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

[sleeper0]

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.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

The graphics aren't the story

[ObviousGuy]

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.

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.

Re:The graphics aren't the story

[RALE007]

I completely agree with you, the graphics are not the story.

On the flip side, the easier (and less inexpensive) it is for a realistic film to be made, the more likely it is a good story will not be passed by.

Our "current crop of crappy" movies as you fondly put it (I like how that rolls of my tongue, I'm going to be saying "current crop of crappy (insert noun here)" for weeks now) oh yea where was I. Yes, our "current crop of crappy" movies are the work of the same film companies that have been ignoring wonderful stories since the companies conception. With never available before ease, a small independent production will be able to create a quality film that incorporates a wonderful story with realistic visual and audio. Before now, we were commonly presented with either a bad story with decent effects, or good story ruined by a limited budget. Hopefully, with the advances in effects, and the costs of creating them dwindling, more good stories will be properly recreated in film, and we can just avoid the "crappy crop" as usual.

Personally, I like the thought of the diversification of quality production that inexpensive realistic methods will allow.

I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the DVD

[mikeophile]

Since they went to all the trouble of making the virtual sets, they might as well let us kill stuff in them.

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? ;-)

Re:Animatrix shows the future

[JamieF]

Have a look at this (Aki Ross nude) for an idea of where 3D cinema will be going pretty soon.

Anachronix???

[philovivero]

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.

G4

[CyberBill]

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

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.

Re:Short Stories

[Allen Varney]

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.

Videos from MMORPGs

[harlows_monkeys]

There have been some nice videos made of MMORPGs. There are some good examples here. Particularly good are "Hero" and "For Albion" and "Dreams".

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.

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:Homemade vs. Hollywood

[uberdave]

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.

A few things

[blissful ignorant]

"...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.

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.

Quick, Alert The MPAA

[KU_Fletch]

MPAA Goon #1: "Those wacky kids on the interweb are undercutting our business again!"
MPAA Goon #2: "Are they finding a new way to pirate our movies?"
MPAA Goon #1: "Worse, they're expressing unauthorized levels of creativity and trying alternatives to film."
MPAA Goon #2: "Those heartless bastards. Don't they know this could result in 20... maybe even 30 dollars in lost profits?"
MPAA Goon #1: "Better get the lawyers."

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.

Not so much merging as maiming....

[quinkin]

For those who have read Neal Stephenson "The Diamond Age" will find this concept quite familiar (think 'ractives).

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.

Re:Not so much merging as maiming....

[Stephen Maturin]

I can see the Hollywood Machine quacking in it's boots over this one
Am I the only one who didn't get a mental image of ducks in galoshes trembling with fear? I hate to pick on typos (I make enough of them myself), but that one was priceless.
Thanks for cheering up my morning!

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.

Re:CGI in the adult industry?

[josh crawley]

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?

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.

99% of machinima copies the plot of Quake II

[mayns]

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!

Don't forget "Red vs. Blue"

[mblase]

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.

bittorrent / mirror

[RudeDude]

I'm downloading the 13 available parts (one at a time) and providing torrents and a tracker. Links to torrents can be found here: http://steem.com/bt/

If you have the downloads complete, please join the Bittorrent 'network' to share your bandwidth.