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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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: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.