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!"

Comments

No fun in watching

[Ignavus Anonymous]

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..

Re:basically that means....

[GigsVT]

That you make movies out of somebody elses hard work and then claim the pie

Yeah, that's almost as bad as those lazy directors and producers that buy pre-built cameras and ready to use film! They are just using other's work and presenting it as their own!

A good thing

[r6144]

Quake (1,2) movies is still one of the few ways to express oneself in video. Of course, it takes a lot of time to make one, but I doubt a DV film will be any easier to make.

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.

Re:A good thing

[unicron]

I vividly remember that one about Cthulu. I was highly impressed with the way the camera angles and walk sequences were set up..wonder if I could still find it..

Great for Sub-professional Animators

[bjb]

I remember when Hardy Workin' first came out, I was trying to explain to a co-worker why this was so cool. It wasn't that the graphics were rendered completely in graphics hardware, it wasn't that the file size for a 16 minute movie was only a handful of megabytes (most being reusable textures and audio samples) compared to a comparable MPEG that could be played CLEAN at 1280x1024, it was that someone is doing a Pixar on their home computer.

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?

Re:NYT Login

[zapfie]

For those who cant, wont or dont want to register

ID : spamfree3
PW : spamfree

If you have gripes with NYT's login policy, don't read the article. It is their content to distribute in the manner of their choosing, not yours.

UT 2003

[Quintin Stone]

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....

Interactive Story...

[Junta]

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
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... .("Sigh... Times are tough..."). That would kick serious ass.

Re:Speaking of 'Quake Movies'

[unicron]

They mixed and matched parts of lesser dorks to make you, didn't they? You're some type of Frankenstein-like, uber-dork.

Dork(robotic voice): I am a StormTrooper.

Triumph the Wonder Dog(robotic voice): You are a huge nerd.

Re:Speaking of 'Quake Movies'

[ethereal]

That's a pretty accurate description, but that's what the ladies like, so who am I to complain?

Congratulations, you have provided me with new bio information. If we'd had this conversation on k5, I think I'd have a new .sig too :)

Re:Great article, but...

[JFMulder]

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.

QdQ

[dogas]

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.

This is starting to work

[Animats]

I saw some early efforts in this direction back in the heyday of VRML, around 1997. The idea back then was to get some stage actors comfortable with improv into a VRML environment, have them do a piece, capture the action, and rerender later with better quality. It didn't work well because VRML avatar movement was too clunky.

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.

LINKS?

[_ph1ux_]

How bout posting some links to actual machinima vids?