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Machinima Festival and News
Hugh Hancock writes: "Machinima (real-time 3D film-making in game engines, what used to be called 'Quake Movies') has a bit of a grab-bag day today -- the New York Times (registration, blah) is running an article on it, prompted by the announcement of the first Machinima-only film festival, sponsored by NVidia!"
What's the fun in watching interactive movies? The thing is that you walk around by yourself to get a 'personal experience'. Its like watching someone else play Quake; a lot of people get sick from that..
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Why dont we all just subscribe to the NY Times? Then we won't need to read slashdot.
That you make movies out of somebody elses hard work and then claim the pie. I may be wrong, but the fact is there is simply nothing gr8 about these, atleast i didnt like it that much that it should have a mention on slashdot!
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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Oh, quick note since the last Machinima-related post on /. attracted some comments - Machinima.com has been redesigned, now with Actually Usable(TM) technology!
For those who cant, wont or dont want to register
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PW : spamfree
I have watched A Warrior's Life and Hard Workin'. The first has a good plot, but is a little slow-paced. The second is IMHO just a laughmaker, but its graphics looks good. I think they are worth watching if you have the time (and the bandwidth to download them), especially Quake* level designers, modellers, etc.
maybe you should follow your own advice and drop it :-P
Think about it. You spend the time creating the backgrounds and characters (basically "cells" for animation, in a sense), and then you direct their movements and so-forth. Sure, there have been home animators for years making their own cartoons, but aren't most cartoons done on computers these days? I just think it is great that someone is making the computer one more way to express themselves. Last wave was the home musicians, now movie makers. What next?
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Wow, yeah that's sticking to the topic.
And if America cares so little then why the hell don't we stop dabbling in places like Somalia? As an American I think we could stand to care a little less, atleast until we work out our own internal atrocities.
You complaining that we only care about our dead and then bringing up your dead is hypocritical. Uh, hello? Yeah, of course we care more when our people get killed.
Really? Did you submit it? You're the only one who likes it!
Is there some relationship here? This is the second article today with a shameless plug for them, not that I have a problem with NVIDIA, I just hope we are getting the real news, and not news that is adworthy
You really are fucking pathetic.
If you think that America is 'helping' in Somalia for any reason other than OIL TRADE, then you're a moron.
Actually, you're a moron. Forget it.
Unreal Tournament 2003 will be a great boon to machinema artists, from what I've seen. During their UT2003 Mod Summit, they previewed a lot their tools for movie and cut-scene production. Matinee is the UT2k3 component that movie makers will be able to use in order to execute tailored bot scripts and set up special time- or animation-related notifications to trigger specific events. I'm not really into that kind of stuff myself, but what I saw did look very useful and very powerful. Now if we can all get easy access to the kind of motion-capture systems the industry has....
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
First off: Moderators, I am responding to a post and not starting a flame. Mod down if you must but please take that into consideration.
:-)
Brilliant article. Very intrerresting and has me interrested in looking for such films. It seems I'll reopen my Quake 1 box soon.
Very true. Every once in a while it seems there is a good reason to reopen an old game. I just got back into Fallout 2.
Stop thinking 9/11
Oh great... here we go...
and give the rest of the world a rest and stop adding terrorist consipiracies and references to everything you write.
Um. Correct me if I'm wrong but the word terrorist is not synonymous with "Evil foreigners that we must defend ourselves against since that tragic day... almost a year ago... *sniff*... I remember when..."
From where I'm sitting you were the first and only person to bring 9/11 into the mix (and after a good opening point). Excuse me if I'm too blunt but that is a spin on an article that would make Jon Katz green with envy.
FYI: There had been terrorist attacks before 9/11/2001. Several against US interests (USS Cole, African Embassy bombings, and the Riyadh Marine barracks just to name the most recent) and many more against others. Americans died over Lockerbie. Americans died along with people of all nationalities.
that it took you two towers and the death thousands of rich americans to realize the horror of MILLIONS of poor 3rdworld habitants.
Except for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have worked in 3rd World debt relief, AIDS medication relief, anti-globalization movements, humanitarian groups, Red Cross, missionary groups, Greenpeace, etc etc.
This seems to be the same argument against "American Movies" when they really mean "Hollywood big budget movies". "There are no good American film makers"... except for Steven Soderburgh, David Lynch, Jim Jarmush, Spike Lee, John Singleton, the Hughes Brothers, the Coen Brothers, Michael Mann, Marion Herron, Larry Clark, etc.
Everyone who criticizes a country always seems to do it based off of some comical stereotype of the nation. Like England is just a bunch of chinless wonders walking around with Pith helmets and monocles or a bunch of mindless footie hooligans.
Sometimes, I think that americans... Here you go off on a tirade that seems to stem from your own overexposure to the media. Granted, you watch FoxNews for an hour and it gets hard to stomach but then, and this is the neat thing about modern technology, you can turn it off. Like hitting the Back button to get out of the article.
I'd like to have someone prove me wrong on this... and someone who will say other things than "F*** YOU, A**HOLE."
I hope I've been cordial in my response.
But maybe that changed with 9/11, and you people finally fell back from your cloud.
Again, the popular assumption that American == worldless slob... except for all of those millions of Americans who aren't. I spent yesterday reading some facinating stuff on Dayan and Amer after catching a program on the Six Day War... oh wait, I forgot I'm an American!
*Thinks* Ok, I spent yesterday getting schlitzed while masturbating over pictures of dead immigrant workers. This while setting about the destruction of Indonesia and holding back the cure for AIDS and cancer we've had but just never shared with the world.
Welcome to the real world.
Hmm. Never knew I had left.
What is music when you despise all sound?
"Bring out yer dead... *dong* bring out yer dead..." ... sorry, couldn't resist :E
warn "Just Another Perl User" if $anyone_cares;
Wasn't there supposed to be a Doom motion picture released sometime ago? Another vehicle for The Rock. Hmm, I think I'll have to skip that. I'll just stick to the Doom books.
word.
but what i'd like to see is a way that anyone who makes a truly good movie will actually get attention for it without becoming the MPAA's bitch or getting slammed for so much bandwith that they have to take it offline.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
When I had AI, my professor was working on a project using the unreal tournament engine. The idea was to have scripted events triggers, and an evolving storyline affected by the viewer who is allowed the most freedom the engine allows. The demo shown in class was an aquarium where the 'plaques' were generated on the fly using some basic facts, in whatever language the user requested. The plaques never looked the same .("Sigh... Times are tough..."). That would kick serious ass.
twice and always offered different facts. The english sentences generated were pretty good and convincing enough to think things were scripted, but weren't. Character actions and dialog are not scripted, but instead they have a knowledge base and goals and rules of how goals can be acheived that influence their speech and action. Truly a gargantuan project but really neat to see it in action. Agents showed visible pauses at decision points in the demo. I have a friend who still works on the project with the college. Now this sort of stuff could make for some really interesting experiences when brought to its ultimate incarnation. Currently it requires three high-end systems to run, and even then the pauses are rather annoying, but given time this could be really exciting. Imagine an RPG with this technology where NPCs have goals and knowledge bases instead of scripts...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I always thought they should have live online machinima puppet shows where audience members could shout out suggestions for scenes.
That way, when they suggest that an accountant and his dog visit a volcano in Hawaii. You could actually see an accountant and his dog at a volcano in Hawaii. Or the machinima version of it.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
I'm glad someone responded brilliantly to my post as you did. I have to admit, I may have jumped a bit ahead of Jon Katz by talking about 9/11 (silly me), but I still think that part of my point is valid. Today, more and more often do we see journalists using the 9/11 facts or ideas in the news, and I'm not talking *only* about the US, I'm talking everywhere, but it seems though that whenever someone has a chance to put some 9/11 fact in an article, they will do it. I don't know much about other countries, since I don't watch news from Spain or other counrties like that, though I get some news from them from the world news and newspaper.
Second, I wasn't implying that americans are worldless snob. As with every country, there are people who are interrested in other cultures and countries, like you seem to be. But whenever I jump on the web on newsgroups (and I'm not talking only Slashdot here), or watch American news, I can't help but feel that your country is looking more and more to it's own self and not looking around them.
The problem seems to be, in my point of view that the masses aren't that concerned about the rest of the world. And when you have a president like George W. Bush who says "We're not gonna reduce our pollution level because it would be bad for american economy.", then I wonder what the masses even think!!! Especially when it's the masses that put him there in the first place. (even tought that's about 25% of your mass)
Feel free, to respond back, you seem to be an interresting fellow.
I highly recommend watching Quake Done Quicker. These guys beat Quake 1 in 12 minutes.. and there are plenty of trick moves to keep the audience entertained... definitely not boring.
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Now, more of the technical problems have been overcome, and there's real potential for this. It's going to be a cheap medium. You have to use people who can act and have good voices, of course.
One of the main points people are missing re: the machinima process and what IMHO will be the revolutionary aspect of it when it really hits, is that it's a "real-time 3D animation rendering process." That means no compositing and no rendering. That means possibly shaving 30-40% off of animation production times. That means saving money for TV and video production companies (not film production, not yet). And that means I get to make a living from my favorite past-time, computer gaming (and I can tell all those old girlfriends who gave me grief about the amount of time I spent gaming to kiss my...).
The other cool aspect is that it's bottom-up, grassroots tech vs. the high end mo-cap suits and big, number crunching, parallel machines. I love that. It gives me a chubby. I like having a chubby.
Now, if only some of those big fish in Hollywood TV land would take a bite *dangling a machinima budget from a fish hook*. Come one, just a nibble.
P.S. re: quality of the artwork--high in-game quality, did you see the Doom III demo? Amazing! Low TV quality that does just fine, have you ever watched South Park or Beavis and Butthead? Nuff said.
ILL Bixby
www.illclan.com
Makes of the award winning short "Hardly Workin'"
USA is 47th in the top countries polluters, yet we take up a pretty big hunk of north america. I'd say bitch at the other 46 before you talk to us.
How bout posting some links to actual machinima vids?
entity based demo save, multiple demo play.
This way, you can save a actor at a time, then
"play" all the actors joins.. saving then as
a full movie.
-Woof woof woof!