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

[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

[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.

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? ;-)

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.