How I Made A Minecraft Movie

How I Made A Minecraft Movie

Hi I’m Gary and I’m a Zombie cut was that good yeah perfect great where’s my latte well what drew me to the character of Gary in the first place is quite interesting really I mean on the surface he’s a zombie yes obviously but below that he’s a lot more than that losing

Barry is really the Catalyst that transforms him from just another mob into something more and I find that so fascinating I mean the complex nuances of the character really make for an interesting and compelling character to play well it’s just another paycheck isn’t it I mean that’s really why we’re

All here right well the actor we got to play Edgar is actually French he doesn’t speak a lick of English hence why he just stands around in pretty much every shot because he is impossible to direct he does not understand a single thing that I say hi I’m Jackson and if you haven’t

Seen any of my long form videos it might be weird seeing me talking candly to the camera right now now for those of you that only know me from my Minecraft videos it might come as a shock to you that I’m not actually in Minecraft right

Now I know are you sitting down I’m actually standing well sitting in front of a green screen talking to a camera in my room alone besides Frank alone this is the setup that I use to make everything just a green screen some lights and and a camera that’s

That’s it original it it wasn’t even going to be a series it was just going to be one video the day in the life of a Minecraft zombie but the great thing about platforms like Tik Tok and and Instagram as you get that instant feedback from your audience and the

Comments were just full of people asking for a part two so after seeing that it got me wondering where can the story go from here so continuing with the format I thought the next video should be the day in the life of a skeleton what would

I do for that and immediately I thought about the fact that skeletons are the best mob farmer in the entire game Sheldon long time no see buddy I got no XP from that but then it got me thinking if this skeleton is in a mob farm then that means that the player

Put them there making the player the bad guy the mobs are just normal people just trying to live their life and the player is the person that invades their world destroys everything and tries to kill them but it was never meant to be this like Grand Story it just kind of

Unraveled that way I never set out with the intention to have it be as epic of a climax as it was I think the most difficult part of the whole thing was trying to contain it in these one minute segments because YouTube shorts doesn’t allow anything over 60 seconds for a

YouTube short but hence why it’s a YouTube short and not just a YouTube video So Not only was there a time limit but there was the whole idea that I wanted every episode to stand as its own individual thing while still having an overarching story uh which is really

Tricky because nobody wants to watch Part 12 in a series if they haven’t seen anything else but they will watch a day in the life of a Strider that just so happens to tie in to the overarching story and that’s what I tried to achieve with every episode that came out but

With this time restriction it kind of worked to my advantage because it meant that every second you know counts and and it really made me a lot more efficient at telling a story in as little words and as little shots as possible and overall I think when you

Them all together it creates a video that is a lot more fastpaced than what it probably would have been had I have just made one long 15minute video what this is Frank by the way if you don’t know who Frank is let’s talk about costumes I have never bought a costume

For the Minecraft series and it’s very rare that I have ever bought a costume for any video on this channel is that a good thing is that a bad thing you decide for my wallet it’s a good thing for really immersing you in the world maybe

It’s a bad thing but if I can get away with it and it still conveys the same message and the same idea of what I’m trying to be then it’s fine I usually start planning a video by seeing what outfits I have in my wardrobe and if I

Can Jimmy something up to look like what I’m trying to convey and it just so happened for the Minecraft series I had an old Quicksilver shirt from like 2016 and a pair of Levis i’ twice and I was like oh perfect that’s like a zombie character or or even Steve because they

Wear the same thing oh perfect two costumes one outfit how good’s that the white shirt I use for Sheldon isn’t even actually mine it’s Mitch’s and I just borrowed it I also think Edgar wears like four different pairs of pants throughout the whole series cuz I kept

Forgetting which pair of black pants I wore like I was like wow was it dress pants last time ah whatever I’ll wear my Dickies this time so that’s a fun little Easter egg if you want to see how many pants Edgar wears I also wear Crocs like

The entire time because why not they’re so convenient you know if you have to change characters three four times I don’t want to unlace my shoes every time and take them off then put them back on Crocs are just so much easier and and also stylish some people think we are now in

My office to talk about filming I use one sometimes two lights to film I use a key light and this guy just kind of illumin the green screen every now and then I use an A7 S3 to film with a 16 to 35 mil lens but for the longest time I

Was using a 17 to 28 mil f2.8 if you care about equipment if you don’t care about equipment skip on cuz I’m going to be talking about it for the next minute for the Audio I used road wireless lav mics uh attached to a road nt1a on a mic stand nt1a

N1 and uh the 99 % of situations this was perfect for the 1% that it wasn’t good I just used it anyway and fixed it in post I have a green screen sheet that I bought from Amazon for about $30 that Frank is currently using as a bed and I

Have a much more expensive Elgato green screen that’s nice but I don’t really use the Elgato because I actually believe it or not really like putting my feet in the videos call me Quint and Tarantino and this green screen does not have does not have feet greenness so

This thing is pretty much just a Bonafide green screen stand where I just clip on my actual sheet green screen over this and drape It On The Ground cuz that’s just so much easier so you know what I used to film but now let’s talk about editing easily one of the most

Timec consuming parts of the whole process so I use Final Cut Pro to edit and and that’s it people keep thinking I use after effects or like some other fancy visual effect software but nope just just Final Cut Pro that’s it and I feel like I know pretty much everything

You can and can’t do in the program and the things that you think you can’t do just have a very weird and creative work around to get them to work and also this isn’t a Hollywood production I don’t know I don’t know if you I don’t know if

You realized it’s just me so if things look a little bit Jank sometimes that’s fine I mean look at this look at this shot here brother doesn’t even have a hand in this Frame it was cut off by the green screen but it works it’s like for

Like three frames who cares it works one of the worst Parts about editing though is the key framing oh my God there is so much key framing in this series every time you see a sword or a helmet or everything that I’m clearly not holding

In real life I have key framed in frame by frame manually most of the time editing that entire final sequence the end part 1 to 5 was just spent key Fram I probably spent a good 3 or 4 days just key framing everything by hand and

Before you nerds say oh you should have just used tracking points no no I should not have just used tracking points the rotation of the sword depends on the angle of my hand in that specific frame so I would have to move the sword and then change the angle

And depending on the swing rotation would also depend on the sword rotation for that specific sequence so no I could not just slap a tracking point on there and be done with it okay that’s ridiculous don’t ever say that to me again sound sound is incredibly important especially with this project

But just in general I mean you might believe I’m in a a beautiful thriving rainforest right now but believe it or not I’m still in my I’m still in my office I know I know the sound was that believable if you still don’t believe me here’s what the series would have

Sounded like without sound surprise did you notice anything wrong with that there was no sound I’d say that sound is pretty important I personally use art list uh but in the past I have used epidemic sound um for music and sound effects and I would highly recommend both of them I’m not

Sponsored by either of them I really wish that that was not true because I use them every day of my life my biggest tip with sound okay this is my biggest tip my tip is very big okay this is a build a sound effects Library okay build

Your own little folder on your computer in your editing assets that just has a bunch of sound effects that you collect and you use often here is mine for an example as you can see I’ve broken everything down into impacts swells Rises music that I use in most of my

Videos all this stuff comes in handy so much when you’re like oh it’d be great to have an impact here or how about ariser you know and that way you just have a bunch of sounds that you always use I also have a memes folder just because you know I really like putting

The Lego Yoda death sound effect in all my videos cuz I think it’s really funny now let’s talk about what you guys really wanted to hear about now I don’t know how that’s going to transition into the video at all I actually didn’t think that far ahead but now we are going to

Be talking about what people are probably most interested in which is how did I do the fight scene how the heck did you do that you’re just one person you would be correct fighting yourself is not easy uh and unless you hate yourself and you’re just fighting

The demons in your head all the time which is in which case I especially when you’re limited to this this is all I had to work with that that was it I couldn’t even lift my arm above my head it involved a lot of this and a lot of

This wa Jesus but we made it work before filming I kind of knew which moves I would want to do and kind of what shots I would like to have in the fight sequence and as far as timing goes I just kind of kept track in my head and I

Knew that if something didn’t quite line up I could always speed ramp one character in post just so that it would line up correctly up to this point I hadn’t really ever done something like this before so I knew I would have to make a video that was pretty much just a

Trial run of how I’m even going to fight myself before the finale which I knew was going to be a massive fight scene that’s where the fight between Willie and Steve was born and as you can see it’s not very complicated like at all but that was the beauty of it because it

Made me realize that the greatest parts of that fight scene are all the parts where I’m not just doing this and it’s just going ding ding ding ding it was all actual moves and Steve you know getting hit by Willie sword and then lifting it up and kicking him away and

All these like more Dynamic movements so it did actually teach me quite a lot about what I wanted out of the next fight scene but then out of that was born one of my favorite and most popular videos of the entire series The Steve vers the piglins fight this video really

Has nothing to do with the story but I just thought it would be kind of funny just having Steve Goen Massacre like 10 piglins all because he’s just not wearing gold which is exactly what they do in the actual game that whole idea of them attacking you unless you wear gold

Reminded me a lot of the Matrix fight between the Smith and Neo when they’re trying to turn him into one of them and that’s kind of where the homage of wearing gold is inevitable came from wearing gold is inevitable and that whole piling on part which is basically

Shot forsh shot from that Matrix fight I actually wanted to talk really quickly about this shot here in particular I just thought it’d be pretty interesting to break down how I did it so obviously we have Steve in the middle doing his you know pushing everyone off him but

Each of the piglins you would think they’re in slow motion but in actual fact it was just me sitting on a green screen stool moving really slowly and the effect worked really well I was super happy with how it turned out and then I just key framed each piglin to

Just fly out as soon as Steve you know Puffs his chest out and pushes them off him and then slow them down right at the end there so it all look like it was in slow motion this is probably one of the shots that I am most maybe proud of or

Just really happy with how it turned out I’m like wow that that was so much better than what I had in my head one of the R times uh that something actually looks really good no I’m not one for storyboards I am usually someone that

Just writes the script and has a few dot points about what I kind of want for the b-roll but I knew that for the finale I was going to have to put in a little bit more planning just with the sheer number of characters and shots that this video

Would have so I drew this the storyboard for the entire finale series it ended up being about 120 panels uh with at least two characters per panel so I was looking at around 300 shots give or take which is not exactly thrilling to hear that’s a lot of work which was actually quite

Daunting to me and hence was why the end part 1 to five took so long to come out because it was just a lot it was a lot of work to take on and I knew I would want to just do it all at once and so it

Was quite scary just to start that but we persevered we finally built up the courage and and filmed it my biggest concern of the entire finale was the weapons I had the swords covered I wasn’t concerned about that at all I’d done it a million times but if you

Hadn’t noticed they’re just 2D images I don’t have access to 3D software or special renders of all of the weapons in the game so everything I use in the series is literally just images I got off Google or footage I captured from the game itself so keeping that in mind

Why did I film Sheldon like this shooting a bow at a 45° angle it’s honestly anyone’s guess extremely luckily for me I found a gif of the bow just rotating online so I managed to screenshot it at the right angle and use that thank God that was that was really

Lucky I don’t know why I don’t just find this stuff ahead of time and then plan the shots around what assets I have then I grabbed a 3D arrow and used the distort tool on Final Cut Pro to just kind of angle it and distort it if you

Will until it looked like it was the correct pers Ed boom bow down perfect but then there was the Trident again what what possessed me to use this angle where am I going to find a trident that looks like oh oh that was actually really easy that was that was very lucky

I swear to God I did not have that in mind when I filmed that shot I did not know that 3D image existed but I’m glad it did the only shot I would say that the Trident doesn’t work is in in this shot no matter where I looked I just

Couldn’t find an asset that matched the angle so I just had to use the distort tool again on a 2d version of the Trident and just kind of make it work it does the job I’m not super happy with how it turned out but it it worked filming took me the

Whole day I’m down here filming took me the whole day but it would have taken me a lot longer if I didn’t have a storyboard believe it or not the storyboard was integral to not only the filming process but the editing process it cut down my time in the

Editing Studio by a lot just being able to follow exactly what shots I had planned previously and just constructing it in the editing timeline it saved a lot of time definitely cannot understate how integral the storyboard was I’m so glad I spent like 3 days drawing it up

As far as getting all the backgrounds I just filmed in-game footage with a Shader on I think I used choco pic and then when I went into the nether choco pic broke the Shader and I had to download another one definitely a pro tip I have when it comes to filming

Minecraft footage is if you change your fov it changes the compression of the background behind you so it ends up working similar to how lenses in real life work so the lower your fov the closer and more compressed everything is together similar to something you’d get

Out of like an 85 mil lens that you would use for like close-ups and portraits but if you want to use a wide obviously you would make the fov really really wide and it would push the background back as well so that’s interesting thing I thought was worth

Noting just about how Minecraft works it’s really interesting that that’s how it works and that’s pretty much it I think that covers most of how I made this series I think that the most important thing to mention is you guys I couldn’t have made this series Without You guys your constant support always

Watching the new ones when it came out always being so hyped when a character would come back from the dead or or something would happen really gave me the motivation to keep doing it and I I wouldn’t be able to make a series like this without you guys so thank you from

The bottom of my heart you know you guys are why I can do what I do and and I definitely don’t want to take that for granted at all you guys are the best so thank you guys for watching and all of your continued support thank you for

Sticking it through this whole video there will be more videos in the future there will be more serieses uh like Minecraft there may even be a season two we’ll see what happens but thank you all for watching go check out some of my other long form videos if you haven’t already I think

They’re a lot of fun they’re a bit different to the Minecraft series but you might enjoy them let me know and with that I will see you all in the next one bye-bye Bye-bye

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