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Machinima - Spielbergs with a Joystick
securitas writes "The Toronto Star's Murray Whyte writes about the growing popularity of machinima as the birth of a new type of filmmaking and artform. The article largely focuses on Red vs. Blue but also discusses Jim Munroe's My Trip To Liberty City, in which 'Munroe adopts the genteel perspective of a Canadian tourist while meandering the seamy, violent streets of the game Grand Theft Auto.' The most interesting comment comes from the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences' Paul Marino who compares machinima to garage bands."
In Burns's house in Austin, Tex., they gather to `shoot' the episodes using the game console's record function.
Is my Xbox missing something, or is this a lovely little piece of misinformation?
What part of that took balls?
Go make a better machinima, then. I dare you. I mean, since you apparently can "write, draw, sing, dance, direct, film" and everything else better than anybody currently making machinima, I'm sure it'll be a instant classic. Or the next web fadjoke. If you are actually comparing machinima to a Hollywood movie, you are (a) stupid and (b) missing the entire point. Nobody who makes machinima is claiming that their machinima is better than anything Hollywood puts out. That's nuts. Comparing the two is nuts. They know that, I know that, everybody seems to know that but you.
Has anyone else wondered what will happen when it becomes truly simple for EVERYONE to make movies, games, music etc. ? I mean, what will it be like when absolutely everyone can express what they want as they want it, even without technical skills? That's part of why I love the idea of machinima so much.
With Machinima, you do still need some technical skills, but you don't need cameras or locations, or a whole lot of photogenic actors. You can create the effects yourself (within the limits of the game engine). I don't think I have any sort of directorial talent, but I still dream of the day when I can just mess around with it, just for fun.
I imagine that if it ever does become super simple for people to create things like music and games and movies, we'll just get lots of crap. But maybe we'll get some gems. Maybe people will be less frustrated if they can express themselves artistically in some way. (Of course, some will be frustrated when they realize they have no talent and no audience.)
For an example of one man's vision, you can check out the anime Voices of a Distant Star, which was written, drawn, animated and I think scored by a single crazy guy.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
The cool thing about machinima is that it helps lower the barriers to entry for creating a movie. It looks a bit kitschy now, but with advanced HW acceleration coming down in price I think 10 years down the road we'll see some very interesting work.
Now what would be great is applying the open source model to work on larger productions. I'd love to see a faithful movie version of LOTR. Done by fans, so no one has to watch Legolas shield-surfing or pointless changes to fit it into a 9 hour trilogy.
Actually, I suppose you could start now as long as you picked open formats for storing the movie elements(dialog, movement, models, etc). Then you can change the renderer over time as things get better.
Imagine a machinima Gutenberg project - producing free versions of all the classic stories Disney ripped off.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
"But saying that everybody who does machinima is completely devoid of talent in a long list of areas is, well, flamebait."
Gotta say I agree. Frankly, people with a creative spark can make something entertaining with just about anything. Remember the Star Wars kid trailers that hit the net last year? I don't remember a fancy term like machima being used for that. It was a creative outlet, and it was exhausted. We all had a few good laughs, though because some peeps stepped up to the plate and demonstrated some talent.
I'm a little surprised that this is being considered as a new genre. I mean we've had puppets for years, this is essentially a digital extension of it. Eh oh well.
"Derp de derp."
"Does anyone else have the balls to stand up and say Red vs Blue SUCKS?"
Yes. I also have the balls to stand up and say "Linux blows goats!" Unfortunately, few would honor either of our sets of balls for it since niether of us were smart enough to provide a thoughtful rationale for why we have that opinion. I guess balls alone really aren't enough for this world.
"Derp de derp."
It's great that things like DV and Machima have made it easier for movies to be made without millions of dollars in budget...but as we should all already know - having a lot of gear and money to throw at a bad story doesn't make for a good movie. And you can have the crappiest production values in the world (Clerks), but if the story is compelling, that doesn't matter. If you've got a good story and know how to tell it, you can shoot your film on one of those old Fisher Price camcorders that recorded on audio cassettes.
That being said, I have always found the work of ill clan to be pretty entertaining and well done. Perhaps it's because the creators are all skilled improvisors and know how to tell stories. Or maybe just because I think lumberjacks are inherently funny.
Photography, technology, and my dog Scout - http://mattstratton.com
I agree totally about the good script & acting. I have all the RvB eps on my work terminal, and I enjoy playing them with video out plugin set to null and just listen with my headphones (so the boss suspects nothing hahahaha). The visuals are just optional, really.
It does get suspicious when I just have a dumb grin on my face when I am just staring at a C program.
Does anybody remember the old (early 90s) DOS game, Stunt Island? Essentially, the game provided an island full of a number of different sets, such as a city, an oil rig, a canyon, and so forth. The player could position cameras and props around these sets, and create event triggers for things like camera pans and object movement. The game also had an editing mode where you could splice together taped footage and insert sound effects. The game had a bias towards airplane stunts, but could be used to film virtually any sort of movie. Back in middle school my friend and I actually used it to create a short documentary about battles from World War II. Stunt Island was greatly loved by those who used it, and it still has somewhat of a cult following.
My question is, why hasn't anybody created something like this more recently? Although FPS game engines work for this, they certainly aren't designed for it, and there's quite a bit of roughness involved when one actually tries to create a movie. 3D animation modelers can also be used, but generally someone creating a movie has to focus on too many low-level details.
I'm actually considering starting up an open-source project this summer to try to create such a movie-creating tool, making heavy use of pre-existing graphics libraries like OGRE. Would anyone else be interested in helping out with such an endeavour?
However there has been a lot of really well done low budget fan films over the past few years. In fact I know someone that made videos from Battlefield 1942 from in game where the graphics are boardering on good high quality CGI work.
And I think that trend will continue. We used an Application called FRAPS in windows to pull video from games and save to a file on the Harddrive as we were making a music video using Rogue Spear: Black Thorn for a broadcast class once and then switched to Macs and added sound and such in iMovie.
I think the major thing here, is that the technology has increased to the point where its become easier and cheaper for creative people to share their ideas. But still, it takes quality writing and acting skills to pull these things off, otherwise it is no different than anyother form of eye candy that Hollywood puts out.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I wonder how much longer it will be until someone produced a dedicated app just for doing machinima. The engine has to look good, and be easy to use, but realtime requirements don't really exist.
Currently, our 3d modelling and animation programs have interfaces that are designed around extreme control, but take *forever* to actually model something. If someone can produce an effective visual side to an animation with nothing more than some people walking around (but can't draw worth a damn or act well), having tools to suit them would be quite useful.
This could actually make an interesting open source project, maybe using something like Crystal Space. Tradtionally , games have not done well in the open source world because of the way games work. Until a game is about 90% complete, it's generally not much fun to play. Open source generally needs interested people using a piece of software and identifying features that they'd like to have -- and implementing those features. In a game, this unbalances things. In a game engine used for machinima, it's possible to later on add in a "flying" feature and still benefit from the existing software that doesn't have such a feature. In a game, adding "flying" would severely unbalance the game.
Crystal Space might be a good base for this.
May we never see th