How Movies Are Made

The truth is... The Sims 2 is not perfect for movie-making. It was never meant to be a virtual movie-making studio in the first place. So apart from the in-built video capture and preset angles, there are very few movie-making features. To achieve some acceptable result, you will need to recongifure the camera controls, download a lot of user-created contents and even resort to some hacking. That's why many people get so blown away the first time they see a well-made movie because it's so not what their games look like by default.

The main concept of Sims movie-making is quite simple.
1. Make your Sims act whatever you have in mind.
2. Capture it.

Then get all the little clips you have made and edit them together making it seem like a continious sequence shot with several cameras. You may use any movie editors. Most beginners tend to lean towards Windows Movie Maker since the features are very simple to use. Personally, I prefer Sony Vegas (as most machinima directors of well-made movies) because it supports high-quality HD even though it's complex and kind of difficult to impliment video/audio effects. In fact, most of the time what you see in movies is not what the game creators intended it to be. For example, if you want a Sim to fall on the floor, you should make them play bowling and wait till they trip and fall. Of course there are hacks which will make your Sims do various things without provoking them to do everything in-game, but that's how movies were made before all those hacks were developed.

Before you start making a Sims 2 movie, it is important for you to familiarise yourself with the game first. That is, if you have only heard of Sims 2 until you saw the movies on YouTube. While familiarising, you get to learn the interactions and cheats which were in the game and also controlling the camera. I'll be gathering all the cheat codes, animation boxes, sites to download custom contents, and other necessary means for producing good-quality Sims movies.

It's probably gonna take a couple of days until I update this blog since Eid Mubarak is almost near. Other than that, I've created a Twitter account for the blog: @Ripped_Scarlet or http://twitter.com/Ripped_Scarlet