*Kick*
Seeing as no one has really given any decent advice...
I've had a couple goes at this, and you can actually get a decent result. I've tried a couple tecniques, and have come up with a few suggestions.
1. Blue-tack the gun (or arm + gun if you want the hand visible) onto the side of your camera.
Pros:
The gun will move with the camera, saving you having to position the camera in accord to the gun every frame.
Cons:
The gun is unstable, but you could try reinforcing the hold with tape or something.
Animating things like reloading is hard (you should also consider some methods for reloading too)
2. Make a small rig, like a megaphone (to hold the gun) stuck onto another brick (like a camera, or one of those weird things with holes and two handles on them that people sometimes use for lego halo SMGs), using the megaphone handle, in a socket that allows it to rotate up and down, or something like that, and utting the camera behind it so you see the guns.
Pros:
The gun is held a lot more firmly, depending on what pieces you use.
If you attach another megaphone on the other side, you can dual-wield.
Cons:
You cannot use hands (unless you find a special magical brick that has an arm socket).
The camera has to be lined up with the gun every frame.
3. File and/or cut the neck off of a minifig torso (I used an old dilapidated one), so that you can put the camera on just behind where the head would be, without having a great big neck-stump in the way, and be able to see and use the hands attached to it.
Pros:
You can now see hands in the frame, and you can also use some other weapons that the megaphone won't hold (like swords etc.).
Cons:
The camera has to be lined up with the rig every frame, and you have to be careful that you don't have the top of the body in frame.
4. Use any of the above methods, or others, to capture the weapon animation in front of a blue(or whatever colour) screen, and have the gun in focus, and animate it's movements such as jerking when shooting, meleeing etc. Chroma-key out the screen, and replace it with first-person footage from the camera, with no gun, to achieve both the gun and the scene in focus, and the gun is not just a blurry smudge in the corner of the screen, because you can only either focuse on the scene or the gun.
Pros:
Scene and gun are in focus
You can make another layer with gunfire in front of where the muzzle would be, so you can have muzzle flash effects IN FRONT of the gun.
You can save time by animating all the stock actions, like meleeing, shooting, throwing grendes etc. (like halo and other fps's stock actions), and just cut them together in the final product.
Cons:
The lighting can be a problem; the gun's lighting will not be the same as in whetever the scene is. Say, when the person turns in accord to a lamp or a dark room the gun won't appear to change lighting with it, and it may have a tinge of whatever 'blue' screen colour you used (although this can be combatted with something like the 'spill supression' option in Cinegobs Keyer, and changing the lighting when filming the animation of the weapon).
That was a long post 
Hope I've helped, sorry if it's a bit long. Cheers 
EDIT:
5. Seeing as you have a quickcam, you could make one of those 'cradles' out of lego and tape the camera to it. You can then attatch a rig in front of the camera to the lego cradle (The torso from 3. would work well, and you could use hands), and now you can move the camera cradle with the gun staying in the same place in front of the camera.
Pros:
Camera and gun stay in accord to each other.
Cons:
The gun or scene (although, given a choice preferably the gun) is still out of focus.
I had a look around on youtube, there are a lot of really amature ones, although some of these are ok and fun to watch;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WHuZaqIbCk
Pretty average, but the basic idea and animating principles are there, and I think it gives an idea of what it looks like. Also the sound effects are pretty good
Last edited by legospaceman (April 8, 2010 (12:30am))
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