http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vAOafqTa6w

I made this machinima - kill video about a month ago, and just realized that this is a good place to put a link for it.

The story behind the making of the machinima is like this. Some hunters can solo Kael'thas now, and as I was learning the fight from the solo perspective, I felt like I could make it into a neat machinima. I had a feeling of how I wanted the scenes to go, and such. The voice-acting is clear and has measured pauses, and the fight has a variety of short phases. I could kinda see the machinima before I'd made it.

So, I did some planning. I wanted a short video segment which depicted the sunwell around the time that Kael'thas is discussing it in his opening monologue (either destroyed or right before - - but not as it was "restored" later). I was prepared to fraps some for myself, but then I found the perfect footage already existed, in the "Fury of the Sunwell - Patch 2.4" trailer (well, perfect except for the fact that it is released as 24 fps instead of 30, but it came out alright I guess). Then, when Kael'thas' lockout expired, I went into Tempest Keep and recorded some special, noncombat video segments I wanted for the machinima. Then once I had everything I needed, I did the recording of the kill itself to get the fight scenes.

I did some things in the recording that I wouldn't normally do. Some of it was part of the acting, kinda. But also, I deliberately stand in Kael'thas "Flame Strike" attack once. I felt like Kael'thas' Phase 4 looked a little silly because it made Kael look harmless. I wanted to do something to show a little bit of how dangerous he is. The actual super-dangerous ability of his is so bad that I couldn't record it for the video - - he has a periodic mind control which almost always wipes the fight if it happens to a solo hunter. I couldn't demo that in the video but I could at least demo the 100,000 damage he can oneshot you with using the Flame Strike ability.

The finished fight-machinima still flows as the original kill did. I didn't chop up the fight timewise - for example, the effects soundtrack remains exactly timed to the original fight. But the video scenes are edited in places, in particular in the beginning, and the sound has had what amounts to corrections throughout. When I say sound corrections, I mean like, turning down the sound of my boss mods at times, amplifying the ambient sounds at times, re-injecting some of the voice-acted lines, and correcting for the weird snapping sound that I get while recording with Fraps sometimes :/ . And the music segments of course have to work.

So. I liked how it came out and maybe you will too. I name most of my videos "AnoobArak vs. <boss name>" because my main tank pet is my pet beetle named AnoobArak. It's dedicated to Kripparrian because my UI is based upon his and the tips in his kill video on his youtube site helped me learn the solo strat for Kael'thas faster.