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

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.

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.