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Production Notes
I started this project in the late Summer of 2001. I was poking through the contents of STRIFE1.WAD with WinTex 4.3 and was looking at the pop-up face graphics when I got the idea to make a movie trailer for Strife.
I wanted to give a narration of what the story's about with intermittent injections of the story itself, much like most real movie trailers do, and thanks to the vast amount of voice recordings contained in the game, I could do so without having to make up my own narration.
I originally started off at 15 fps and got the duration up to 3:03.4, but I hadn't yet tried to compile an AVI. The audio track consisted of the individual wave files just stacked on top of each other, so the cut between voices was a lot quicker (which I liked better), but I kept running into synchronization problems, so I manually mixed the voices into a master wave, and I set the frame rate to 10 fps so that I could accurately index the voice cues. (Why didn't using a calculator occur to me back then?)
I wasn't actually finished with the “faces” part of the video when I started thinking about the music track. (I wanted to use a quote from every character with a pop-up face.) I originally intended to record one of Strife's MIDI's to wave, but for some reason I decided to listen to the music from Scourge of Armagon during a practice run. I couldn't believe how perfect it was! The tune was about the same length as the video, and the music picked up in intensity at perfect video cues!
With the classic “Trust no on” tacked on, I was about to declare the movie done, but I thought it needed an explosion at the end. I wanted to use a bunch of action shots with big, blazing guns for the video, but I still don't know how to generate screen captures from the registered version (without crashing Win-d'ohs, i.e. PrintScrn => Alt-Tab => paste), so I did what I could within the limits of the shareware version, which responds to most of the Doom codes. (If you look carefully, you can tell where I did touch ups to hide the display messages, or you might see FPS tickers at the bottom left of the screen.)
The only sound effects used during the main feature are the meteor crashing at the beginning and the explosion at the end. I was going to put sound effects throughout the video (like the Sigil powering up and firing), but I decided it was too distracting from the music and dialog.
I added the introduction with a drone shooting a peasant while the movie “loaded,” in reminiscence of Strife's startup progression screen.
Strife might seem dated now that it's six years old and is the last game to use the Doom engine, but it's still a cool game. Consider yourself lucky if you come across it, because Velocity, the publisher, went out of business. Maybe if we bug Rogue Entertainment enough they'll make Strife II and include the original Strife as a bonus.
Got Strife and want an editor? There is one! At DeePSea.
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