Glad you like it. It's lots of different things all glued together. As far as I recall, I used the following...
For the flying sequences:
Combat Flight Simulator 3 with repainted versions of the
Aeroplane Heaven Mark 1 Spitfire and bf 109E. Some shots - notably the 'chase sequence' - were done in
Battle of Britain 2, which is a pain in the ass, because BoB2 replays don't have sound on them so I had to add all that. Those flying sequences would probably have been a lot harder to do without
Track-IR, so that deserves a mention too. I can't remember for sure, but I think that one of the close up firing shots might be from
IL2 1946, but I might be mistaken on that. Most of these shots were captured using
FRAPS, which is great and thoroughly recommended.
For the bits with the pilots, the dog and the car:
Those scenes were basically done in the game
The Movies (which is great fun by the way), plus its add-on disk
Stunts and Effects. If you fancy doing this sort of thing, I really do recommend The Movies game, as it makes it very easy to do. The backdrops for those scenes were made from screengrabs of CFS 3 and BoB2, which were then messed about with in
Photoshop and imported into The Movies to use as static backdrops behind the 'actors'. The Spitfires you see behind the car are also done in that way, as a traveling matte shot. I also had to draw the dispersal hut and a few other bits and pieces from scratch, but I nicked the picture of the deckchairs you see in a couple of shots from off the 'net and cut it out in Photoshop!
For the editing:
Most of the editing is done in good old
Windows Movie Maker, but some of the effects I wanted were not possible in WMM, so I imported WMV files into the animation program
Moho. Things like the camera shake when the pilot fires his guns and some of the zoom shots were done that way. Also the matting shots of the Messerschmitt in the rear view mirror of the Spitfire is a composite of two different WMV files matched up frame-by-frame in Moho (i.e. manually rotoscoped). The pilot's outfits had to be composited in Moho too, using a PNG file placed over the footage of the pilots, this is because there is no flying helmet and oxygen mask costume in The Movies game, which is a bit of a shame as it would make things a lot simpler!
Voices:
The voices are all done by me, which you could probably tell by the bad acting! They were messed about with in the sound editing program
GoldWave to get the necessary radio-style treble boost.
Probably the hardest bit of all was getting the thing to fit inside the maximum ten minute allowance for files uploaded to YouTube, as I had to ditch a lot of really great shots I'd made, in order to keep the running time down but still give it a bit of a storyline. The other tricky part was editing the music so that it fitted the mood of the shots, which required me to listen to the soundtrack CD to the film,
Independence Day about 30 times. Incidentally, that's a great soundtrack (music by David Arnold) which I'd also recommend!
So, it took quite a bit of work (and I don't regard it as finished yet).
Chock