Machinima Invade Hollywood's Turf?

Thanks to Wired News for posting an article discussing the rise of machinima, which are "animated movies.. utilizing the [real-time] 3-D graphics engines of games like Quake or Unreal." The article cites prominent machinima such as Jake Hughes' Anachronox: The Movie and the machinima-created music video for Zero 7's 'In The Waiting Line', and according to Bill Rehbock of Nvidia, "..machinima methods, in addition to providing a hobby for aspiring filmmakers, are starting to be used in the creative industries far more than is apparent. For example, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies." There's also a significant cash prize for machinima makers as part of Epic's Make Something Unreal competition we mentioned a few weeks back.

Comments

Movies of Games

[r84x]

They already are making movies out of games (Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, etc.) Is this just one step closer to a merging of the entertainments? interactive movies? More realistic games? Just an idea I am going to toss out here, hope it is grounds for a nice healthy discussion.

Re:Movies of Games

[sleeper0]

Not really any step closer. The examples you use are really just more of a symptom of hollywood being eager to latch on to anything that has an existing brand... like games or old sitcoms, or remakes, or what have you.

I don't think the article is being very realistic asking if hollywood's turf is being invaded. ILM doing storyboards with a game engine? Great didn't they used to do story boards with pencil and paper? More like animators turf being invaded.

Once you develop a game system to the point where you have so much character control and facial expression that it rivals cgi films I think you've probably made a CGI development environment and not a game engine.

Re:Movies of Games

[heinousjay]

The only hope I have for techniques like this one is a further lowering of the barrier to making movies. As the hobbiest tools get more powerful, we can possibly take a step back from the relentless "hit" machine and let some truly creative ideas into the mix.

Of course, it's really just likely we'll have a whole new breed of porn.

As far as game movies and movies games? 98% garbage.

Re:Movies of Games

[danila]

Good point, but wrong. :) When you make an advanced game system, it will either give a lot of control to the developers or just take that control for itself.

In the first case, developers would be able to edit facial expressions. In the second (a la Half-Life 2) the facial expressions will be generated automatically according to the situation. And while the first case would not be very useful to amateur machinima creators, the second one just might.

With Half-Life 2 you can have a small team play out the scenes and be sure that game face expression and physics engines will take care of the rest. Look at their trailer - the gameplay already looks close enough to movies.

The idea is not to replace the physics of the real world with a CGI environment, it is to replace basically everything except the director with software. :) Currently you still need some "actors", because it is easier to control the characters that way, and you need sound and video editors to turn the game footage into the final film. But the rest is done automatically. Once you have a standard renderers (and model/level formats), as John Carmack suggests (in a few years, probably in less than a decade), you will also have access to all the props and decorations you might need. Just what Valve is already doing for Half-Life 2 - they create a library of objects to simplify the level design.

Then you will be able to quickly select and tweak the models, levels and objects, load up the game engine, take control of the characters, give some orders to AI bots (just look at the Rome: Total War trailer to see how AI-controlled bots can make for "totally awesome" Braveheart-quality footage), may be even recording actions for some characters and then running these recordings to remove the need for additional human players and record the scenes. You can be sure that most of the stunts, the lipsync, environmental sounds, etc. are done automatically by the engine. Then you will have the video and audio footage. Now just load up the editor and make the final film.

The only remaining question would be the rendering quality, but with the impressive progress done by the game industry every year, I have no doubts that real-time video-realistic graphics can be achieved quite soon, probably in less than a decade, a few years after movie studio CGI reaches that level.

Re:Movies of Games

[Anonymous Coward]

What you're describing is essentially Massive, the software that was used to do the large-scale battles in Peter Jackson's LOTR. I believe it's been released for public consumption, to the tune of a couple thousand dollars.

The footage is very impressive.

Re:Movies of Games

[pornjokeguy]

[have to post from another account somehow i'm unable to post with mine but i'm the guy you replied to]

Wrong? I guess in your opinion. Just because people look at game engines and say wow, you could make a film doesnt mean that people will be, at least for things you'll go and pay $10 at the theater for. My opinion would be that you've been drinking too much of the kool-aid, at least as much as those who predicted midi would replace studio musicians by now. If nothing else the focus and economics of it don't make any sense, computer games (and their engines) have far less general appeal and far less money thrown at them than cinema does, why would a niche market drive (and take over) a huge market? I think if anything the reverse is much more likely to be true, a future where electronic cinema technology aids in the creation of games (such as the film work and motion capture that was done for the matrix game)

Re:Movies of Games

[pilotofficerprune]

At Kuju Entertainment we did this a few years ago with a game called Halcyon Sun. This was some four hours of realtime cinema cut scenes interleaved with about 30 kickass space combat missions. The interesting part was that the game was initially released for free, using a TV model. We designed the game as ten TV episodes, and you could download the story/game piece by piece. With zipping the episodes were under 5 Mb each (though they were bigger if you added the voice .wavs). The publisher went belly-up in the dotcom crash, (after all, free games means advertiser income only) but Halcyon Sun still survives as a budget PC title. Please excuse me: this was my baby and I'm still proud of it. It was a great game and story and those people who managed to get through to the end really seemed to enjoy it.

Re:Movies of Games

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Not really any step closer. The examples you use are really just more of a symptom of hollywood being eager to latch on to anything that has an existing brand... like games or old sitcoms, or remakes, or what have you."

Exactly. I vaguely recall (sorry I can't find the exact quote) an advertising article in which one of the marketing people working on the new Tomb Raider was talking about how the movie was "a total marketing package" or something of the sort. Basically it was one long commercial. The way he quoted it made it sound like everything that was done in the movie was done to show off a product.

Now, this comes as no surprise to me, as I'm in advertising...but disgusted me none the less. Hopefully people reject the Hollywood marketing movie crap that comes out. Sooner or later you're going to have to have a plot in the movie...you can't just make a movie with product placements and expect it to sell well.

Re:Movies of Games

[Doomstalk]

It hasn't quite reached CG quality yet, but there has been some progress in this area. No One Lives Forever 2 features ingame cutscenes with the best facial animation I've seen from a game yet. They managed to have realistic looking mouth movement, a fairly convincing range of facial expressions, and models with invividually rendered eyes (they aren't part of the face texture).

Re:Movies of Games

[Jad LaFields]

Yeah, the NOLF2 cutscenes were cool, but graphics-wise they will have nothing on Half-Life 2 once it comes out. Check out the 500mb footage at fileplanet and search for it.

Re:Movies of Games

[poot_rootbeer]

Once you develop a game system to the point where you have so much character control and facial expression that it rivals cgi films I think you've probably made a CGI development environment and not a game engine.

Game engines are interactive, CGI development environments are pre-scripted. That's the only difference that matters.

Re:Movies of Games

[malducin]

Well the thing is that the article description is a bit misleading and it's comparing two slightly different things. ILM used the Unreal engine to do storyboarding for Spielberg's AI couple of years ago. The system would allow Spielberg to decide shots, say where to place the camera and actors, any camera movements etc. (this was mostly for the Rouge City seqeunce). It was just a crude system to help the director plan the shot.

It's not much differrent than say now using CAD programs to design sets instead of going to a big board or easel. CAD designing of sets and props can give more flexibility and options to the filmmakers. Just the same, game engines are just a way to improve on typical storyboarding which is stil being done quite a bit, along with video animatics or stuff like ding animatics in Maya or XSI.

Here is the article:

ILM Creates Artificial Cities for Artificial Intelligence

Re:Movies of Games

[johnnyb]

Actually the point that was made was that the fact that the use of video game characters in film has nothing to do with whether or not films and games are coming closer together. In which case, he is exactly right. Your response was also correct, but had nothing to do with his post.

Re:Movies of Games

[Darby]

[have to post from another account somehow i'm unable to post with mine but i'm the guy you replied to]

If you're going to do that, the least you can do is throw in a porn joke as well ;-)

Re:Movies of Games

[Cromac]

why would a niche market drive (and take over) a huge market?

Many Linux advocates have been saying that would happen with Linux on the desktop. A niche market (Linux) taking over a huge market (Windows desktop).

Re:Movies of Games

[danila]

Massive is certainly nice, but it only solves one (albeit important) aspect of the problem: it makes good AI characters fighting in large groups and also provides some physics. That's why it probably isn't suitable for anything other than medieval battle scenes. We will need everything else as well, like Sims2-style genetics, Half-Life2 facial expressions, Doom3 lightning and sound editing, etc.

Re:Movies of Games

[danila]

Have you read his whole post? :) I was replying to the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs. :)

Re:Movies of Games

[danila]

Well, I said "useful to amateur machinima creators", not to professional directors like George Lucas (but wait, doesn't Lucas already use Unreal engine?). Anyway, the point is that making movies will become extremely easy. Lionhead is already developing their "Movies" game, where you will be able to film short (a few minutes) trailers (that's interface for you). Half-Life and Unreal now include machinima tools (that's camera controls). Everything else follows and there is nothing stopping that progress.

The only thing uncertain is the quality of the final films. You are right that many films made will not be worth 10$. And I am sure that generally they will not be as rich as professionally made films (you can't put as many small touches as 100 people working together for a year can). And because of that movie studios will definitely not vanish overnight.

But note that the game market in the US is already larger than the movie market (may be not exactly, as the DVD/video was not included in that estimate). That means that money thrown on engines is at least comparable with money spent on custom CGI tools for films.

It won't be a niche market anymore, and hopefully movie studios will gradually migrate to (merge with) the game industry. Don't worry about games based on movies (and vice versa) to be poor-quality hacks. The developers will eventually learn how to do that properly.

The stated goals of Valve, id, NVidia and others is "cinematic computing" or movie-quality experience in games. Thanks to Moore's Law they can reach these goals quite soon (if creative problems are resolved as assumed above). You can already use the GeForceFX to render Shrek or Aki Ross in real time. Yeah, that is not the whole scene and it is a few years late, but you see the trend. In a five years you are likely to see Gollum-quality characters in your games, in ten years you might see video-realistic humans.

And when all this will happen, the games will be nearly capable of making the films even without human participation. Imagine a "creative replay" feature in Doom 6 that would make an action-packed horror thriller out of your recorded game. That might not be very original (but many movies aren't original at all), but the production quality (video, sound, suspence, stunts, explosions, monsters, emotions, etc.) can be high enough. Add to that some creative ideas from actual humans (the story, the moral behind the story and little touches, like manually adding the rabbit from Doom2) and they can make it. A simple example (if we have to use real films) is the Blair Witch Project. Add a story, and the rest can easily be provided by the game.

P.S. We tend to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long-term progress. I am just as inclined to that as everyone else. Make appropriate timeframe corrections as you see fit.

Re:Movies of Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you're exactly right! We could somehow genetically breed each of the features of those games together..we'll get some DNA from John Romero, whoever made The Sims, the two guys from Andromeda, the entire production team of massive, and a bit more from John Romero again..then we'll splice them altogether and "fertilize" a strung-out dancer from Vegas who will do anything for a few thousand dollars. Within nine months we will have a programmer capable of creating Orgasm, the ultimate game that somehow manages to link drool-inducing features of radically different game engines together into one mass of code that, upon running, occupies 43GB of RAM and causes your processor to melt into a cute little blob of smouldering silicon.

Yes, that is exactly what we need. Actually, no, it isn't. What we DO fucking need is some good stories in games for a change. Games that are fun. Games that have replayability, not just jaw-dropping graphics and fake people with somewhat real mouth movements. We don't need amazing lighting, we don't need realistic looking, fat zombies that run around crazily in men's restrooms. We don't need the Sims, or Doom 3, or Half Life 2. We need original ideas, creativity, games that can be enjoyed for their entertainment value

Re:Movies of Games

[danila]

Good point, but alas, wrong again. :)

There are two kinds of games.

1. Games that simulate something that you play with.
2. Games that simulate you as another character in another world.

First category includes games ranging from chess to RTS, to economic simulators, to logic games. These need gameplay first, story second and graphics third. All parts are important, though. You (an average game player that represents THE CUSTOMER) might settle for a game with poor graphics, but brilliant story and gameplay, all right... But given a choice between that and a game with slightly worse story and gameplay, but with brilliant state-of-the-art graphics, he might as well choose the good looking game. Another thing is that sequels (for non-story-based games) must have great graphics, because the potential for gameplay improvement is limited. That is football sims and The Sims themselves.

Second category includes first and foremost FPS games and also things like racing sims, flight sims, etc. The gameplay is pretty well defined already. Unless you are making a truly innovative game (and all games cannot be truly innovative, there is no developer capability for that and no market) like Rez or Black & White, you must concentrate on realism (graphics and audio realism that is). Gameplay and story are also very important, but not as important as graphics - you are making the story, kind of. These games will ultimately lead to the development of full-immersion VR indistinguishable from reality. To claim that FPSs don't need good graphics is to slow down the development of VR which is a bad thing.

Regarding your sarcastic comment about "genetics". Well, you might be surprised but yes, it will be very close to what you describe. Haven't you noticed that all games now use motion capture, from FPS to RTS? Don't you realise that both Sims and HL2 (and probably SWG) have procedural models that can be tweaked and (in case of Sims) can "genetically" evolve. Don't you realise that many games now have face expression capabilities, not only FPS games. Yes, non-FPS games may lag behind, because as I explained above, they are in a different category. But they eventually accept all technologies of the previous generation of FPS games. Compare Quake and WC3. Compare Q2 and C&C: Generals. Compare Q3 and Rome: Total War. All the technologies quickly become generic. John Romero's lighing is revolutionary today, but tomorrow its varieties will be included in all new games, even train simulators. Shadows were once a revolutionary technology and I remember how cool it was for Kingpin to include them for characters. Today you have shadows for every object in every game. Now translucent shadows and soft shadows are introduced in FPS games. Expect them in all other games quite soon.

Can you tell me any reason whatsoever, why games should look like shit? If we ignore for a moment the efforts needed to design the game engine and create a good-looking world, why shouldn't the games look 100% realistic? Is that a bad thing per se? Or do you simply think that your priorities should dictate what developers do and also ignore the fact that many innovative and original games are made every year?

The graphics aren't the story

[ObviousGuy]

When you make a movie while mesmerized by the gee-whiz factor of what you can do with computers, you inevitably leave out the most important part of the movie: Storytelling.

Look at films like Final Fantasy, SW1&2, or even LoTR (flame on!). The directors went overboard with the graphics and the story suffered as a result. In FF, the CG was the story. In SW1&2 it is debatable whether Lucas had any story to tell in the first place. And in LoTR, so much time was spent showing battle after battle, landscape after landscape, hokey special effect after hokey special effect, that it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie.

But considering the current crop of crappy movies out, CG or not, I doubt very much that there is a genuinely original storyteller/director out there getting his work into theaters.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[WankersRevenge]

Not to be disrepectful or anything, but this has always been the case with the cinema, and I might extend my argument to encompass art in general. Hell, bring computer science into it, if you want to.

The artists fall in love with the medium, but ignore the story, hence they create a crappy product. After awhile, water finds its level, and the balance is restored. I am most familiar with the the cinema but I am sure you can find a similar theme running throughout all of art. With the cinema, we had the advent of sound which produced a boat load of crappy sound films. I believe at the time people thought it was a fad and we would go back to silents which of course, would never be the case. Then came color. And with the rise of the blockbuster, we had special effects taking ahold of us in the eighties, and now we are seeing cgi enter the palette of the filmmaker.

I will even argue the same with trends such as in the forties we had noirs out the ying-yang. In the fifties, we had musicals. In the late sixties early seventies, we had the counter-culture movies. Then the blackpoltation movies. We had slasher films in the eightes.

All the crap dissappears and we remember the best. But during the time period, we are saturated with all of them. And in time, we will forget.

This is history. That's all.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[RALE007]

I completely agree with you, the graphics are not the story.

On the flip side, the easier (and less inexpensive) it is for a realistic film to be made, the more likely it is a good story will not be passed by.

Our "current crop of crappy" movies as you fondly put it (I like how that rolls of my tongue, I'm going to be saying "current crop of crappy (insert noun here)" for weeks now) oh yea where was I. Yes, our "current crop of crappy" movies are the work of the same film companies that have been ignoring wonderful stories since the companies conception. With never available before ease, a small independent production will be able to create a quality film that incorporates a wonderful story with realistic visual and audio. Before now, we were commonly presented with either a bad story with decent effects, or good story ruined by a limited budget. Hopefully, with the advances in effects, and the costs of creating them dwindling, more good stories will be properly recreated in film, and we can just avoid the "crappy crop" as usual.

Personally, I like the thought of the diversification of quality production that inexpensive realistic methods will allow.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[JamieF]

You should really watch the "making of" stuff that comes with the LotR DVD set. Those landscapes are real, and I was very surprised at how much of the "CGI" stuff was actually just old-school camera tricks (miniatures and perspective optical illusions). Some of the landscapes are composited, and there are some CG monsters, but there are also quite a lot of cases where they're just super short people in hobbit make-up, or 2D composites of 30' tall miniature sets.

BTW, any filmmaker knows that audiences would rather see a bunch of dialogue than battles. Riiight.

Re: The graphics aren't the story

[gidds]

Good point -- concentrating on graphics to the detriment of the story is indeed a real risk. (LOTR I felt only went too far at one point, but to preserve the suspense I won't mention which :)

Conversely, I suspect that the main reason that Toy Story did so well is because, despite the amazing graphics, they worked very hard on the story; everything you see is designed to tell and support the story.

I was thinking yesterday that a story is to a film what a melody or vocal line is to a piece of music: it's one aspect amongst many (structure, themes, cinematography or graphics, mood, &c/structure, harmonies, texture and instrumentation, rhythm, &c), but it's the one that most people concentrate on and are mostly aware of. You can do without it, but then you're into the avant garde, and few people will bother. OTOH, the other elements are also important, but people often won't notice if they're not right, or will perceive it as a problem with the story/tune.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[ajs]

Look at films like Final Fantasy, SW1&2, or even LoTR (flame on!). The directors went overboard with the graphics and the story suffered as a result

Look at films like 2001, The Abyss, The Matrix, or any of the other GOOD films that broke new FX technology ground. If you want to talk purely about CG, I doubt that it's fair at this point. The medium is new, and most of the really good work is going to be in the background right now, done by people who are struggling to get into the business. This is true with any new development (I'm reminded of the kid with the keyboards auditioning in the beginning of Fame).

And in LoTR, so much time was spent showing battle after battle, landscape after landscape, hokey special effect after hokey special effect, that it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie.

Hello! What elements of Lord of the Rings are you suggesting cutting out in order to tell the story of THREE BOOKS in 2 hours?!

Jackson already had to cut a lot of the books (as, of course, anyone would... the film-version of the books unabridged would probably be 50-100 hours!)

You mentioned battle after battle. Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.

You mention landscapes... much of the time in the books is spend describing these landscapes, their history, the importance of their past... Jackson is doing as much as he can with the gorgeous landscapes of his native home to give you that same sense of awe and wonder at the world. If you didn't get that, I'm sorry... it was truely as close as I think a movie can come to the books without hour upon hour upon hour of cheesy voice-over, essentially narrating the book.

Special effects in LoTR are, IMHO, some of the most seemlessly integrated FX in the history of movie-making.

Perhaps you saw different movies, or read different books than I, but I'm very pleased at what is clearly the most faithful adaptation of those stories to hit the screen to date. I can only hope that it's the start of a trend!

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[timeOday]

But you didn't even mention the very first feature-length computer animated film - toy story. Which goes to show that blaming computers for storyless movies is wrong.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[LMCBoy]

Check out the documentaries on the FotR DVD. A lot of the stuff you probably think was "hokey" CG was actually made using older full-analog techniques, such as miniatures (they call them "biggatures", becuase the models are typically 1:4 or so) and forced-perspective. CG was only used where it made the most sense to do so.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[ralphus]

The artists fall in love with the medium, but ignore the story, hence they create a crappy product.

To debunk this absolute statement, take a look at any of Akira Kurosawa's films, Rashomon, Ran, Throne of Blood & Dreams in particular. Kurosawa began as a painter, and went into cinema falling in love with the camera. He used the camera like no other before him and in a lot of his films he used the camera as a large part of telling the story. It was his canvas. He was a master is considered one of the best directors of all time by me among more notable others.

Sure, a new medium can make it easy for people to go off on tangents and not pay attention to the whole package and making an excellent film, but there are notable exceptions in any genre. A talented artist will take advantage of new technology and find new methods to produce absolutely amazing art. Hacks will simply pile on eye candy. Oh boy, more bullet time & explosions!! ;)

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[Rogerborg]

>Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.

The troll in Moria. Rohirrim versus warg riders. Elves at Helm's Deep (not primarily CGI, but you did ask, and they did get screen time that wasn't in the books). It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes, some were nepotism writ large, but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was just a showcase for Weta.

Both LotR movies so far have in fact looked like tech demos. Sure, nice FX, I believe that it's now possible to do a proper version of Lord of the Rings. So why didn't he?

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[ajs]

I suppose I should not follow up to my own follow up, but in re-reading it I realized I came off as a bit of a gushing LoTR fanboy. Let me make it glowingly clear that I want there to be a trillogy that comes along next year and blows me away, and makes LoTR look poor by comparison.

Based on the work that's out there, I don't think that's impossible as LoTR is a good but fatally flawed story in the sense that it myopically ignores vast areas of character development. There are some works that come to mind (e.g. Hyperion or Diamond Age or going back further, Magician (which is not the calibre of work that LoTR is, but would also IMHO translate to the screen far better), Foundation and The Mote in God's Eye) that I think are a better foundation for a movie, but I also don't think it'll happen. I don't know who Jackson had to do what to to get the freedom and budget that he had on this, but it won't happen again soon if history is a guide. Then again the Wachowski Bros. have been given extraordinary leeway to make the films they wanted to make, and if you look at their previous work (e.g. Bound), it's a little unclear WHY that is.... who knows.

When it does happen, oddly enough Disney usually has a finger in it (Toy Story is a great example of a technology-driven, but well-crafted story that the visionaries at the helm were allowd to STAY at the helm on)... Disney is doing something interesting here... cranking out gobs and gobs of crap on the one hand and at the same time spending ludicrous amounts of money on a few amazingly good stories through their other divisions such as Toy Story, LoTR, importing/translating/releasing Miazaki's work, etc. I don't understand their plan, but as long as I'm allowed to ignore the crap, I'll continue to patronize the good stuff.

Also, there are more and better examples of brand new technology being brought to bare on creative work than I listed: Akira (computer-assisted animation's giant baby-step), Tron (computer-generated FX first big movie, and while I wasn't a big fan, certainly a wonderful exploration of the idea of cyberspace long before the die was cast by the likes of Gibson, and to envision a games-based virtual reality was perhaps closer to the mark than we could have realized at the time...), and more I'm not thinking of now because I'm slow in the mornings.

I think you can easily pick out 2-5 really good stories that come out, backed up by brand-new (or brand-new to movies) technology per decade, and when I look at the world of books, I see about the same... a really creative new idea is rare, and while books are easier to produce the ratio of good idea + good story to number of books published seems (at first, unscientific glance) to be in the same ballpark.

I will certianly agree that many of these technologies need time to mature, and morphing is always my best example there. I decided morphing hand matured when I saw that movie about the assassin going back to his high school reunion (don't recall the name) and it struck me that a particular scene used morphing, just to compensate for a real-world limitation in the filming (go see the movie, and see if you can spot it).

Interestingly, it was The Abyss that introduced morphing to movies, and its use was also not center-stage, but was actually used to create motion-blur for the computer-animated effects.

If you never saw The Abyss, you need to: it was perhaps Cameron's best work... though I'm tempted to say that might have been Titanic... another widely misunderstood movie that was NOT about LeoDiGirlMagneteo, but about the ways (many!) that people face -- or refuse to face -- death.

Terminator and Aliens were Cameron's adolescent big-guns action movies. The Abyss was his more mature, sense of wonder, coming-of-age story. T2 was just a love-for-SF picture with a bit of reflection on what he'd been doing. True Lies seems to have been born of some relationship concerns he must have had, and I'm willing to mostly ignore it, Titanic was his attempt to come to terms

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[Clockwork Apple]

"And in LoTR, so much time was spent showing battle after battle, landscape after landscape, hokey special effect after hokey special effect, that it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie."

Our milage differs I guess.

I think ALL of the visuals and effects were needed. Jackson just took too much screentime playing with them instead of doing justice to Tolkien's work. His bigest mistake wasn't turning a 2 hour movie into a 3+ hr movie, it was turning 6, 2+ hr movies into 3, 3+ hr ones. I knew the return to Hobbiton was cut as soon as I heard Bombadil was tossed out. There is just no going back from there.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[ajs]

So, I asked if you could name battles that weren't in the books, or ones that had an a disproportinately large role in the movies as compared to the books...

You replied:

The troll in Moria

As I recall, the goblins in Moria engaged our heros in a battle in which Frodo's armor was revealed in exactly the way it is in the movie. I didn't ask if you could name a creature that was out-of-place, obviously you compress some things from the books rather than simply throwing them away (like trolls), and that was the case with many situations. I asked if there was a BATTLE (since you mentioned that there were too many in your opinion) that was not in the books.

Rohirrim versus warg riders

This is as close as you come. Again, nothing new here, but the alteration is large enough that I consider it a "new" scene. Fair catch.

I don't see any other way to bridge the large sections of "woe is us that the fellowship is broken" with the attack on helms deep without throwing Aragorn in the river, and that would be rather pointless without some REASON for him to fall, but still... it is an alteration that was made to the movie, and it was accomplished with a fair amount of CG-FX.

It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes

Such as? Subtitles for "dummies" or for those who were unfamilliar with the volumes upon volumes of Tolkein's work on Middle Earth?

some were nepotism writ large

Huh? Such as? Not sure what this means.

but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was just a showcase for Weta.

Too bad it wasn't in Moria, but at Helms Deep. And besides, what was wrong with that scene? It exposed the the distrust turned respect, turned admiration, turned freindship that really wasn't in the dialog so much as the narration in the books.

I get the impression you didn't so much experience the movies as go to them to find fault with the treatment of your treasured memories. I understand. I did the same thing when I went to see that travesty of a movie Starship Troopers (or insert just about any SF book of the 50s made into a movie in the last 10 years). I was stunned by the mistreatment of that book, and it really set me up to expect LotR to be about Prince Aragorn and his trusted band of "Hobboids" (large reptilian beasts with psychic powers) who set off to save the Princess from the clutches of legions of "Orcitrons from Planet 10"... in some ways that would have been better than what they did to ST.

Instead you got what I think is the best treatment of the Fantasy genre on the big screen to date, but you wanted more... oh well.

I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the DVD

[mikeophile]

Since they went to all the trouble of making the virtual sets, they might as well let us kill stuff in them.

Bad idea...

[Thinkit3]

Games are optimized for video cards, which in turn are optimized to make small sacrifices for frame rate. To do a static movie, you want as much flexibility as possible.

Re:Bad idea...

[shotfeel]

OK, maybe I'm just slow, but I'm having trouble understanding what a "static movie" is. Are we talking a movie where nothing is moving -essentially a background?

Animatrix shows the future

[teutonic_leech]

I just went to the Anime Expo 2003 in Anaheim and saw the entire Animatrix there. It's simply incredible what they are pulling off these days. I predicted something like this over 10 years ago, when 3D was just getting on to a lukewarm start, but I'm still flabbergasted seeing almost life-like actors completely generated in 3D. Now, give those guys another 10 or 20 years and we will be able to generate realistic movies entirely in a computer. And, I must add of course: Can you imagine a beowolf cluster of these? ;-)

Re:Animatrix shows the future

[JamieF]

Have a look at this (Aki Ross nude) for an idea of where 3D cinema will be going pretty soon.

Re:Animatrix shows the future

[Lord_Dweomer]

Now once they can sync the tactile technology to the video of this...jesus...its a whole new level of porn.....(shivers in anticipation)

Anachronix???

[philovivero]

OMFG, if they think Anachronix is competition for real movies, they're in for a biiiig surprise. Watch more than 5 minutes of it sometime.

The direction is utter, if I might be so bold, s--t. The camerawork is dizzying for no real cinematic effect. The plot is nearly nonexistant. The mood is dull and always dark.

If you want to talk about real Machinima competition for hollywood, the only thing I've seen that comes close is the Reds vs. Blues Halo-rendered comedy, which even then is only funny the first two or three episodes. Then it starts to drag on in the way that amateur comedy tends to do.

I'm afraid we've got a long, long time before the techniques get smoothed out and we stop focussing on technology and start focussing a little on story, direction, editing, and foley art.

Re:Anachronix???

[Anonymous Coward]

The camerawork is dizzying for no real cinematic effect.

Good God, you couldn't be more right. I just watched two minutes and I already have a headache.

Re:Anachronix???

[Rothron the Wise]

A fistfull of in-engine FMVs does not a movie make. Anachronox is both well directed and a laugh, but you really need to play the game to appreciate it fully. There IS a lot of story there.

I certainly agree with you that the technology has a long way to go, but it's still interesting to follow its development. The first movies ever
made were not much to brag about either.

G4

[CyberBill]

G4 Network has a series (I cant think of the name right now) which uses in-game movies and added in dialog to do all sorts of shorts and such. Kind of like a soap opera for teenage boys. Personally I think it sucks, but whatever. You can get to the website at http://www.g4tv.com/ Oh, the name of the show is Portal. Seems they only use MMORPG engines (Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, etc). -Bill

Short Stories

[retto]

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D. That was one of the funniest skits I've seen about the pen and paper experience.

I can really see game engines as being a great way for someone to make a short story cheap, but I can't imagine sitting for an hour and a half watching a drama made from Sims footage. It would require VERY good writing, and that is not an easy thing to come by. As the technology advances, I could see it becoming the standard way to story-board or 'pre-edit' a movie before it is even shot.

I hope some developing film maker could use it like a musician uses a demo tape, and convinence someone to fund smaller projects. At the very least maybe it will lead to a group of people that can create really good in-game cinematics or cut-scenes.

Re:Short Stories

[Allen Varney]

The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D.

That's a machinima adaptation of a skit by the Milwaukee-area comedy troupe The Dead Alewives. Slashdotters who don't hate Flash can check out a new adaptation by Cybermoon Studios.

I can't imagine sitting for an hour and a half watching a drama made from Sims footage. It would require VERY good writing, and that is not an easy thing to come by.

Too true, but don't condemn the idea out of hand just because the medium seems unsuitable. One of the greatest works of Japanese drama, the Chushingura (Tale of the 47 Ronin), was written for puppet theater. An early animated feature, Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Ahmed" (1926), is told entirely through animated paper cutouts, yet it still holds up quite well as a beautiful artwork. (I know because I just saw it for the first time last week on Turner Classic Movies.) I expect a compelling story can make its impact felt even in machinima. I'd like to try it myself someday.

Videos from MMORPGs

[harlows_monkeys]

There have been some nice videos made of MMORPGs. There are some good examples here. Particularly good are "Hero" and "For Albion" and "Dreams".

These illustrate very nicely how much you can do with good editing and music, even if the visuals are limited somewhat by the game engine.

Re:Videos from MMORPGs

[WWWWolf]

While we're at it, everyone should check out The Holimion Trailer, for a NWN module. This stuff was certainly epic, something that isn't often seen in rest of the NWN but that is possible. Yippee - flying dragons, real war, stuff from the front lines, special effects that bring the NWN engine to knees... and the Koreans weird idea of English =) And most of the bits and pieces in this are available as custom content for the game, too.

(If you try to find that one from P2P... SHA1: 536844f26e6779961585858d7cdf472c23139429, MD5: 11072fef23deb5dfc27025bba0a518fc.)

Homemade vs. Hollywood

[Dexter77]

From the article "The quality of machinima movies today rivals Toy Story five years ago, Rehbock said."

I think that says it all. There have been home-made videos, home-made (music) CDs, home-made food, etc. for ages. Technology has just made it possible to spread home-mades to another area. The picture itself isn't even half of the movie. Those hundreds of people working on a Hollywood movie, aren't for nothing.

It doesn't really matter whether you can do those movies at home or not, it still takes hundreds of people to make a quality flick. I've seen many machinimas and in my opinion, this is just hype. Machinimas are a wonderful idea and finally people can do movies about anything they can imagine. But I still believe that machinimas need atleast dozens of people to become even TV-series level.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[uberdave]

No, it doesn't take hundreds of people and millions of dollars to turn out a decent movie. For example, "Blair Witch Project", and "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding". Much of today's music is done with PC driven MIDI synths. A DJ buddy of mine puts together his own tunes using FruityLoops. Sure, you're going to get a lot of schluff, but you're also going to get the tools into the hands of people who know that plot and character, not visual effects, are what makes a movie great.

In a way, it is the Cathederal and the Bazaar all over again. Hollywood's star maker machinery vs small independants with powerful tools.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[femto]

Or it takes one (or a few) VERY dedicated people.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[alphaseven]

I agree with you that machima is just hype (most of the stuff is terrible) but I do think advancing technology has allowed hobbiests to do some incredible stuff.

For example, the anime DVD Voices of a Distant Star, a half hour anime (with cgi graphics) done by a single person (except for the voices) on a Macintosh G4/400. It was quite incredible looking, better than some professional anime with dozens of people involved.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[duffhuff]

The quality of machinima movies today rivals Toy Story five years ago

I'm really going to have to disagree (with the article) here. The quality of Machinima movies is not even *close* to Toy Story, or hell, even Tin Story (the predecessor of Toy Story).

Anachronox: The Movie? Made from a game based on the Quake 2 engine. The Ill Clan? Real-time, looks to be about Unreal 1 / Quake 1 level in quality.

With godly hardware, like a GeforceFX, custom shaders, and a lower resolution it could be possible. Square did demo Final Fantasy: TSW in real-time using some Geforce tech. It didn't look as good as the finished product, but it demonstrated that it could be done.

Toy Story had a very unique style of animation. Woody sort of flopped around like a doll on strings. The dinosaur wadled around like someone with limited leg mobility would. That kind of animation and style just doesn't happen in real time, it takes a lot of time and effort, or a lot of computing power, to pull it off convincingly.

Lip syncing is also pretty touch to do in real-time (The Ill Clan and Anachronox use basic facial expressions), though Valve has had technology which supposedly can do it for a while now. We'll see when Half-Life 2 comes out.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[cfuse]

In a way, it is the Cathederal and the Bazaar all over again. Hollywood's star maker machinery vs small independants with powerful tools.

I can't wait for the shit to hit the fan in hollywood ;-)

If we want better movies, then I suggest we find a cheap way of upgrading the audience. Either that, or we show "Phantom Menace" again and shoot anyone who turns up.

Stop paying to watch crap.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sure a couple of guys in a garage with the Quake engine could have made the LOTR movies. (Slashdot really needs a rolleyes tag.)

And don't bother coming back with "just wait, they will!" No, they won't. It's not possible for a tiny crew of amateurs to beat the pros at their own game just because they have some cheap and easy tools, because the pros have all the same tools and more.

Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[Rogerborg]

>Lip syncing is also pretty touch to do in real-time (The Ill Clan and Anachronox use basic facial expressions), though Valve has had technology which supposedly can do it for a while now.

The news bimbo on http://www.Ananova.com/video has been doing it for a couple of years. It's a slightly different issue because it's done through Text To Speech and the animation is done at the same time as the phoneme generation. It also does some content and context analysis to try and determine an appropriate mood. Watch her go all serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example.

Red Vs. Blue

[gopher_hunt]

Along the same lines is the Red Vs. Blue series availible at http://www.redvsblue.com/
They are working on the Blood Gulch story right now, and have about half of it up for d/l (using Bittorrent)

Re:I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the D

[retto]

they might as well let us kill stuff in them.

Lucas probably didn't want to admit that he knows that everyone that watches to movie wants to go and shoot Jar-Jar.

A few things

[blissful ignorant]

"...it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie." What? Are you suggesting Peter Jackson could have compressed the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy(what, a thousand something pages altogether?) into one 2 hour movie? What LoTR did you see that was filled with hokey special effects? I think LOTR is generally agreed to be a near perfect blend of real stuff(the landscape of New Zealand, actors on horses) with computer stuff(gigantic statues, ruins, gigantic armies.)

You give examples of bad CGI movies, but ignore the good ones. What about Toy Story, and basically, everything else by Pixar?

It's easy to say, look at all this crap. The hard part is looking through the crap to find the genuinely good movies out there involving storytelling. And in some cases, so what? Was the story behind T3 compelling? No. Was it still awesome because of all the stuff blowing up and other CGI effects? Yes.

Re:A few things

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference between Toy Story/Monsters Inc. and SW/LoTR/FF is that the former movie realize the benefits of CG by maximizing its ability to defy reality. The latter movies strip CG of its abilities by forcing it to conform to a preconceived set of rules.

CG is the logical extension of cartoon. It is not going to replace human acting.

Re:A few things

[Rogerborg]

Three and a half hours probably refers to the Director's Cut of Fellowship of the Ring. It's an exaggeration to say that only a third of it was shown. It was more like three quarters, but he did add passages, many of which featured CGI effects, that could have been cut in favour of showing more of the actual story.

I've been underwhelmed with the CGI in both LotR films so far. It's good, but not great. You can't simply forget it, especially when it's shoved in your face so often. For example: CGI not quite matching the landscape in tracking shots, an orc army that looks like something from Total Medieval War, wargs that looked like they'd all been done from the same model, Legolas repeatedly drawing CGI arrows through the side of his quiver (now that's elf magic).

Maybe you didn't see these, or they didn't bother you, so that's what you mean by "near perfect", but I assume that there's flaws that I don't spot, so something has to appear flawless to me before I declare it "near perfect".

Pacmanima

[xtrat]

Finally my home movies will get noticed! Then I'll be the one laughing because I'll be famous... FAMOUS I say...

Bittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Could somebody put put a tracker for "Anachronox: The Movie"

Copyright/licensing issues?

[orbital3]

After seeing stuff like Red Vs. Blue, I've wondered whether this technically violates copyrights. The models, textures, etc. were created by people other than the ones doing the posing, scripting, etc. Also (I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this one already, but I'll ask in case anyone knows for sure), can you use any game/rendering engine to do things like this with your own models/textures/sounds, or are you technically supposed to license the engine as well?

I'm really interested in these questions because I think this is a great way for people who want to tell stories but who don't have the resources to use other media to get their material out there, and I hope we see more of it in the future.

Re:Copyright/licensing issues?

[CrankyFool]

I think Red vs. Blue (which I love, and am a super sponsor of) and Warthog revisited (in addition to Warthog Jump) get away with this stuff primarily because:
A) Halo's smart enough to understand that what they're doing is free publicity for the game -- and on a personal note, it works. I didn't particularly want an XBox+Halo, but the only thing stopping me from getting it at this point is the fact the new job is starting in a week and until then I have no money; RvB sold me on the game;
B) They're not exactly looking to become rich off of this, and in fact aren't charging for downloading it (though in the case of RvB you get better quality clips if you pay a whopping $10);
C) It *may* be that taking small elements out of the game may be considered "fair use" under copyright law.

-roy

Re:Copyright/licensing issues?

[ewhac]

WARNING: This post contains half-remembered incidents of years ago, learned second-hand. Until somone more dilligent than I provides factual backup, it should be regarded as rumor.

I recall a court case of many years ago, where some packager was selling a CD-ROM collection of user-created maps for Duke Nukem 3D (often without the map maker's permission). 3D Realms sued them for copyright infringement, and won.

Now, on its face, this seems absurd. The CD-ROM contained only user-created data. None of 3D Realms' copyrighted data appeared on the disc -- not the engine, none of the maps, none of the textures, none of the sounds. It's true that the user-created maps did utilize 3D Realms' datasets, but the only way you could do that was to buy a legit copy of DN3D. The user-created maps would then use the installed, lawfully-obtained datasets. No problem, right?

3D Realms didn't argue that. What they argued was that they held the copyright on the character of Duke Nukem himself (fictional characters are copyrightable -- just ask Disney about Mickey Mouse) and, as such, 3D Realms held the exclusive right to craft new "stories" (i.e. maps) involving that character. That meant the firm selling the collection disc was, argued 3D Realms, distributing a collection of Duke Nukem stories that had not been authorized by the holders of the Duke Nukem character copyright.

The court swallowed it, and found in favor of 3D Realms.

So that means that 3D Realms went after all map-makers, right? Wrong. See, 3D Realms had this little clause in their (ha ha) "license agreement" forbidding commercial distribution of user-made maps without paying them tribute. But trying to enforce a shrinkwrap "license" is shaky legal ground. So they dreamt up the character copyright angle, and selectively enforced it against the CD publisher.

Apparently, no one was sad to see the CD publisher crushed, as they had apparently misappropriated a large number of user-made maps, gambling that their creators were too small to sue them. But in shutting them down, a rather hazardous legal precedent was created. I imagine it's only a matter of time before it bites someone.

BTW: Gordon Freeman, the central fictional character in Half-Life, is copyrighted by Valve/Sierra.

Schwab

Re:Copyright/licensing issues?

[Mike Hawk]

Based on the fact that Rooster Teeth has done some work specifically for Bungie, notably a E3 video, I doubt they are going to get strung up for copyright violations.

If they did not have permission they are still not attempting to profit DIRECTLY from the video (they do sell some shirts with the Rooster Teeth and RedVsBlue.com logos) so they are little more than some kids video taping what happened on their TV and then showing their friends. (No disrespect to the quality of work, clearly they are more talented than that, this is just from a copyright perspective)

The other question involving using a game engine with your own models/textures/sounds...
IANAL, but most modern games do come with an option to record a demo. This demo is obviously intended for distribution. Not for profit distribution, though. So this would be a valid, legal use. To attempt to profit from the underlying technology (the engine itself regardless of any assets utilized in the production) you would need to work out a license for that.

I guess in short, giveaway movies = defensibly permitted. Movies for profit = asking for it.

On the lighter side....

[El Jynx]

.... check out Red vs. Blue (www.redvsblue.com). A really funny series written with the Tribes 2 engine. It's not exactly a movie, maybe it's best comparable with Friends - only then for males. (What? humor? for US???)

:P

- El Jynx

Re:On the lighter side....

[Yakman]

Err, RvB is done in Halo on xboxes.

So what...

[mraymer]

Big deal. If 3D animation still looks like animation... then what's the big hullabaloo about? It's still animation, just using new technology.

I think computer generated images still need to go a long away to be truly photorealistic, which is where they would be the most useful. Even in recent big budget movies, Terminator 3 for example, you can clearly spot some of the CGI. Granted, it looks great; shiny and flawless... maybe a little too much so. Perhaps that is why it stands out so much. I'm sure I didn't notice every time they used CGI, because some of the effects were likely very subtle.

Still, I'd like to see CGI advance to the point where it is totally impossible to see an visual difference from reality... where they could show a computer generated metal robot and have it look identical to a life-sized model.

Re:So what...

[josh crawley]

Still, I'd like to see CGI advance to the point where it is totally impossible to see an visual difference from reality...

Apparently you haven't seen video of the Half-Life 2 demos. I'd give you a link, but I found it on P2P myself...

CGI in the adult industry?

[Radon Knight]

One other question is how long it will take for CGI to enter the adult industry. After all, so many of the stars have undergone radical surgical alteration that it would have just been easier to create a photo-realistic Lara Croft and send her off into action. Wouldn't need to pay wages or worry about STDs, etc.

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[incest]

It'll be a while. Probably a rather long one.

Models as good as, say, the chick in Final Fantasy or the chick in the first animatrix short (Last Flight of the Osiris) are NOT cheap or easy to build, at least not yet. Look at how much they spent just to make Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within--$100 million+. I'd argue that you need a model at least as good as Aki's (the FF chick), if not better, to get the man on the street to want your porn. Most people, despite what you may have seen on the internet (Caution: that's porn), do not want to watch animated sex of any sort. Porn is usually produced on a shoestring budget (or shall I punningly say g-string?). If you spend $25,000 on your porn film, you're spending a lot, believe it or not.

With a CG movie, you'd still need to pay the animators, the modelers, and the voice talent, as well as some time on a render farm to actually make the film. I can't help but think that adds up to rather a lot more than $25,000 right now, and probably will for quite a while.

On the other hand, CG porn probably is coming eventually, and here's why I think it'll happen: reusing old animations and hacking up models to make them look a bit different (rather than building new ones) will result in a big savings over doing things the hard way. If that means some clever camera angles will hide that fact Porn Movie Alpha and Porn Movie Bravo are using the same sex scene, only with marginally different models, well, as long as it was a good sex scene, who cares? Certainly not the pornographer. That's how the cost of making a CG movie will be brought down low enough to make it feasible.

Great, I just wrote about porn on Slashdot. That means an extra 7 years of no sex.

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[josh crawley]

The porn czars would really have to factor the cost of a huge render farm amortized over time.

I mean, they've got an endless supply of fresh faced young whores who'll let 30 guys fuck holes not even discovered yet and spit on them, and drink a gallon of jizm for maybe $500-$1000 a movie. If the hoe wants to make it in the industry, she pays for her own fake tits and brazilian waxes, etc. The profit margin is huge because they can film 10 of them a day and sell every copy for $50 to some sex deprived sticky fingered geek. Even better yet, put it on a website for $29.95 a month, and the geek can whack it as much as he wants.

I'm sure that there's some cost analysis going on there, for instance to determine that "even a hard core pud whacker can't use more than $X worth of bandwidth a day wrestling the purple headed bishop, and even if he goes over that he'll have to take a day off to recouperate, so the average turkey jerker uses $Y a month of bandwidth; if we make it difficult enough for him to cancel his account, for instance if he has to call an 800 number and ask to cancel his monthly subscription to DIRTY CUM DUMPSTER WHORES DOT COM in person, he'll probably keep his subscription until he cancels his credit card, which means our profits will go SKY HIGH!"

That being said, barring the emergence of an extremely low-cost photorealistic rendering farm that can generate cum loving whores faster than an L.A. casting couch, this would have to be a long term investment of capital by one of the leading corporations in the porn industry, with views on transforming the porn industry; for instance, being able to cater to combinations of fetishes and deviations not already provided for in the market (necro-sado-bestio-scata-philia?) There would have to be a proven profit potential for any sane person to consider this; in other words, people would either have to pay more or BUY MORE PORN.

Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[WWWWolf]

"...to enter the adult industry"? Look, the old law of technology: After any given technology is out of initial testing, someone is going to use it for pornography. So it's not a wonder they've already done that.

Hmm, merging Machinima and Porn... well, the only example that springs into mind (and that I have seen) is "Metal Pr0n Solid 2: Sons of Libido", but I bet this practice is actually far more widespread than that single example. =)

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[lunatik17]

Most people, despite what you may have seen on the internet (Caution: that's porn), do not want to watch animated sex of any sort.

That depends on the target audience. There's a thriving animated porn industry in Japan; considering how prevalent cgi is in Anime, it probably won't be long until they use it as well. America's warped attitude towards animation is probably a big reason why animated porn isn't popular here.

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[Dirtside]

Porn Movie Alpha

I always preferred Porn Movie Alpha Hyper Tournament Edition.

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[boots@work]

incest wrote

Great, I just wrote about porn on Slashdot. That means an extra 7 years of no sex.

Surely with a username like that you're getting plenty at home?

Well

[bih]

Well this certainly makes the movie to video game adaptation easier.

In a word...

[Valar]

No.

Re:In a word...

[Excedrin]

pie

Re:In a word...

[Valar]

What the hell? I'd hate to self reply... but it's showing Score: 1 in the comment header and Score: 2 in the details.
Ick.

Machinima might hold out hope for movies

[Ridgelift]

If Machinima becomes popular, the immediate improvement in the artform will be storyline. People will become quickly bored of yet-another-machinima-graphics-fest (YAMGF), and gravitate toward [machinimas|machs] that have stories to tell.

For example, I watched about 5 minutes of Anachronox, then turned it off. The graphics are cool, but the camera pans were too distracting and took away from the story. Hollywood's been guilty of the same thing. There are lots of movies with great special effects that are collecting dust at your local video store. "The Matrix" on the other hand is still a popular title to rent and buy. It worked because the special effects added to the story, and the filmmaking created a larger-than-life environment.

Re:Machinima might hold out hope for movies

[Anonymous Coward]

You should give it a longer try, or pick up the game and play the game. Great story.

yes, but can you dance to it...

[djupedal]

Machinima
Language: Other

Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Machinima
Que tu cuerpo es pa' darle alegria y cosa buena
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Machinima
Hey Machinima!

Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Machinima
Que tu cuerpo es pa' darle alegria y cosa buena
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Machinima
Hey Machinima!

Machinima tiene un novio que se llama
Que se llama de apellido Vitorino,
Que en la jura de bandera el muchacho
Se metio con dos amigos

Machinima tiene un novio que se llama
Que se llama de apellido Vitorino,
Y en la jura de bandera el muchacho
Se metio con dos amigos

Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Machinima
Que tu cuerpo es pa' darle alegria y cosa buena
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Machinima
Hey Machinima!

Dale a tu cuerpo alegria Machinima
Que tu cuerpo es pa' darle alegria y cosa buena
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria, Machinima
Hey Machinima!!!

Quick, Alert The MPAA

[KU_Fletch]

MPAA Goon #1: "Those wacky kids on the interweb are undercutting our business again!"
MPAA Goon #2: "Are they finding a new way to pirate our movies?"
MPAA Goon #1: "Worse, they're expressing unauthorized levels of creativity and trying alternatives to film."
MPAA Goon #2: "Those heartless bastards. Don't they know this could result in 20... maybe even 30 dollars in lost profits?"
MPAA Goon #1: "Better get the lawyers."

Dead Alewives

[Cyno01]

the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D

That was the first thing i thought of too, but if you didn't know, the video is summoner, but the original audio is an old sketch by The Dead Alewives. Theres a part two to that, you can probably find it on p2p, one of them brings a girl along, hilarity ensues.

sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

apologies for the formatting error, missed the slash to end the blockquote~Cyno01

Both examples are false.

[metalhed77]

My Big Fat Greek Wedding was originally a play. Tom Hank's wife saw the play, liked it, and had it funded. It was several million in production costs.

Oh, the blair witch had a few hundred thousand (maybe even $700,000) in post production applied to the raw footage before it was released to theaters. Of course that example doesn't work as well as "Wedding" but still, the tech isn't there yet to do it on your own unless you are willing to really learn your equipment.

Re:I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the D

[Danse]

Oh yeah.. that would be sweet... give me a flak cannon and let me run wild through the Gungan army scene :)

Machinima vs. Hollywood, OSS vs. Microsoft

[heironymouscoward]

Much the same battle, it seems. On the one side we have the incumbents using market control to milk a public with inferior but oversold goods, on the other we have the small independents using new technology to provide the public with the stuff they really want.
Presumably Hollywood will go through the classic cycle: denial, arrogant dismissmal, panic, protectionism, decay, death.
Don't you just love the way these things go?

Re:Machinima vs. Hollywood, OSS vs. Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you just love the way these things go?

Good grief, no. If the only people producing movies were amateurs using machinima, movie quality would be significantly lower than it is now. Fortunately, like most people who wax philisophic about OSS and the like, you're realllly reaching, so we don't have to much worry about it.

Half Life2

[Tyreth]

I'm betting that some pretty good movies could be made from the haflife 2 engine, for those who have seen the 500mb gameplay demo.

Not so much merging as maiming....

[quinkin]

For those who have read Neal Stephenson "The Diamond Age" will find this concept quite familiar (think 'ractives).

There is a long tradition of movies being made from books, games, etc. However, this is not merely a blending of different mediums - I believe it will bring about a major shift in the powers that control our allowed entertainment.

Think of a great movie that you have seen - now imagine that you could choose to download (free/licensed/whatever) the scenery (level) and any assosciated mods/custom scripts etc.

You and your friends are able to recreate the "movie", either exactly or to your own interpretation, and allow others to watch live or captured recording of your performance.

I can see the Hollywood Machine quacking in it's boots over this one (despite the fact that if they play their cards carefully they stand to gain much more than they will lose). Although the Casting Association of America is guaranteed to do all within it's power to restrict the casting to union members...

I for one would love to be able to recreate the marine charge in Aliens.

It is conceivable that groups of performers will become so popular amongst the audiences that they will be able to become commercial entities (if they so choose) themselves. Kind of analogous to the local community acting groups.

The largest stumbling block at the moment is the difficulty in portaying emotive content. I can see "Rambo" making an easy conversion to machinama, but "Driving Miss Daisy" may be left lacking...

What we really need is a system that (through consumer grade USB cameras) can capture the expressions on a face, convert them to relative muscular movement descriptors, and then send this information as modifiers for the model of the character is currently playing. For instance, this should allow characters without a typical humanoid appearance to still represent the facial movements in a mostly understandable way (ie. a smiling dog).

I believe similar systems are currently being developed for "quasi" video conferencing, so a meshing of the two technologies would greatly benefit both goals.

There are a large number of issues, which although not immediately obvious, bear some consideration before we rush in. Censorship (never a favourite concept of mine admittedly), copyright and a whole host of others.

My overwhelming thought? Maybe we will actually get some decent entertainment if we take the power from the hands of the yellow-livered, "let's just do another sequel", mentally challenged, emotionally crippled individuals we currently call Hollywood executives...

Q.

Re:Not so much merging as maiming....

[pornjokeguy]

have another pipe hit?

Just because you look at your video game and think wow jeez this looks pretty real! doesn't mean you're going to be making your own movies any more than digital audio editing means you're a rock star. Remember, you're no francis ford coppola. If you were you'd probably be working on making movies already instead of waiting for ut2k9 to come out.

Re:Not so much merging as maiming....

[NetGuruFL]

Casting Association of America? Where did you pull that one from?

Maybe you are thinking of the SAG.

Re:Not so much merging as maiming....

[Stephen Maturin]

I can see the Hollywood Machine quacking in it's boots over this one
Am I the only one who didn't get a mental image of ducks in galoshes trembling with fear? I hate to pick on typos (I make enough of them myself), but that one was priceless.
Thanks for cheering up my morning!

Quake 2 Done Quick - been around for years!

[Zog The Undeniable]

If it's still on the Net, grab a copy of Quake 2 Done Quick (Q2DQ). It's a fairly small download but you'll need Quake 2 to see it.

What is it? It's a recammed demo (basically a movie) of someone completing Quake 2. In 21 minutes. On "Hard" difficulty setting.

There's an even older Quake Done Quick, but I haven't seen it.

Re:Quake 2 Done Quick - been around for years!

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

Bah, I'd rather see more well-done short segments, like the unbelievably funny Apartment hunters short, rendered in Quake.

--

Re:Quake 2 Done Quick - been around for years!

[Jad LaFields]

Yeah I saw Quake Done Quick once, it was awesome. It was like 15 minutes long, yet I saw secrets and areas I never seen before playing through it normally.

Best part was the "storyline": Quake guy has lost a contact lens next to Shub-Niggarath (sp?), proceeds to kill everything in his path to find it.

Re:Quake 2 Done Quick - been around for years!

[ewhac]

Seconded!! Here's the Web site of the Quake Done Quick crew.

Of special note is Scourge Done Slick, a speed run through the Quake add-on pack Scourge of Armagon. It has remarkably good voice acting, some good lines (including a cameo by The Levelord), good camera work, and some astonishing moves and play tactics. As a Quake afficianado, I regard this as required viewing.

No matter how you slice it, it's good stuff. Recommended.

Schwab

I must not be tempted...

[madmarcel]

"George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies."

I have to resist the dark side....must not make obvious comment...aaargh...no....
<<bangs head against wall>>

<<Sigh>> I give up...here goes:

"Used a computer game (engine) to storyboard Star Wars? Wellll...THAT explains a lot!"

Re:I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the D

[madmarcel]

"Lucas probably didn't want to admit that he knows that everyone that watches to movie wants to go and shoot Jar-Jar."

Well...after watching some interview with him (or the making of..) on tv...I seem to remember he was asked a question regarding Jar-jar (something along the lines of: What were you thinking? :) and he sort of indirectly implied in a roundabout way that yes, perhaps Jarjar might've possibly been a mistake...maybe :)

don't download, quality sucks

[Crass Spektakel]

The Quality is a shame. Whoever encodet that crime against my eyes should be sentenced stop using videotools for live.

The Videoterrorist used MPeg-Video-Level1 to encode 640x480 at a rate of 130kByte/s - including audio!
For Heavens Sake, even using most uptodate codecs like MS-Video9 or H.264 its not possible to achieve anything watchable with that specs.

The Encodingclone used INTERLACED material, but the codecs obviously wasn't aware of that... which makes the video incredible fuzzy. A five year old knows that this sucks.

That Eyeball-Necromant even left a LARGE black border around the video - which is also VERY BAD for quality. While the black compresses very well the border to the real video is the problem, MPeg-Video-Level1 wastes incredible amounts of data on those.

This Eyeball-Knife also is totally darkened, nearly not watchable at all. Even raising the Gamma and Brightness with FFMPEG sucks as there is nearly no contrast left after all those encoding failtures.

My personal oppinion: The Ideas are smart, the realisation is ok too, but that ridiciulus encoding makes it impossible to watch. Stay away, don't waste bandwidth.

Discovery Channel Segment

[Anonymous Coward]

The Discovery Channel (Canada) did a piece on Machinima today. You can watch the clip from their show, Daily Planet, here. Unfortunately, the clip is in ASX format, so some may be unable to watch it. I'll give a brief description. The clip features a group of Machinima Artists called the Ill Clan, which performed Improv comedy Real-Time at a Film Festival.

The best work comes...

[Naikrovek]

... when you limit the tools you allow yourself to use.

if you allow yourself to use every new effect, every sound stage technique, every actor that all the money in the world can buy, you hem yourself in.

its the small budget films that use a very strict set of rules (thusly forcing themselves to exploit those rules far more than someone that can simply add a cgi effect) that are the most creative, the most original, and the most entertaining.

If you limit your tools when making a movie, you can make a greater movie. that's my opinion anyway.

The White Stripes' "Elephant" was recorded on gear that was old before The Beatles landed in America - have a listen to that album, and you'll see what I mean. Forcing yourself to work with a 4 track mixer instead of a 64 track mixer will force you to think of ways to deal with them. Ways that sound great, and that you never would have thought of if you'd only had that extra track to mix in (not to mention record in) at the time.

Re:The best work comes...

[Jad LaFields]

I remember reading about how Kevin Smith's first movie "Clerks" was shot on $60,000 from a couple of maxed out credit cards. Since he could mostly only shoot at one location (the store), he was forced instead to write a clever screenplay with lots of good dialogue that made the movie interesting despite revolving mostly around one static shot location.

I feel that these limitations made Clerks a much better movie than Smith's later big-budget "Dogma". Not that Dogma was a bad movie, it just seemed less "tight" and focused than Clerks, and left less time for witty dialogue amongst the scene changes and effects.

Re:Anachronox???

[duffhuff]

The camerawork is dizzying for no real cinematic effect. The plot is nearly nonexistant. The mood is dull and always dark.

To be fair, most games with "cinematic" cutscenes tend to do really impossible things with the camera. It's generally because the directors have a full 6-degrees of freedom all the time, and they tend to overuse it. Anachronox is a good example, though I loved the game. Or perhaps they don't move the camera at all, and you get very static, rigid cutscenes (Deus Ex comes to mind).

Very few games actually stick to the normal, actually-possible-in-real-life camera movement. A good example is Metal Gear Solid 2. The cutscenes were masterfully directed (the plot is another story), and really came across well.

Also, I got really pissed at Peter Jackson for the LOTR movies where he's constantly doing camera pans, helicopter shots, and just plain impossible stuff. I really don't like the shot in FOTR where the camera goes from the top (?) of Isengard (sp?) down through a cave, following some birds, and finally up to Christopher Lee. You could never do that in real life, and so it always seems fake to me.

Final Fantasy...

[karstux]

Why the heck is everyone picking on the Final Fantasy Movie? I think it's great, and I'm usually a discerning person when it comes to movies.

Okay, some of the characters were a little cliché, but few enough movies are not guilty of that. And sure, it's not as if that type of story had never been done before, but that doesn't make it a bad story. I think it was wonderfully reminiscent of FF7.

However, what's most important: Final Fantasy had atmosphere. Lots of it. For me, it's one of those movies that grabs you by the collar and pulls you in - deep - to not let you go until the ending credits have long rolled past. And for me, that's a sure sign that you've seen a great movie. And despite the slightly clumsy animation and facial expressions, I was able to sympathize with the characters - they sure were real enough for me.

It's a damn shame that Square Pictures didn't start producing sequels - they were just getting good at doing what they were doing. Subsequent movies could have been produced at a fraction of the cost of FF, with all the hardware, software and researched knowledge already in place.

It will be years until computer animation of that quality level will hit the big screen again.

On the other hand, none of the Pixar flicks have really convinced me. Annoying characters, stupid slapstick comedy and bland "recipe" storys. It may be ok for kids, but I just can't stand the saccharine commercial ubercuteness, the cookie-cutter characters and the omnipresent political correctness in those features.

Some of the competition's productions were good, though: Antz was far superior to its Pixar counterpart, and Shrek would have to be a strong competitor for the "best cgi movie to date".

Let's hope that the genre flourishes, and that Square Pictures is revived some day...

Re:Final Fantasy...

[NDPTAL85]

Looks like you're pretty much alone on the "FF doesn't suck but Pixar movies do" line of thought...

And strangely enough

[jeroenb]

when artists ignore the possibilities of the medium such as the abstract artists of the 20th century did and focus exclusively on their on personal expression, people say they're a bunch of frauds for not producing work that shows incredible skill in the field of painting, etc. (think of the New York school of artists like Newman, Pollock and Rothko).

Perhaps the medium *is* the art to a lot of people. In fact, quite a few think the movies mentioned higher in this thread are wonderful solely because they look so beautiful.

99% of machinima copies the plot of Quake II

[mayns]

I've yet to see a Machinima that didn't look like the cutscene from a game. I'm not talking about the render quality or the models and textures. I'm talking about shoddy camera work, nonexistant acting, and most importantly: crappy sci-fi shoot-em-up plotting. Most of these follow the same plot as Quake II or Unreal. "Aliens are running around on a distant planet full of gunmetal grey buildings in the future. Now one person with a bfg will fight them off." Yuck! It makes David Weber books seem high-brow. I'm not expecting for anybody to become the next Hitchcock or even Mamet using CG in their rec room, but could somebody try making something other than the intro movie for Quake IV? Other than the Reds vs Blues stuff, all of these guys are making their own models and textures anyways. Half-Life mod makers have used new models and textures to make worlds revolving around special forces, world war ii, the old west, and even the american revolution. Why then do 99% of machinima films have to ape the subject content of the game they're using as a render engine? I'd love to see a well done machinima western, or a period war film. But not another Unreal III cutscene wannabe!

Re:99% of machinima copies the plot of Quake II

[Charlie Bill]

I'll agree that I've been generally depressed by the state of machinima films. Obviously, one of the most limiting factors is the fact that most fools are just taking the stock characters and making them do funny things.

If Machinima is going to take off, they'll need to do the whole boat -- character rendering, background illustration, custom textures, etc.

The Killer App here would be one that hooked into a stable gaming engine for rendering but gave the illustrators reasonable tools with which to work and not limit them necessarily to the rules and physics of the gaming platform.

Until I can illustrate "real world" scenarios (like what happens outside on the street without a bunch of armor and guns), machinima is going to be marginal tech.

Re:Anachronox???

[zabieru]

Mm... I've seen Imax films that did similar things. Notably Everest. I agree with your points about the games, though.

I'd like to see books made into machinma

[Comsn]

books like
Predator : Concrete Jungle
or Predator : Cold War

or there are some cool star wars books as well
like Star Wars : The Crystal Star

of course , these violate a bunch of copywrites to use as storylines. but there are always the public domain stories. the public domain fables? etc.

Father

[Apreche]

Father Frags Best

Remember???

Re:Father

[Schezar]

We watched that at a LAN party back in the day. (My 1337 Pentium 200mHz humming along to Q2 Weapons Factory.. Ahh...)

It might have been the doritos, or the mountain dew, or the fact that it was 3 in the morning, but, at the time, that was the most hillarious thing I had ever experienced.

machinimas are best viewed in the original engine

[Blaskowicz]

Even you high bit-rate video9 H2434654 version 2.07beta with progressive overscan pitch noise filters and so will look like crap compared to the same thing running at 60fps on a voodoo2, under the Quake2 engine. Or you can run it in 1024x768 FSAA4X with a better card, or in HDTV resolution.

Not to mention file size. as an example, there's Quake Done Quick With A Vengence (qdqwav), a complete warlkthrough in quake1, done in 12:23 minutes. The original games weighs about 60MB, and the demo 11MB. whereas the crappy DivX file with lousy resolution weighs about 150MB.
same thing for quake2 based machinima

sorry for the rant, but you started it in the first place :P

Anachronox deserves the attention

[Decaffeinated Jedi]

If nothing else, Anachronox deserves another chance to shine. I realize that ION Storm tends to rate a fair amount of ridicule in most circles (and rightfully so when you consider Daikatana), but Anachronox was--at least in my opinion--an amazing game. I'm not a diehard CRPG player by any stretch of the imagination, but of all the CRPGs that I have played, Anachronox was by far the most immersive. I guess it was just one of those odd games that got the critics behind it, but never managed to rate much attention from the game-buying public (see also: System Shock).

I don't know a lot about the production history of Anachronox, but one gets the impression from playing it that the designers had quite a bit more planned for the game than was actually packed into the final product (and they packed quite a bit in already). I can only imagine what the game would have been like if ION Storm wasn't collapsing around the design team's ears while they were trying to finish production.

Either way, Anachronox deserves any extra attention it can get--even if it can't be a sequel to pick up on the original's "to be continued..." ending.

DecafJedi

direct url?

[juraj]

Is there a direct url for the zero 7 video?

The shockwave site fails to detect I have realplayer installed, I don't have windows media player nor quicktime installed (I use linux and don't have crossover or some stuff like that).

Or you can send some URL mplayer can play (I believe they can stream windows media, I have binary plugins installed).

If you have real player installed correctly, could you just play it and paste me an URL it plays?

Thanks!

Re:direct url?

[juraj]

ok, I found it out myself:

mplayer 'http://205.252.48.142:80/wm.atomfilms/full/waitin g_line_wmp_300.asf'

if you do

mplayer -dumpstream 'http://205.252.48.142:80/wm.atomfilms/full/waitin g_line_wmp_300.asf'

you get a direct local copy of the file, which can be then recoded (with mencoder) to something more sane than Windows Media.

Animated movies ...

[svara]

>[..] machinima, which are "animated movies..
>utilizing the [real-time] 3-D graphics engines of
>games like Quake or Unreal [..]

Hey, what about movies that aren't animated?

hardware/software question

[WormholeFiend]

I'm really interested in doing machinima, and it also just happens that I'm about to buy a new computer, mainly for home video editing footage from my sony minidv camcorder... and gaming (just in time for Half Life 2 - which is coming with machinima tools according to the article). But I'm really unsure what hardware to get based on my budget... I do plan on putting more money on the foundation of the system (CPU, mobo..) and less money on the videocard at first, to upgrade later to a top of the line card when I get more $... Basically, my question is, between Intel and AMD above 2.6 GHz, which is better for the same amount of money? Also, I would like to know if it is possible to do video editing on a Linux system, and if so, what configuration?

Don't forget "Red vs. Blue"

[mblase]

The Blood Gulch Chronicles are a (IMO) very funny series of movies made entirely from in-game footage from Halo with the audio dubbed over. (As a bonus, BitTorrent links are available from the web site for recent episodes.) This is the first I've heard of Machinima, but it sounds like a similar approach using a different genre.

Re:Don't forget "Red vs. Blue"

[mblase]

This is the first I've heard of Machinima, but

My bad, that should have read "the first I've heard of Anachronox".

Re:Don't forget "Red vs. Blue"

[mink]

Unlike R. Vs. B. Anachronox is not new story.
It is a combination of the various cutscened from the game, mixed with ingame stuff. Since it's being done by the developer some things like custom/alternate angles for some scenes compared to whats in the game.
IMO a lot was left out of the "movie" that you only get by playing the game, but I enjoyed the movie so I could show people how keen it was.

Word is he is working on a full resolution DVD version since the machinima is at half rez or lower to cut down on file size.

If you watch the DVD

[aliens]

If you watch the extra stuff on the DVD you'll find that a lot of the computer aided stuff you probably didn't even realize had anything todo with computer graphics.

And, umm, did you read LoTR? Cause maybe you forgot, but there are battle after battle after battle in the books. Maybe you'd like a G rated version where Gollum is a carebear.

Yes!

[sharkey]

or example, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies.

Fingers crossed: Padme dressed like Aida for the entire movie!

Hollywood is safe...

[Anonymous Coward]

...until these guys come up with a 3D casting couch.

Hollywood + Moore's Law = Machinima

[ILL Robinson]

The point here is that Machinima isn't just about using Classic Quake to create a movie or two. Machinima is about the converging of 3D game tech with animation and filmmaking.

3D animation is clearly striving for always-faster render times and 3D game engines are coming closer to software renderers. Once you get to the point of real-time animation and interaction, the creative approach becomes more akin to filmmaking than animation (although some of the animation aspects will still be there).

And yes, the hardware render of today does not compete with a software renderer. But Machinima isn't just about what's being done today - it's also about what's going to be created as the technology advances and converges.

Re:Anachronox???

[lightcycle]

I thought that particular Isengard shot was beautifully made. OTOH, I watch a lot of Italian giallo, and I kind of like the impossible camera stuff. When done properly it can really heighten the mood of a film. Watch films by Dario Argento or Mario Bava for example.

bittorrent / mirror

[RudeDude]

I'm downloading the 13 available parts (one at a time) and providing torrents and a tracker. Links to torrents can be found here: http://steem.com/bt/

If you have the downloads complete, please join the Bittorrent 'network' to share your bandwidth.

Something else to check out

[Rogerborg]

http://www.ananova.com/video

Basically a virtual newsreader done through animating a talking head as part of a text to speech engine. The subtlety is that it does content and context analysis to determine an appropriate mood; watch her go serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example. It's not perfect ("fighting for their livs in hospital"), but given that it selects stories off the news feeds and TTS and renders them 24/7 with no human interaction at all, I find it fairly impressive.

You wouldn't know it from their marketspeak site, but the company behind it ( http://www.digital-animations.com/ ) are working on expanding the content analysis and tying it to an animation library, with the goal of being able to select appropriate models and act out arbitrary text with minimal human interaction, and eventually do a basic render of a complete film from a (slightly marked up) screenplay.

Heh, I'd like to see what they'd make of a screenplay of Tron. A computer generated version of a film about a computer generated world. Sweet.

This is likely the future of cgi

[Trailer Trash]

I've been predicting for a couple of years now that the pure CGI movies will be going this direction, i.e. rendered real-time in the theatre or your house. We're fewer than 5 years away from being able to render a Monsters Inc. style movie in real time at a high resolution using a $100 video card. We're almost at the level of the original Toy Story right now, with the major piece left being hair (which is a complete bitch to render, and not present in the original Toy Story).

The current state of CGI is such that we can make a mostly believable CGI character, and very believable CGI backgrounds and such. It's very likely that one of the major players could turn out a pure CGI movie that would be nearly indistinguishable from live action. Within 8 or 9 years, we'll be rendering those in real time on a $100 video card.

Should be interesting, since Hollywoood's going to be crazy stupid over preventing anyone from getting to their character and scene definitions and making incredibly bitching fan films. How many people out there could write a better Star Wars flick than George Lucas? Let's make that simpler to count: how many couldn't?

Michael

Re:Anyone else having trouble posting tonight?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been having the same problem, Every time I try to post, I get that message.

So when do we get decent content ??

[Archfeld]

More power to the technology, but animated crap is no better than real life crap, the problem lies not in the technology of making a feature 'film' but in the creativity and financing department. As we have seen with a few other animated powerhouses, great animation does not a blockbuster provide, especially here in the US, the land of the advertising buck :( What we need is a revolution of the money men, not the film makers....

MIDI's on the pop charts

[yerricde]

at least as much as those who predicted midi would replace studio musicians by now.

In popular music, it largely has. In some genres, it has entirely. (Generic Trance anyone?)

why would a niche market drive (and take over) a huge market?

Stranger things have happened. The niche market of movies has taken over the electronics industry.

Re:I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the D

[RogueWarrior65]

Too bad this is at least 50% bull. Phantom Menace was pre-viz'ed using the ElectricImage Animation System AKA Universe. A complete animatic of the film was done before a single frame of film was shot. Some of this stuff can be seen on the DVD.

"Tin Toy", not "Tin Story"

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject says it all

Re:I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the D

[computechnica]

My favorite Quake 3 model to hunt down and slaughter is Jar-Jar.
A good Machinima movie to make would be to send the Boba-Fett Q3A model after the Jar-Jar model and Jib his ass with a rocket. Can you tell I hate Jar-Jar, he's the one who started the Clone War!!

just one that doesn't change...

[Thinkit3]

That is, a film, not a first person shooter.

Howard Chaykin's 'American Flagg'

[frellnick]

Howard Chaykin's 'American Flagg' comic book/graphic novel series in the 80's was based around an actor who had been replaced on his hit show by a pure simulation. I'm sure there are earlier examples of sci-fi where television shows and movies are produced entirely using CG actors, but this one sticks out in particular 'cause it was cool.

Re:Howard Chaykin's 'American Flagg'

[mink]

Looker

Bugrit.

[El Jynx]

So much for my game knowledge reputation :) I think I'll go molest a cobra now.

- El Jynx

Re:Bugrit.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats one of those made up animals isnt it?

Re:Bugrit.

[Wolfrider]

--Not if you used to watch those old GI Joe cartoons! :)

There isnt that much CG in LOTR

[Swiss_Cheeseman]

If you watch the docos on the special edition box set, you will find that the majority of the major structures/locations in LOTR are actually models, real life models. How did they get the hobbits to look so small? Not by CG, but by camera perspective tricks. It seems nowadays, that whenever someone sees something that is in the realm of special effects, they automatically think it was done by computers, often, it isn't.

Surprisingly enough...

[Wolfrider]

Y'know, I'm actually quite surprised no-one has mentioned Red-vs-Blue yet:

http://www.redvsblue.com/

--Basically it's Halo on the Xbox used to make some pretty good movies (they're actually *funny* because they're scripted and timed so well.) Check them out.

Re: The assassin's high school reunion

[Wolfrider]

> I decided morphing hand matured when I saw that movie about the assassin going back to his high school reunion (don't recall the name) and it struck me that a particular scene used morphing, just to compensate for a real-world limitation in the filming (go see the movie, and see if you can spot it).

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0119229

"Grosse Point Blank" with John Cusack and Dan Aykroyd, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Which scene used morphing?

Re: The assassin's high school reunion

[ajs]

It was a baby. They mophed a section of its face into an image of a smiling baby face. It was just a little rough so that if you were aware of the technology, you could see it, but I'm sure most folks saw the baby smile on cue, which was kind of stunning to most parents, I'm sure ;-)