World of Warcraft Machinima Update

Within the last two weeks I have modified my project drastically. I have decided that this machinima will be in the form of a talk show. My World of Warcraft character will be the one under the spotlight.

My idea is this:

Character name: Galashton
Profession: Online Character

Setting: A talk show stage setting, chairs, people watching etc.

Idea: My character will be animated to speak into a microphone onstage and respond to people's questions about his time as he was taken into "custody" in the virtual world when the Chinese gold farmers hacked my WOW account.

That will be the main focus of this talk, but he will also answer any other questions asked of him.

Focus: To create some kind of feeling and human expression within a digital binary character.

Problems: What I really would like to do is have the actual audience be able to pick up a microphone in the California Building and ask my character questions and he responds from the screen. I believe this is doable but will take some more live performance methods from me. I am still discovering and researching how I could make this possible. This would be my most favored approach, as it lets the audience interact with the setting more.

Other thoughts: If my idea above cannot be executed then I would like to use real people in my video, as my character will be the only digital person in the video, but will be on a talk show being asked by the audience and the host questions about his life in World of Warcraft. This is a little bit more doable as I don't have to figure out how to make my character respond to unexpected questions in a reasonable amount of time to make it look authentic.

Right now I have found some amazing third party tools that are helping me with learning about how to extract my character out of WOW as a wire frame and apply skins to the wire frame. Below is an application I was able to download, its a third party tool called WOW Model Viewer where you can specifically work directly with characters and animate, cloth, customize, and even change backgrounds with this tool. Below is the process I used to take my actual character out of WOW and dress him in appropriate clothes.

Playing around with this application has really opened my eyes to how I can totally customize my character outside of the game yet with video editing I can green screen him right back into the game environment and make him do things he couldn't normally do just playing in the game.
I also found what is called Wow Map Viewer. It is another third party tool that allows me access to all of the 3D rendered areas in the WOW world. I have totally customize these areas with fog, water, tabards, weaponry racks, etc. Below are a few screen shots of this program. Currently I am researching an area in wow that could potentially play a role as the stage for a talk show.

My other idea was to have my character actually in the real world, his background is that of the real world and he is the only digital thing in it. See below for some pictures of this.

Animated Stills

Here are a few videoes I recorded using Fraps.
Fraps will be used to capture green screen footage of my character and then I will use Adobe Premiere Pro to do the final editing of sound and video layers.
These videos just show me messing around with the new software and trying to get a feel with what it is capable of doing.