Star Trek: Borg War (fan film)

[Darren Dirt]

Way cool idea, and after I watched "part 2" I was very impressed with the way the one-person production "team" put it together, using the engines of 2 different Trek games, and using the original games' sound files combined with his own creativity in a brand new story...

Low-quality but easy-to-view:
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=kephren1


Higher quality version:
http://www.machinima.com/films.php?series=Borg%20War


http://www.borgwarmovie.org/FAQ.htm

Q: What is the Borg War movie about?
A: Borg War depicts the conflict between the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and a strain of Borg infected with a mind-controlling, flesh-mutating virus. The incursion of these diseased Borg throws the Alpha quadrant's finely balanced power structures into chaos. As Picard marshals the free races to oppose the Borg, the Klingons and Romulans use the turmoil as an excuse for interracial war. Meanwhile, the Borg themselves struggle against the infection, which is using them as a source for food.



Q: How did you make this movie?
A: This is a machinima project -- a movie created by manipulating the customization features of two game engines. 

For Starfleet Command 3, I make changes to the setup files for the ships to make them act in ways that are unnatural to the game, but necessary to get a particular shot (e.g. a disabled Enterprise that will stay in one place, rather than move to attack.)  I then "play" the game. The game engine records the activities, with a camera angle that's always centered on the "players" ship, but which can can zoom and rotate during playback, which I record as described below.  For special shots, I use a special ship that is only a black dot, which can fly in between and around other ships.  This effectively gives me additional camera angles. For a few of the more complex special effects, I set up multiple computers with multiple "players" and manipulate them simultaneously.

Elite Files 2 has a much more sophisticated customization engine which served not just to play the game, but to create the cinematics for the game.  I use an editing program (provided free from the game developers) to layout the sets, place pre-created objects and characters, define locations for characters to walk, and so forth.  I then execute the game in "development" mode and record the actions of the characters and objects, based upon a script.  The scripting language is, for you techies out there, a multi-threaded C variant, which allow me to define the pre-formed animations that the characters will execute.  These animations, combined with dialog (see below), are combined to build each raw scene.  Essentially, every single action, from a character raising an eyebrow, to a massive explosion of everything in the room, is under my direct control.

The original source of the dialog is the sound files for the two games.  To build the dialog for the movie, I take snippets and sections of the dialog and recombine them into new dialog that conforms to my plotline, using an inexpensive sound editor named Audacity.  The resulting sound clips are run through a program that makes the mouths of the characters move in sync to the words.  However, in many cases the dialog is added to the movie during the editing phase and "lipsynced" to the movements of the character's mouths.



Q: How many people worked on this movie?
A: This project was entirely built, filmed and edited by one person, in his spare time, over the period of about 18 months.  I use my three best friends, all of whom are Star Trek fans, as consultants.  The four of us appear in the movie several times, as our computer animated avatars, of course. We can be identified by the "28" on our communicator badges.  Of course, several dozen people worked on the original video games, which were both major productions from major game studios.  They created all the basic animations that went into the two games.  The developers have been very supportive of my efforts, even though the two games that I am using are no longer being officially distributed. 



Q: Why are you doing this?
A: I'm trying to do a better movie than Nemesis, given the restrictions of the medium.  Beyond this, I have been interested in computer animation since playing with MovieMaker on the Atari 800 in the mid-1980s.  Machinima gives me the opportunity to make a feature-length animated film without the necessity of collaboration. Let me put it another way. I think of my project as successful when viewers tell me "Hey, Borg War is a good animated movie; you did some nice things within the context of the Star Trek genre."



Q: Is this a game mod or just a movie?
A: It is a game mod.  The Borg War movie is a "cinematic" for a game mod that includes many of the sets used in the production.  Thus is it impossible to get the full 100% value of Borg War without purchasing the two games and running the mod.