An Introduction and Request for Help Getting Started on Research

Hi there everyone! My name is Chris, I’m a current senior majoring in Computer Science at a college in NY, and at my college we have something called a senior project. It’s a year long assignment that we’re given pretty much free reign over. For my project (since I also spent a few years studying Film before deciding a film degree wasn’t for me) I want to code an FMV editor from scratch that’s super easy for a typical film editor to use. I also need to do some research to demonstrate why this is a useful thing, and that brings me towards my request for anyone reading this. Any reccomendations for where should I start researching for the historical context?

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If you are referring to FMV in games, this was a thing in the 90s in games like wing commander as cut-scenes. However, i don’t know if this in any way justifies writing a FMV editor from scratch that is useful today.

Specifically, I would be asking what is the crucial differences between your proposed FMV editor and a general purpose video editor, of which there are many good ones now to choose from both in the professional and non-professional spaces.

Disclosure: i worked in the digital editor business for films in the 90s.

Hi Chris, welcome to the forums!

I don’t have a lot of experience in FMVs or films in general, but I am curious why you’re on these forums specifically. This is the forum for interactive fiction, which mostly means interactive text-based narratives like parser text adventures or CYOA-like choice-based games. Although there are people with knowledge in your field of research (there are quite a few programmers here, too), they are not the majority, and the people in this community primarily focus on games with few to no visual graphics.

We’re always welcome to inviting new people into the community, but this may not be the community for you if you’re looking to research film and FMVs.

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