Sometimes, you might want to add effects to your movies such as fire or smoke. It is possible to add them during editing if you are capable of producing custom visual effect, but if you are not, you would have to rely on in game effects. However, some of the effects such as a Sims on fire produced highly animated animations. With downloaded visual effects, you get the effect without the over the top animations.

Using Slow Motion

It is recommended that you film at slow speed by using the cheat slowMotion [0-10]. This is because slowing down the game speed will maximized the amount of time captured in each frame making it smoother especially if you need to slow the speed in editor.

Don’t worry about filming at slow speed because it only slows down the game speed, not the playback speed. I always film at slow speed even if I have no plan to slow down the clip in the editor.

It is also recommended for you to play the game at slower speed (at slow motion rate of 2-3) while searching for the best animation. That way, it will be much easier to spot a suitable animation because you won’t miss any fast facial/body movements.

 Trial Run

The chance of getting the perfect shot without doing a trial run is almost zero. What I mean by trial run is by playing the scene without recording it. Do not simply record and use the clips. That’s the work of lazy director and a lazy director will not produce good movies.

Doing trial run is especially important if you incorporate camera movements. You need to time the action and the movements accordingly and that sometimes requires a lot of reconfiguring. 

Filming Basics

Steps in filming a scene:

i.         Find the most suitable animation for the scene, set up the character’s position

ii.        Look for the best camera angles possible that compliment the scene

iii.      Do trial run of the chosen animation(s) with the chosen angle(s)

iv.       When everything looks perfect, pause the game and queue up the chosen animation(s)

v.        Start recording and un-pause the game.

vi.       Stop recording after animation(s) completed

After finding the most suitable animation, you need to set up the character’s position. Be aware of the surrounding when placing the character on location. Do not put them too close to objects or they might end up having parts of their body going through the object. The same principle applies to walls not only because of the mentioned problem, but also due to the fact that filming close to the wall closed up the view making it two dimensional and boring.

When filming a scene, make sure to record extra few seconds before and after the animation ends. You can do this by un-pausing the game a few seconds later after you start recording and let a few seconds pass by before stop recording. This is especially useful for if you plan to add transition during editing. If you’re using an advance video editor, you would need to overlap the first and the second clip in order to create a transition, therefore having an extra few seconds will prevent it from cutting the actual scene. Even if you only use Windows Movie Maker (which doesn’t require clips overlapping to create transition), it is still good idea to have the extra seconds to make sure you didn’t cut any parts of the animations. The extra clips can be easily cut in the editor.

It is recommended that you film more clips than you actually need because it is faster to go through the recorded clips than to go back into the game, re set the scene and record it all over again. Having more raw clips also increases your options during editing. Sometimes, things might look good during recording, but when you playback the clip, you might find something undesirable (and uncontrollable) going on in the background, such as unwelcome neighbor scratching his behind. Yes, sometimes they do come out of nowhere and you might miss it because you were focusing on the scene you’re recording. So, having more than one takes now will save you time and effort later.

When you record scenes, don’t record everything at once. Do it by stages or you will be overwhelmed by the number of raw clips you have and might get confused with which one you need and which one you don’t when it comes the time to manage the movie folder. 

Filming Strings of Action

When you want to show scenes that involved a string of actions, make sure you break the action sequences by using variety of camera angles and ranges instead of just one long clip. The reasons for this are because one long clip of a character doing something can be really boring and uncreative. It tests the viewers’ patience and you risk losing their interest. Also, some strings of actions involved unsightly animations such as object appearing and disappearing in thin air.

 Filming Dialogue Scenes

As with filming strings of action, filming dialogue scenes also require variety of camera angles and ranges. For example with a conversational scene involving 2 characters, instead of showing them both talking in one long shot, you can break it up by alternating the shots of both characters with the first character and the second character.

If the scene has long dialogue, even the alternating between group shots and individual shots can be repetitive.  You can break up the repetitiveness of the conversational scene by inserting close up shots of the listener/talker’s body parts/movements. You can also include external elements such as the happenings around the characters. For example, if the location is a restaurant, you can add shots the waiter serving food, other patrons eating, patrons getting in/out of the door, or even candles flickering.

Useful Downloads:

Decorgal's Talkie Guide

Crazy Talk