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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!
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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