These things always start off as "wouldn't it be cool..." phrases. In this case, it happened while we were watching some Quake movies one evening. After watching the Die Fette Faust demo, the Zerstorer preview, and Operation Bayshield, an innocent conversation of "man it would look so much cooler if it was done like this.." ended with a 36 hour weekend marathon post production session as we rushed to beat the release of Quake 2.

Last year, Avatar made a small patch using the blahbalicious fat guy model (now available for download), playing around with adding RPG elements to Quake. Basically you started in a hallway, walked around the corner and this fat guy started talking to you. If you left he started complaining and if you shot him he called for the guards. The sounds were absolutely hilarious, and when we were thinking of ideas for demos, this patch eventually sprang up. Avatar added a few more frames to the model and we started fooling around with it over the summer, filming a few random ideas and trying to stick them together using an old KeyGrip beta (v0.7b). Most of the footage was shot during this session, but wasn't edited until enough time had elapsed that we totally forgot which clips were which and what was going on. By then, a new version of KeyGrip had come out, and though it was indeed faster, it seemed to be missing some of the features of the previous version and we really didn't feel like learning a new program, so the whole movie was edited with KeyGrip 0.7b. A lot of cool ideas for scenes didn't make it into the movie, but we had enough trouble finishing what we had already done in the time we had without adding more work and the pak file was getting gigantic anyway. A lot of time was spent collecting humorous outtakes, mostly .wav files of us screwing up lines. It didn't all get included in the credits, (my blah dir is 30megs) but I think we had plenty. A lot of the humor, especially in the credits, was based on other scenes of the movie. You really need to watch it quite a few times to pick up on everything, especially the credit wavs. It's wierd to watch people see the movie for the first time and laugh at things I've seen so many times I can't even imagine would be considered funny. Anyway, it was a hell of a lot of fun, but don't hold your breath for the sequel, I think I'm more than a bit burned out on demo editing. :)

How did you make those models do certain things at certain times?
Most of the things you see happen in Blah, especially when its an entity that doesnt run around at all, is done with impulses in QuakeC. Originally I had keys all over the keyboard bound to a variety of actions. When we got too many (blah is the closest I've gotten to hitting the impulse limit), I made J K and L control UIO and P (like hit k and the impulses that UIO and P fire would change). An example of using these impulses would be pressing L and then O to make Jim in Bad Day for Jim scene run faster and faster, finally exploding, causing the "joggers" to dance and cheer.

How the hell did you have all those guys on Mel Gibson would be proud... All played by two people?
You'll notice that all the characters in this scene move together as one, ie the group of knights all swing their swords at the same time, Scottsmen all go "freedom" at the same time. I used QuakeC to create virtual actors that players could control: When you pressed it, you yourself would be made invisible, and you would drop a character who would move however you moved. For Suitable Alternatives to Polishing Squad Cars, LordTrans controlled both the FBI agents during the time that the Dire Straights music played, because getting two people to walk right next to each other in time is like impossible. Therefore, the real LordTrans in that scene is flying around in the air like a puppet master. During that part I was on the ground to do the impulse to fire the sniper bullets while wendigo was floating in the air as cameraman. Its interesting to note that all these virtual actors WILL fire whatever gun you're firing (or axe). We spent way too much time running around this arena map for scene that got cut, making these puppets and shooting at each other with them with rockets.

What's up with that guy standing next to the instructor in the mirror in the gym scene when using the GL version?
The r_mirroralpha support was added into the map on a whim during an 11th hour bug fix compile long after the demos had been filmed and edited. We didn't really notice the problem until we were running a final check and at that point, it was dismissed as being too insignifigant a problem to fix that late in the game. Shoulda known you crafty eyed 3dfx owners would catch on and we'd take flak for it.