My name is Anton, I'm 22 years old student from Russia and I like video games. My first ArenaFPS was UT99 and later I started playing UT2004 which became the main game for me for a long time. I also tried to play QL/CPMA but this didn't work out good. Now I'm playing Quake Champions and, yes, I will probably make some movies of this game.

Self-taught.

Sony Vegas, After Effects, VirtualDub, Photoshop, Fraps, RypelCam. Sometimes Unreal Editor. Last movies I tried to do some sound FX in Fruity Loops, though I'm noob in sound editing (really, what are all these buttons for?).

First of all, I find the music I want to use. Then I start building the idea of how it should look like (color correction, style, etc.), marking some places, which could fit for some frag or maybe some crazy edit perfectly. Also, the project could be started with some idea I already have so I'm looking for a very specific genre of music depending on the style and effects I want to use.

Half of the job is getting done in my mind when I'm listening to the soundtrack, trying to imagine which frags should fit better for each place and where should I do cameras and transitions. Then I try to bring to life episodes in which I'm sure most of all in Sony Vegas, other scenes will be builded around them later. So the creation sequence is pretty randomized, right up to the fact, that intro could become the last thing left to make. Also, I can change some scenes many times later, till I finally feel confident in them.

In general, that part of work in Sony Vegas is the most difficult, since this is a base of whole movie.

The fun part starts in After Effects. That's the place where movie starts looking like a movie. After Sony Vegas all these pale scenes fall on this conveyor of magic and witchcraft. I process each fragment separately because different maps need different color correction and because I'm not sure that I will like this correction tomorrow. Besides, I'm rendering all AE stuff as JPEG sequences. For what? For changes, of course! I can nitpick even to frames. JPEG sequence is your choice if you don't want to rerender whole composition due to few frames.

After the visual part is done it is time to make the sounds. Sometimes I think that it would be better if I didn't make it. Because a movie feels done and you're hastened by a wish to just upload it to YouTube already. Well, it's worth taking a little longer to work with sound, but the hell with that! :)

I was really impressed by my first watching of fragmovie. So impressed, that I wanted to make this shit too. These movies became a UT classic for me:

Finnish it by Electry
GROULINK by FlesH
FilmenKlar by meep
MXS the movie 2 by jarnul

Also, my acquaintance with Alter significantly influenced me as moviemaker. With his advice, my editing skills grew very fast. Well, there was no better UT moviemaker in Russia that time. But not for long! :) Here's some of his good works:

Fractical
1 minute team the movie
Crash Down

As for Quake movies, "The Contenders 2" by entik and "Dorftrottel" by KOS are still my absolute favorites.

EDGE2 was the craziest shit I ever did, in my opinion. I can't say that I'm really proud of it. Anyway, I learned a lot of tricks and techniques while making this movie and I still see that I can do better.

I would say it's 70% for high-edited style and 30% for oldschool. If you can't really recognize what's going on on your screen that is not a good as you can see (or can't see?) in many CS and CoD movies, unfortunately. Yes, all this super-duper overedit stuff is cool but what sense if you can't even see a shit through this? There should always be some balance between content and editing. Otherwise nothing good will come of it.

There's always new styles/techniques possible. Even for now some people are doing a lot of crazy and innovative things. One thing that is left to wait for is the balance which we spoke about above.

Watch. Learn. Try. All we once have started from scratch.

Thx lolograde for the interview. Made me remember the good old days.