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 Last night we posted this phenomenal WoW dance video that we saw on Kotaku. As soon as I saw it I rushed off to find the creator and send him a few questions for a quick email interview. They start below and finish after the jump. First some basics: What's your name and age? Where do you live and what do you do for a living? My name is Tom Hope-Parry, I'm 24, and currently living in the UK, Wales. I'm an animator, but almost fresh out of university so I guess you can start making some pretty strong links. What sparked the idea to put the video together? Hard to say really, I've wanted to make a WoW related movie for quite a while. With that aside I took a personal interest in where the styles of dances came from. Seeing the Napoleon Dynamite dance on the Blood Elf male really amused me, I love that film and I've always loved that dance scene. It made me curious as to where other dances came from. I decided it would be fun to match them with the WoW characters to see exactly how closely they moved together. The Blood Elf female was the first that I made and since it worked so well I continued to make the rest. It wasn't really until later on that I thought to post it on You-Tube. The attention to detail is pretty amazing, especially the clothing you put the WoW characters in matching the sources. How did you accomplish that? I used a free program called WowModelViewer, which basically enables you to display any model from the game and equip characters with any item of armor or weapons. You can then create images or movie files from the display. It seems to be a commonly used tool and it can help create far better effects than just capturing straight from the game. I spent a lot of time searching through to find the best possible items for each scene. It was important to try to make the character fit, and was really the enjoyable part about doing this too. The movie really would have had a poor end result if i had just layered the character on top without all the effects, this seemed a little more sophisticated. Lighting, shadows and scale were important things to consider so as to make the characters match the scenes. I included subtle motions of the character to follow the movements of the camera too. These things really helped bring the character to life, and help make it feel the character fits directly into the scene.
How did you isolate the characters? Was there a lot of compositing involved and what programs did you use? Making this film was really an opportunity for me to get to grips with 'Adobe After Effects'. It was really quite a simple process of exporting from WowModelViewer and then importing to after effects where I could mess about with the layers. I typically used green screen when exporting from WowModelViewer and went from there. You-Tube was my resource for the footage, it can all be found there. I captured it with another piece of free software called 'Bobyte AviScreen Classic' which simply records your computer screen and creates a movie file of it. For some of the clips I had to layer up still images to remove things from the background. For example in the Chris Farley Chippendales sketch, Patrick Swayze is standing just to the left where the ogre is. This was problematic because you could see Swayze moving behind the ogre. So I had to add a still image of the background on the left side to completely remove him. If you look closely you can see where the image overlaps the original scene. There were some races and sexes that were not present, what's the reason behind that? Would it have made the video too long or are they not based on anything? Length was not the problem. I really wanted to make as many of these as I could, however I had a lot of trouble finding the footage for many of the dances. Quite a few of the dances are simply just dance styles and have no major commercial value. For the male Undead for example is moshing/headbanging which is well associated with heavy metal. I spent a long time looking through Rock concerts to find footage that matched but nothing really fit. The female Troll was also difficult as it seems to be rumored to be a Shakira dance for 'Whenever, Wherever'. I looked through her music video and several live performances but could not link it with the dance of the character. Another Dance that was quite perplexing was the Female Human's. For those that are unaware she is doing the 'Macarena' by Los del rio. Unfortunately the animators have got the dance wrong, which seems a little out of place considering how closely linked they have the other dances. This meant that the animation does not move to the video and so i left it out. I have contemplated editing the animation myself so that it fits but we will see. The gnomes had me completely confused. I have to admit I gave up with looking for their dances quite prematurely as I didn't really have any clues to help me. Some of the original sources are pretty obvious, but could you name all the sources you use in your video for our readers? As shown in order: 1: Saturday Night Fever 2: MC Hammer- Cant Touch This 3: Chubby Checker- The Twist 4: Alizee- J'en Ai Marre 5: Napoleon Dynamite 6: Daler Mehndi- Tunak Tunak Tun 7: Chris Farley Chippendales sketch 8: Britney Spears- Toxic (dance routine) 9: Michigan J. Frog in One Froggy Evening (Looney Tunes Cartoon) 10:Riverdance 11:Michael Jackson: Billie Jean 12:Peanut Butter Jelly Time The video is extremely well put together. Did you study film/video making anywhere? Well yes I've studied Film/Video for a long time and have an Animation degree. Much of my study has revolved around traditional animation and the theory behind film making. I'm pretty much self taught in regards to using software, though much of what I've learned over the years has been put into practice. Are you an avid WoW player and if so what's your main? Good question. Yes, I started playing back when the game was first released. As a result I have played many characters and many classes. I think I've always been happiest playing the melee classes like warrior or rogue though. I play on a roleplay server so thats always been an important part of the gaming experience for me, I really love the lore behind the game, Its undoubtably a major factor in why I play WoW. Anything else in the works? Well since the demand has been so high I'm going to really sit down and try to look for more clips to complete it, I will probably just make a 2nd part if I do. I'm certain it wont be quite as good as this one but we shall see. I'm very keen to take what I've learned and make something a bit more creative. Ive really enjoyed using WowModelViewer and After Effects together so I would like to try to make another WoW movie at some point using the same principles. ------- There ya have it, the guy knows what he's doing. Obviously a lot of effort was put into this video and the end result was all the better for it. Cheers, Tom!
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