have access to a blue screen to do such a fan film. Unless you know any space carriers from the future which are just lying around unused. Using a real life hanger would be a step in the right direction... but what about things like props or making it look half-way to WC?
 
think the only way to make a decent wc movie would be to have it all done in cg, or 2d animation if anyone is good enough with that style. Albeit it I think now a days it's easier to make animations in 3d programs than hand drawn art animation.
 
Actually, blue screens aren't really so hard to make (although WC3 actually used green screens because of the blue Confed uniforms, so I guess that makes it impossible--WC4 used real sets and everything, but I'm afraid to say whether they did any green screen work). However, a fan film could be done using the Ginger Lynn Allen action figure (teehee), or machinma, or any number of techniques commonly used to produce fan films. CG tends not to be as common because it does take a lot of work if you're not using machinma techniques.
 
It isn't that hard. Check out the briefing rooms: just some chairs and big screen in the back. Most universities must have places that look more or less like the Midway briefing room. Replace the chalkboard with cgi and there you have it. Or, even better, USE THE CHALKBOARD. They did use a chalkboard on the rec room of the Tiger's Claw, after all.

And what about the briefing rooms on WC3 and WC4? Just some old computer equipment and a table. How hard is that?

Or have a "Troops" on locale. That means a desert, or a forest. Just a few trees will do. They have trees in WC! Some fat guy without his shirt on holding a stick can be a Mopok. Throw a CGI Kilrathi and you have a WC1 live action cutscene.
 
Yeah, I was thinking about that, too. After all, you guys have all those WCP flight suits, they've gotta be good for something. ;)
 
ChrisReid said:
There's actually lots of video from dragoncon in the editing process now..

:: Drops Plastic Beer Cup On Frosty ::
 
lol, so i take it you guys opinion of a fan movie is a bunch of guys sitting round a poorly desgned living room set? Least in 3d modelling programs you can have some areial dog fights to cover over bad fan acting :D Lol, I can just imaganie the micromachine fighter craft hanging from a string. Lol, make the wingmen gay and you can turn it into a camp classic :D
 
Hey, at least that'd be something. You can say, "OK we're going to get someone to invest $50 million to make a Wing Commander fan movie with real actors and fancy special effects and it'll just look so totally realistic," or you can be reasonable and take a more dramatic approach (in the theatrical sense) and let people fill in some of the details with their imaginations.

Remember, before CGI, there was stop motion animation. Up until something like towards the end of DS9, all of the ships in Star Trek were done using models, not CGI. Give people a background, and I think it'd actually be kinda cool for somebody to do a WC using their living room set and micromachine space fighters. With stop motion, part of the magic is seeing seemingly real but inanimate objects move (for example, imagine a talking LEGO men effect). Red vs. Blue, for all its popularity, was mainly dubbing overlaid a video of people nodding the heads of video game characters. The thing that made it interesting for people was the dialogue and the characters, not the versimilitude of the effects. [edit]The effects in the (original) Star Wars were also all done without CGI, using stop motion, models, camera motion, explosives, and drawing directly on the film (!) for laser effects. Granted, they may not measure up to what you'd see in a modern film, but they're certainly a lot better than what most would expect out of a fan movie, either.[/edit]

Personally, I think it'd be cool for somebody to do a whole movie using "live action stop motion" with human beings instead of models. I mean, sure, you can just film the actors in motion, but just think of the novelty factor. And you could probably do some nifty effects, too.

I also don't think hand-drawn animation is necessarily harder than CGI animation, especially if you're not aiming for perfection. The problem with CGI is that you have to adjust a bunch of vertices to make characters move. You can make that easier using skeletons, but you still have to tweak it over and over again. It's not like live action with computerized actors (although they're moving in that direction, it's not there yet, especially with commonly available tools). With hand animation, you can just draw out some lines in the way that feels most natural to you. The main trick is drawing the same thing over and over again with consistency, but for a fan animated movie, it wouldn't have to be held up to commercial-quality standards. We would very likely accept something well below TV cartoon fare.
 
But real life models are expensive. Fans can makes complex 3D models using highly advanced pirated software quite easily! Nearly all fan-made SW movies use a lot of CGI an the bare minimum of actual stuff. Most of which they already have in abundance for conventions and that kind of thing.
 
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