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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."
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.