If you'd searched the boards you might have found about 20 other threads on this, here's my reply to one of them:
Quote: "Oh dear, not again...
There are three ways of doing it:
1) 3D animation:
Export your character meshes and animations aswell as scenary and rig it up in a 3D animator with animated characters, lights, effects and basicly EVERYTHING 3D. While this usually gives you the best results, i don't think anyone has tried it yet and it takes forever. Plus, you have to learn how to drive another program.
2) Machinima:
Again, i haven't ever seen any examples of this in an FPSC game but its easier to do. Make your room/scenary in FPSC as a multiplayer map then download a screen-recorder and get other players on the map to act out your script/story. While this is easier, the character animations of each player are limited and even in the best render settings realism is not possible.
3) Text animation/gif:
These are generally the easiest to make as they also require you to animate text to tell your story, this can be done in pretty much every peice of video-editing software around (even Windows Movie Maker). Or they can be more cartoony by making them in a program like animation shop that exports .gif files. While this is quick and easy, the results are generally crap and unless you are a fantastic writer, ther audiences attention will drop dramatically while watchign one of these and they may even get bored if they go on too long.
You decide which is best for you. Personally, i choose 3D animation but its taken me a year a get to the stage where i'm confident of the quality and realism of my stuff. It's also the reason why my game won't be out until dec '06
hope that helped, search the forums next time."
AE
P.S: Go to the showcase forum and look for "Blanc Point: a paratrooper story", i'm showing off the first half of my opening cut-scene.
