Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Mar 2

So I've got a movie which is a murder mystery in a mansion. Various people go to different rooms at different times. And some of this happens offscreen but is described or implied in later scenes.

I want to make a representation of this that I can scroll through, possibly even synched to the movie. Like I'd want to be able to map an animated map of the mansion and show who is where, when.

Any ideas with what software would be good for this/how should I represent this?

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Mar 2
I could start at the end of the movie -> digital representation of timeline of pawns moving about -> movie-synch'd animation, but that'd be a lot of video editing and I don't enjoy that much. I want to be doing as little of that as possible, and as much of automating some representation -> video renderer
Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️Mar 2

which'll probably be little icons moving around a 2D* map

* hopefully.

Show threadAlice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️
all the ways I can think of doing this are a little too annoying, and I'm hoping someone has an idea on how to do this that wouldn't horribly suck
Mar 2 at 5:21amWeb
Show threadAirelle 🕸Mar 2
@foone I suppose if I were to do it, I'd do:
- one pass time-stamping who is where textually
- make a digital floor plan (à la Clue) of the place
- map textual places to pixel coordinates on that plan
- map people to their sprite, now I'd have a CSV file of time stamps, sprites and positions
- animate the map/sprites using whatever (pyxel ? Pygame ?) into a video
- PiP the (mini)map into a corner of the video.
Show threadBloognooMar 2
@foone
Describe the rooms using the filename format from 'type help' (on itch.io) as your 'who's in a room' reference then you've got a nice parsable start and end for all characters at each beat of the plot you can then generate the movement between rooms linearly or via crappy manhattan path following (anything more complicated sounds like a lot of effort)
Show threadPlan A to YMar 2

@foone the main thing that comes to mind is doing this as a keyframe animation or something similar. With each person's location charted with at what times they leave a room and at what times they arrive at the next so you can either do a pre-determined path between the two rooms or just interpolate between them.

I could imagine doing this in Unreal Engine and setting it up so that each "person" is an object on a separate timeline within the animation with a sync to a media playback component. Just rigging the thing up as one big "animation" so it can evenly match up to the video's current time and you could jump around without causing any issue (just make it so forced updates to the playback time simultaneously set the animation's current time)

But that's obviously a bit overkill, unfortunately I really don't know any software that would be better suited to something like this. I think the concept of making a list of "keyframes" for each person's position is probably the right way to go at least.

Show threadLP🔸Light up the nightMar 2

@foone it definitely speaks to your audience that a lot of the answers are "write new software", not "use existing animation software" :)

Unfortunately I don't think any newcomer has reached Flash levels of ease of use for "here's a layer with the map. here's a layer with a dot or whatever for each character, keyframed when they change room. autotween if you want to."

But you have Win98 machines, and Flash 4 is probably on the internet somewhere, right? And it'll export to an image sequence