Machinima Festival Discussed, Picks Announced

Thanks to HomeLan Fed for their interview with Machinima Academy director Paul Marino about the nominees for the 2003 Machinima Awards, honoring "filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment." Those up for awards include the ever-popular Red Vs. Blue, and more than one title from the commercial machinima company Fountainhead Entertainment, and Marino makes the interesting claim that "the holy grail of rendering systems is real-time rendering - and after that point, the creative language shifts and becomes more like filmmaking where shots are recorded in real-time."

Comments

That was quite an adventure

[iendedi]

I followed the link and watched every episode of Red & Blue. I must say, that was a refreshing and new experience. Quite cool.

This could be a really profitable segment for some game company to enter. Take a good 3D engine and make it possible to import all sorts of models, provide hooks for motion capture and whatnot and tools for cinematic capture and edits...

Re:That was quite an adventure

[WoTG]

Yeah, I just watched an episode (probably others in the future). I guess it really is all about storyline! Very cool.

Animator != Camera

[Bazzargh]

"the holy grail of rendering systems is real-time rendering - and after that point, the creative language shifts and becomes more like filmmaking where shots are recorded in real-time."

Having the ability to "film" a virtual world in real time, as if you were using a camera, is only possible if your virtual world has rules - like physics in the real world - that allows the world to change over time without the intervention of a human - the animator.

Thinking about it that way, I'd guess a whole lot of animators don't see replacing them by virtual cameramen and cartoon physics as the "holy grail". Part of the attraction of animation has always been where the animator breaks the rules in the viewers head about what should happen next.

Or put another way, if you remove God from the universe, you won't see miracles.

-Baz

Re:Animator != Camera

[Saige]

Well, just because the world has rules doesn't mean they won't break what the AUDIENCE thinks the rules are. One of the possibilities of a virtual world is that the rules can be different. They can create unexpected rules, then bring them into play at just the right time and still keep the suprise factor.

I don't see how real-time rendering will really affect animation in straightfoward ways. Will they bother to make use of it when they're going to be having to plan out all the details anyways? I'd think they can plan scenes out with low-quality near-realtime rendering, then when they're happy, render in full detail.

When real-time rendering can be done on hardware that's not extremely expensive, that's when things can get interesting. Besides video games taking on incredible levels of realism, what about blending between games and animation with audience participation, when you can have a computer system capable of doing the rendering in the theatre, and they just download a "script" that's rendered on the fly? Probably not something that will be done much, may require too much work, but that seems a bigger difference to me.