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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.
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.
I have been pwned because my
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.
fifth sigma, inc.
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.
"...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.
Valete!
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.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
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.
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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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.