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Production Notes
Last winter I discovered the joy of “filming” Carmageddon replays: You watch the replay one frame at a time and take a screen capture of each frame. This, however, takes a long time, and when filming a long sequence, the game sometimes crashes before you're done! The game scans the serialized screen captures in your directory and looks for the lowest availible number each time you press SHIFT-D, and fills in the gaps before counting any higher. That means, if you've already got over 500 screen captures in your directory, it scans all 500 files each time! On my computer, Carmageddon has reached 800 screen capture dumps before crashing, but usually crashes around 600.
Anyways, when I play Carmageddon, I use my customized CD that has Joe Satriani on it. One of the tracks is Surfing with the Alien. One day, I was flying through a level at incredible speeds while listening to this song, when I got a brilliant idea: A Carmageddon (only) music video!
(A quick note about my customized Splat Pack CD: The real CD's playtrack is crap: Three short songs plus four silent 4-/9-second tracks. So I made a custom audio mix :-) I still have my original registered version of the Splat Pack, plus a second copy that I bought at Future Scam's going out of business sale for $10, because I thought my cousin might want it--but he didn't.)
Most of the footage is just stuff that happened during normal game play. The only “engineered” footage was the Disco in Hell; I used the edit modes to put the opponents in neutral so that they wouldn't bother me, and I kept respawning the pedestrians so that I could redo the party crashing when I didn't like how the last one went. And once I finally got a playback I liked, I kept reshooting the fall from the dance floor (I wanted to get a good shot of that disco ball!).
At the end of the Hell sequence, you can see Otis P. Jivefunk's car embeded in the ground as a result of being neutralized while wandering around off-screen.
The first city sequence was supposed to run longer--it was an awesome little battle and I wasted my oppoents quickly--but the game crashed after 788 screen captures.
The mineshaft scene was supposed to be longer, too, but it also crashed, after 860 screen captures. I trimmed the sequence and later cut a wee bit out of the beginning so that the video syncronized with the “whoosh!” audio event as the Eagle flew over the hill.
I'm especially proud of the final sequence, with the Fearari chase, Ed 101's hood getting tire imprints, and the cop crash at the very end. That last crash was perfect for ending the video.
The first time I was nearing completion, I had five sequences, but I wanted to include more, so I increased the frame rate from 10 to 12. I suddenly had a couple more minutes to fill, so I added two more sequences. I wanted the Disco Dance Floor to Hell and something cool from the Nascar-type racetracks. But I couldn't think of anything good for the Nascar scene, except driving into the concessions stands, but it didn't fit the pace. So I tried “Knight Riders” instead and got some nice footage of the Eagle II surfing across the walls.
With the additional scenes, the music ended up being too short, so I sort of extended the music, by amplifying the faded ending (at a rising slope). I'm still surprised at how good those last 30 seconds of music turned out.
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Legal stuff:
Carmageddon / Splat Pack ©1997 SCi |
The Silver Surfer ©Marvel Entertainment Group |
Surfing with the Alien by Joe Satriani ©1987 Strange Beautiful Music/ASCAP |
This page ©2002 Wally Waffles
Last Updated: 2002.11.22
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