I thought about what Sitters said, about concept art, and did some research on planning methods the pros use when working on animations and movies, etc.
I did a little work on an intro cinematic kinda like the last partial one I put together, starting out with the Earth in space, becoming a display on an alien screen with a hand, here is part of it:
http://www.destructavator.com/public/IntroStart1.avi...but before continuing work on it (yes, this one doesn't have a hand yet), I think it would be a good idea to plan what the whole intro should be like, and then continue working on modeling/animating/rendering it.
What many professional film-makers use is a technique called
storyboarding, making a primitive cartoon-like series of frames (quick and simple drawings) with notes, arrows showing what will move to where, etc., kind of like a script with pictures. I also studied this a little in college in a media creation class, and it really does work quite effectively for making animations, long and short films, and cinematics. The Wikipedia doesn't show a good example (a tiny, hard to make out ugly graphic), but some good examples are on this site:
http://www.storyboards.co.nz/gallery.htmI think this might be a good idea for planning cinematics in the game, proposing ideas with quickly-drawn pictures, just with a pencil on blank paper even, along with notes and then discussing them before trying to render something only to have to make extensive changes down the road and re-work the renders.
This is where I really need input from the developers, especially Winter - I think once Winter approves a storyboard sequence - one others put together or one he makes himself - then anyone wanting to contribute can pick the parts they will try to model/edit/render and we can actually get a good number of working cinematics in the game with RoQ playback.
Again, this planning technique really does work and works well, and has a much better chance of getting some cinematics really done and finalized as opposed to how it's been going so far, and so far the "videos" pk3 in the game directory doesn't have anything in it, last time I checked.
I'll also add that I'm very close to getting some working animations in Blender for the soldiers and the existing maps with the models already created, but I don't have any planned storyboard "scripts" yet.