The Sims 3 Meets Web 2.0: Introducing the Movie Mash Up Tool Set

US, April 16, 2009 - EA likes to say that The Sims is about telling stories, and what better way to tell stories than to make a movie? That's the gist behind the new movie mash up tool that the company revealed today. The mash up tool is designed so that you can record video clips in The Sims 3, and then export them to the official web site where you can edit the clips together to make a movie. That might sound daunting, but we had a chance to test out the tool in action at EA, and it's incredibly easy to use.

The Sims franchise is no stranger to video, of course. The Sims 2 let you record videos in-game, but after that you had to have a third-party video editing program in order to make a movie with them. And in those pre-YouTube days, there wasn't any thought about how to actually share them with the world. But now we live in the YouTube and blog era, and people are used to streaming video.


Check out the movie mash up tools in action.


Now, The Sims 3 doesn't have a direct-to-YouTube button like Spore does. That sort of thing wouldn't work as well for The Sims, where the idea is that you'd need to edit together different clips in order to tell a story. To do this, you utilize the game's movie mash up functionality, which consists of two parts.

The first part is the game itself. Just like its immediate predecessor, The Sims 3 has video recording tools. In fact, the controls are almost identical. There's a little video recording icon in the bottom left corner of the interface, and you just click it to record. There are settings that let you adjust the video quality of each recording (beware of the uncompressed option; it eats up gigabytes of hard drive space), as well as video size and length. As a default, the game records clips of 60 seconds.

Next you just have to record a bunch of clips. You move the camera around, just like the director. It's important to think as a director, as you'll want different angles of the action. Once you have an assortment of clips ready, then quit and restart the game in order to get The Sims 3 Game Launcher. The Game Launcher lets you do several things. First, you can launch the game, but it also keeps you up to date on the latest news, lets you download and install game updates, and lets you download and manage user-generated content (stuff like custom sims, houses, and items). And, lastly, it lets you manage your uploads. These can be everything from stuff like sims that you create and want to share with other to your video clips. You can choose your best clips and then upload them into the Create-A-Movie tool.

Create-a-Movie, video editing in your browser.
Create-A-Movie is a video editor not unlike Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. The only difference is that it's entirely Web-based and lives on the official Sims site. It's also designed to be easy-to-use; for instance, different objects such as transitions are associated with different shapes (square, circles). That way, when you make a movie and need a transition between two scenes (which may be associated with squares) is select a square object and drag it into the square slot.

When you get to Create-a-Movie, you'll see all of the clips that you've uploaded. At that point, it's just a matter of arranging your clips in order, editing which parts you want to use. Then you add transitions and effects, such as fades, blurs, and sepia tones. You can also add captions and a soundtrack, choosing from more than 200-plus musical tracks made for all The Sims games to date. However, you won't' be able to upload your own music, probably for copyright reasons.

At any time during this process, you can preview your work-in-progress and the Create-a-Movie tool renders together a video to watch in a few seconds. Once you're done, the idea is that you can share this in various ways. You can post it to your player page, get embed links that you can stick in a blog or any other Web page or you can take your video and upload it to YouTube or any other video site.

That's it. It's a pretty simple process, but one capable of creating some pretty sophisticated movies if you invest enough time into it. The tool worked smoothly when we tried it last month, and the good news is that the game in general looks very polished and is almost good to go. However, there's about six weeks still before it releases on June 2.

Source:IGN