Chapter 21 out-takes and behind the scenes.

[dicreasy2]

Ok, it's time for me to share some out-takes from my latest chapter with you all. I am planning on talking about the storyline we saw all but wrapped up in this chapter too, but for now I'm going to settle for just showing you pretty pictures and talking about this chapter.

First things first, I was not at all surprised I ended up making this a two parter. When I checked the folder with all the pictures I'd taken for this chapter, I had over 1700 pictures. Yeah. That's what happens when I panic that I'm going to be writing up gameplay rather than plot: I take pictures of everything, and then come up with a bit of plot to put in anyway. :P

Right to start at the beginning, let's talk about the pretty lady I posted a picture of in a friend's locked post a little while ago.



I'm pretty sure that most of you who looked at it realised that she was Mary Hutchins, Marielle's mum. I started with Marielle, and then tweaked her to make a unique sim, while still keeping the family resemblance. Oh, and yes Marielle does look tall here. I know she has tall hair, but she always looks taller than the sim she is standing next too, including Eddie.

Shooting with these two was fun.



"So, you're my mother then?"

"That's roight 'unny, I'm ya dear ol' mum."

I decided that it was about time I introduced Marielle's background into the legacy itself, after all it's something I've known the basics of for over 18 months, but only fully fleshed out (and discovered Mary) in about March time. The scene originally wasn't going to include the memory of Mary, rather it would be Marielle railing about being back in a hovel, and then breaking down, with no truths from her mother. Mary has really captured my imagination though, and I was itching to include her somehow, and so the idea of a memory suddenly came to me.

I did download the ghost hack to film Mary, but ended up not even unzipping it. Basically I decided that I didn't want her to appear as a normal ghost to try to discourage confusion as to why her ghost was suddenly appearing. Plus I sometimes have pretty glitchy looking ghosts, and I didn't want any oddities with meshes. All the pictures were done with good old fashioned editing.



This was the first go: I basically took two pictures, one with Mary in, one without, layered them and changed the transparency of the one with Mary in. The trouble I had with it was that she looked too real, and had too much colour. If she is a memory I wanted her to be more faded, and the colours to be off, as if Marielle's memory is slightly at fault. That's also how I rationalised her wearing that dress, even though it's not the sort of thing I really picture her having worn: it's how Marielle perceived her before her illness.



What I eventually did was get a bit more complicated. I duplicated just Mary a couple of times, and applied a different filter to each copy, changing the opactity as well. I then put a copy of the picture of just Marielle in on top and changed the opacity of that to 1) make Mary look transparent, and 2) again act as a filter. I'm very pleased with the results, although I did hit a small snag.



The second half of the conversation was meant to happen in the living room, but I discovered when editing the pictures that the tones of the walls in this room didn't work well with the filters I was using, and Mary pratically disappeared. I moved it to the kitchen, reshot the pictures, and carried on as if nothing had happened.



I tried various poses for Marielle crying on the floor, and not all them worked well with the cry overlay, but it was fun to experiment.

Still staying with Marielle, she nearly ruined my goodbye pics for the holiday. In fact I did have to pick her up and move her because she kept getting into shot.



Go away woman.

Obviously I had lots and lots of pictures of the holiday I couldn't share, but I did try to keep the spirit of what happened in the game. The pleasure beach for example, Beth did run off to watch the waves, Chris went to play Myshuno! and Bethany did shock me by going for a ride in the hot air balloon. The only two I directed to do something was William and Bertie: I wanted William to get the played pirates memory, so I had him and Bertie play.



Oh and Bertie also had a go in the balloon.



I love Bethany a lot, and she pulls the best faces:



I think we all love William and Beth so:



As was pointed out by chapter 19, Beth is not Beth without her hat, however that hat causes me problems when shooting at times.




Camera angles are very often my friends.

Other activities the family did, but I couldn't show include:





(How funny is it seeing a woman in a Victorian riding habit pilot a helicopter?)

With the quick trip to Takemizu to get back the memories lost by the rebuild, William now has 41 memories. Since he will never get the full 45 (no using a computer to order a photoalbum) I've got the most points I can get for this section, and I'm not going to worry too much about collecting them for the rest of my heirs.

William also witnessed a figth between a tourist and a local:




I have no idea what it was about, but I do know that the tourist is called Neil Trimble, and the old lady is Willow Trimble. If they are related to Beth, it must be a distantly.

Let's have some sweet toddler pics now. I shot the scene with Eddie, the Goodies and the kids in my dummy hood since I didn't know what teleporting toddlers onto a lot would do. I did turn out to have very limited interactions availiable to the adults, just basically pick up, and put on the Llama riders. The kids made up for that be being unbelieveably cute though.







I lucked out when I had Eddie kneel down by Stuart and he looked at him. I managed to get a great shot, but then he must have had a bad thought because he pulled a grr face:



Oh dear.

On to Stuart's party. There were a few surprises:



Beth, you are not a finger gunner, in fact you have only 3 outgoing points.

"Pshaw, my husband has 9 outgoing points, as do all three of my children, four of my grandchildren, and the other two grandchildren have 10 outgoing points. Is it really surprising that the habit has rubbed off on me?"

When you put it like that...

A couple of non-surprises:



This is what Alexandra uses her 9 outgoings for.

"Yeah, that's all well and good, but where is my love interest?"

Oh Stanley, the night is young, I'm sure there will be no shortage of offers if you ask.

And of course, there was Carmen:



I'll talk more about her role in the plot, how it changed and how it didn't another time, but I will say I wrote the scene between her and Eddie back in September. I reworked it a lot when it came to write it for the chapter, but the basics remained the same.

Quite a few people on Boolprop picked up on her before this chapter and asked me how I was going to get round the fact that she was a playable. I explained it each time that she started off as a downtownie teen, and here's proof:



That's her on the left. She looks a bit different now doesn't she?

I sent her to uni at the same time as Eddie, and have been playing her by legacy rules ever since. I know I could have got her through uni, and then made her a townie, or not played her, but I didn't want her to suddenly be 15 days younger than Eddie.

Anyway, as I was getting everything set up for the scene, Eddie did the sweetest thing:



Ok, so he actually primps all the time, but I like to think that he wanted to look his best to woo Carmen.

I took lots and lots of pictures of the two of them starting to dance, and I found this one when sorting these out-takes that I really like:



Now Carmen and Eddie always started to dance close very quickly, so I tried using a classic dance to get a shot of them apart. That led to this:



I tell you what, have another dance shot just because.



I also tried several things for the last picture of them dancing, and althugh I went in the end for Eddie looking deep into her eyes, it wasn't what I had originally planned, and I'm not as happy with it as I would like. Here are a couple of things I tried:




Yeah, I was going for the idea of the party happening inside and them being apart from it, but it didn't really work.



Yes Carmen, we know.

Right, let's talk about Joe and Aria for a bit. As I said in the chapter itself, this was part of what Jamie asked for to punish Joe, It also fitted in with a few other pople's suggestions of Joe falling in love with someone, and then them rejecting him. Once Aria had been mentioned, I couldn't get the idea out of my head, aftre all, who better to wrap him round her little finger, reach into his chest and rip out his heart, before grinding her stiletto heel into it?

The idea of Marcus having died not long before all this happened came about because i knew he didn't have long left. In fact the Grundstrom house is only played when I need to shoot something there, so Joe is only two days older than Vicky, rather then being the same age as Alexandra and Anthony. When I went into the house to shoot this, Marcus had only 1 day left and since he should technically have been dead before Alexandra offered Joe the chance to get to know the twins, I decided to let him die.



I cheated him platinum because I think he deserved it having been married to Maria for so long.

Of course I played his death, and then like an idiot blundered into shooting Maria and Joe, having forgotten to put her into widow's weeds.



I also forgot to put Joe into a black jacket, but since I realised my mistake after I had shot everything with Aria, and men weren't expected to observe mourning as strictly as women, I decided not to change him and reshoot, opting instead to make it clear that there was a bit of time between Marcus's passing and Joe going out with Aria again.

Of course I did end up shooting Joe and Maria again, because when I went to put in the pictures I had taken with Maria in the correct clothes, I found that they were slightly too dark.



I put more lights in and shot again.

I really did have to get Aria and Joe engaged to get her to take the ring out of the bocx, but for me that was a vital part of the scene. Not only would it allow her to flick it back at him (the first image I came up with for the scene), but it would make him think she was going to accept.



"Erm, lovely?"

Sorry Aria, but I did exit without saving, and at least you took it better than Joe.










*twich* "Yes, at least I am not behaving like that." *twich*

I did also have her reject him, and although the animations were good, they weren't Aria, or what I wanted;




On the end I used the proposer, rejected animation from one of AG's animation paintings. I froze Joe in the place I wanted, and (because it doen't give you the prop) used an OMSP to put an extracted box into his hand.




Since the ring is still in the box with this prop, it was a case of finding a camera angle that obscured it, and finding the animations I liked for Aria.



I was pleased with the end pictures.

As I've said, Aria flicking the ring back at Joe, and the shot of the ring in the air, was the first I came up with for this scene, but I did try a few different things with the shot.



In the end I went with the very first shot, the one that matched my original idea the closest and I'm glad I did. Oh, and a small note. i lightened the stone of the ring, both for this scene and the scene when Eddie proposes, just because the stone of these rings are shaded to look like it is faceted, unlike the original Maxis ring.



This was also a shot I'd planned, and Aria smiled perfectly throughout it.

Onto a very different couple now. As you can see, Carmen and Eddie were very pleased to finally be in love.



A&A are still very stalkery.



Both of those were free will.

Becca decided to gatecrash Vicky's wedding, which cracked me up, but did mean I had to shoot around her, since she is not meant to have met any of hte family at this point. (She does live in the same block of flats as Carmen, but I'm ignoring that storywise).



"Oh a wedding. Can I watch?"

If you look carefully in the wedding pictures, you can just make out her formal gown in one of the shots.

I shared so much of Di and Indy's wedding warlier, I don't want to bore you any more, but just so you can see, Bethany let go first:



I must admit I did giggle when Theo headed to the guitar.



Part of me wanted to make Eddie start singing, but he hit the violin instead.



I was playing about with the new stats thing on Photobucket, and Mean Bone has been watched over 2500 times in April and May and another 500 times in June. I'm pretty amazed by that, and I guess you liked it then?

So there was another pub scene in this chapter. I love filming the pub scnes almost as much as I love writing them, but they can be a bit of a pain at times.



Sorry Cass, but you have no chance. Stanley is strictly heterosexual here.



You Ori, not only have a chance, but are already one of his special friends.

Anyway, I can't tell you how lovely it is to film Eddie and be able to capture him smiling again. Since smiling is his natural expression, it was often really difficult to get the pictures I needed for when he was miserable.



Since I'm sharing happy Eddie, have some happy Theo and Stanley too.




I really do love these boys.

Onto the last part of the chapter now, and yes I often film things out of order.



Storywise Marcus was dead by now, gameplay wise, not so much.

Carmen and Eddie actually only went on two dates, but I took them to different lots to get different shots and at different times of day to make it seem like they had been seeing a lot of each other. Even though I shot all four weddings between them falling in love and getting engaged, there was only one day in the main house between the events.



There are many reaosns to love Carmen, but look she autonomously sprays bugs, even if she is on a date!



Anyone else think she is perfect spouse material?

So the engagement itself. I knew right back in July last year that Eddie's second wife would have a totally different attitude to the position of legacy spouse to Marielle, and in fact I droped the hint that Carmen knows it will be a lot of work right back at Eddie's first wedding reception. It also became apparent as I played Carmen and got to know her character, that she would reason through it, and not make light of it. Instead she would go into it with her eyes wide open, and be willing ot give it her best shot. I also wanted Eddie's insecurity to come out with the scene and the idea that he is sure she is rejecting him, when she isn't at all.



Again I used the extracted ring box by MSBurrows at T$R, but i had to wait for the engagment to be over before the game would allow me to put it on the table. That meant I had to be very careful not to get Carmen's hand in the way.

That's it for picspam from this chapter. Hope you enjoyed it, and I will be back soon with a look at the plot, or maybe a house or two.

Hope you are all having a good week.

Comments

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

Yay picspam! Eddie and Carmen are too cute together. I liked how you did the shots of Marielle and her mother--I did get more of a "memory" vibe from it than "ghost."

I also love Becca crashing the wedding, and Cass's rather forlorn "Stanley's a Romance Sim."

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

Also, I saw the episode where the Top Gear guys had to make a limo out of a regular car tonight, and I laughed so hard I had to pause the TV until I stopped. Jeremy pulling up to the red carpet with only half of a limo was priceless.

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

I really do love seeing Eddie and Carmen together: I think it was worth the wait.

Thanks, and excellent. Sometimes it's not easy translating what is in my mind into a visual image, so I'm glad the idea of Mary being a memory did come across.

I did laugh at Becca gate-crashing. It was just the way she walked round the corner, finger-gunned everyone, then span into formal wear. Cass did not want to move from that spot, and in fact I had to make him selectable and tell him to go do something else in the end because I was trying to shoot Theo. lol.

Aw man the limos! I'll tell you what, when they were testing the cars before starting the challenges and Richard unlocked the steering in the Alfaab, causing it to careen out of control on the runway, then jumped into the other driving seat to help, but made it worse, and THEN the steering wheel came off in his hands...I thought I was going to die. I seriously could not catch my breath I was laughing so hard.

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

Yay for picspam!

I always love these 'after update' talks about what made it in, what didn't make it in, why certain things happened the way they did and HOW certain things happened.

I think you and I must have been sharing a braincell when it came to shooting Mary Hutchins and Aeric's astral jaunt. I did pretty much the same thing you did. I do have the family ghost hack, but it does do weird things with non-Maxis hair meshes and some clothes. It was easier just to shoot the picture, lock the camera, remove the one sim, and then shoot the picture again. The only problem I ran into was that occasionally, very occasionally, the camera shifts anyway. I had that happen in one of the new pictures I shot yesterday and today. Luckily I could mask Aeric in and it didn't show that there was a shift.

Yay for swooning over Stanley. Sorry Cass. I'm sure there'll be a boy for him eventually. ;)

I TOTALLY did not realize that Carmen was a downtownie teen. I must have missed it at some point when you said that. For some reason, I assumed she was a dormie with a slightly different face template, kind of like Marielle was a professor with a slightly different face template.

As always, looking forward to more, Di. :)

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

"Yay for swooning over Stanley. Sorry Cass. I'm sure there'll be a boy for him eventually. ;)"

A baker who dyes his hair black, perhaps.

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

I have learnt so much from reading how others put things together, I like to share how I do things too. Also because I have to adhere to certain things, I can't always put in how my sims really behave in the updates, so it's nice to show that too.

We must have done, and the mesh oddities were one of the reasons I decided not to use that hack. This method turned out to be very easy, and the results are just what I wanted. My mouse is very sensitive, and I did find that the camera was drifting more often than not. What I ended up doing was turning my mouse upside down once I had pressed tab, and then pressing the number that corresponded to the camera angle I wanted. That stopped it for me.

Yup, Carmen's the Tricou downtownie with the odd hair. She didn't appear in the chapters until she was at uni and I could change her clothes, but a few people asked about her.

[smoothiesims.livejournal.com]

YAY CARMEN TIME NOW.

Marielle really does sort of stick out like a sore thumb. Leave her alone and she pops up everywhere. You're going to need to do something about her, Di. ^_~ The scene with her and Mary really was very well done and I admire the effort you put into making the shots do what you wanted.

LOL at Beth and her Evil Eye-Piercing Hat of Death.

Go Aria! Making Joe feel exactly what Alexandra felt when he hurt her is just brilliant. There is no better revenge than that...and you say you aren't done? oh deary.

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

Yes, Carmen time now. :)

The woman is very annoying, turning up when she is not wanted, but that's the 10 outgoing points for you. I may have a little something in store...

Thanks, I'm pleased with how the pictures turned out, and by the end I could get the editing done in about 10 minutes, including selecting Mary and all the faffy bits of her curls.

The hat had ruined so many sweet pictures due to the Eye-Piercing evilness of it lol.

Aria and Joe was lots of fun, and I love the poetic justice aspect of it. I definitely have more in store for him too. :)

[mysterymusic7.livejournal.com]

Okay my brain hurts now Di. I'm really not technilogically sound enough to understand half of the information you gave on how you shot the Mary scene. But I did love the effect and you did a fantastic job with it. Thanks for taking the time to give us the backstory on Marielle.

I love Beth's hat, but that must be annoying sometimes to have it ruin all your nice William and Beth shots.

As to Carmen, wow she really does look different. She's very pretty now and it just goes to show you that sometimes all a sim needs is a good old fashioned makeover. I really am looking forward to seeing Eddie with Carmen. *sigh* They are just too cute together.

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

Hehe, once you start playing around with a photo editor such as PSP, you can't stop. It's not a difficult process I used, it's just slightly faffy. Thanks, I'm really pleased with how the pictures turned out.

The number of pictures I can't use because of that hat...

Exactly, so many people dismiss face templates without really looking at them, or trying out different make up etc. I like the Pao face, especially when Carmen smiles.

[penguingirl03.livejournal.com]

Yay picspam! This chapter was fantastic and I love seeing how you set up some of the scenes. I definitely got a memory rather than a ghost idea from Mary.

I completely missed that Carmen was a townie teen. I just assumed that she was a dormie that you had graduated at some point. When did you get her as a friend drop?

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

Excellent, I was hoping that my idea for how Mary was appearing would come through. :)

Hehe, yeah you never saw Carmen as a teen because I didn't know how to change her clothes at that point, and decided to drop the fact that she was a well drop from the plot. They met back when I was filming chapter 14.