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Fountainhead Boss On Machinima Perils
Thanks to Machinima.com for their interview with Fountainhead Entertainment boss Katherine Anna Kang, in which the ex-id software biz person discusses their "independent production company that specializes in documentaries and animation... our specialty is Machinima" - that is, "filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment", often involving videogame engines. Kang laments: "I'm sad that Machinima isn't as popular as I thought it would be by today... the one thing that worries me is that Machinima will be seen as a hobby and not taken seriously, and that very much annoys me." She also mentions: "We may open-source an academic version of [in-house movie tool] Machinimation in the very near future."
I agree with the author of this article. I've really enjoyed a lot of the video game animation I've seen from hobbiests and students. I'm a big fan of the Star Wars Kid and Homestar Runner. It's too bad that more people aren't aware of the students and hobbyists who make these highly entertaining shorts available to us, between classes and during time off from their real jobs. Perhaps with the release of the anemic version of their tool, more students and hobbyists will be able to create short works placed on obscure websites for our enjoyment. Who knows, maybe one day they will rival the likes of SpikeTV and The Outdoor Life network for our entertainment dollar.
yhbt
Isn't a "Fountainhead Boss" something from Dilbert?
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No... Dilbert has the Pointy Haired Boss (PHB)
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Machinima is alive and well in video game cutscenes, notably RPGS like Final Fantasy, Xenosaga, etc... More and more it seems like the storytelling is being moved into movie-like cinematics using pre-rendered computer generated characters. The downside is that the watching the cutscenes a second time can be tiresome unless there is a way to skip past it.
I'm interested in filmmaking and animation, and the Machinima concept piqued my interest when I first heard about it, but for someone who doesn't have any kind of experience with 3D modeling, it seems just as prohibitive as learning 'regular' 3D animation techniques. Maybe more-so, since I don't have a LAN at my disposal (well, I'm just lacking nearby fellow geeks) and if I was going to spend time gathering voice actors and such, I might as well be spending that time finding actors for live action films.
I can understand the relative ease of use of this compared to keyframe animation, on the other hand its really not something that entices me enough to look into further.
I'm guessing I'm not the type of person this concept targets, although if there was a few programs available that would help me create simple characters and scenes specifically for this purpose, I would definitely try it out. As it is though, I wouldn't be diverted from learning a program like Swift3D, which currently best suits my relatively minimal animation requirements.
--- "Yeah, I'm a bit stressed out. I have a research paper due tomorrow and it has to be +5, Insightful."
The Blood Gulch Chronicles by Red vs Blue is machinima.
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Prerendered cutscenes. It is not necessarily "live acted", although Red vs. Blue is. It can be scripted and keyframed. It's defined by being "in engine", meaning rendered at one point in real time by what is typically a game engine. This is most often seen in cutscenes in action games that don't cut out to some prerendered or animated sequence. When a community as tech savvy as /. doesn't really understand what machinema is, I think it's a little early to worry about how seriously it will be taken.
...at the moment. I am optimistic that it will change, but there's always the danger of it being niche'd to death.
I am surrounded by bohemian types - writers, actors, all sorts of artists... and everyone's always doing one of two things; either 1) trying to get as close as they can to perfect in their medium (either through traditional or very untraditional ways) or 2) trying to find a new, original medium. Machiniama is interesting because the idea isn't new, but the implementation is.
The problem is we need something a bit more serious... something with real emotional investment (the stuff mentioned in the interview seems to be heading towards that). While redvsblue can be funny, there's only so much you can do with a bunch of guys swearing every other word, coming up with dialog that becomes repetitive and formulaic, and scenes that smack of the MTV school of "filmmaking" transposed onto a virtual environment. It's a new medium with plenty of room for exploration; now that the tried and true has been worked through, some people need to start embracing its intrinsic properties and turn them into art. And I don't mean that they have to be epic tales of loss and destiny, or heavy handed conversations about the nature of life; a piece of work can be great with humor, with violence, and with plenty of vulgarity (Pulp Fiction springs to mind); the key is in the charaterizations and the investment viewers inevitably put into what they're watching.
At the moment, 95% of machiniama looks and sounds like it's made by geeks who may be technically minded, but not very creatively inclined. In other words, the stuff looks like a video game, and is a lot less interesting than it could be.
You're thinking of the non-quite-as-famous comic Randbert.
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