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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.
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
-Bill
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.
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)
.... 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
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
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.
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.
Have a look at this (Aki Ross nude) for an idea of where 3D cinema will be going pretty soon.
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!
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.
If you have the downloads complete, please join the Bittorrent 'network' to share your bandwidth.
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker