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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."
haha 3rd post fuckers!
Machinima is a big steaming pile of dodo and I don't care who knows it (notice not posting anonymously). Comparing them to a garage band is an insult to garage bands everywhere. A garage band usually takes at least a couple of kids to buy a few instruments and maybe took a lesson or two. They aren't creating anything very important and they know it, but its about pursuing an impossible dream and pissing of your parents. I give garage bands serious creditability because nobody expects anything from them.
Machinima people don't seem to know how to write, draw, sing, dance, direct, film or much of anything else very well. Near as I can tell they their best skill is making hype and having a vested interest in playing video games.
So what?
There are dozens and dozens of video game fan sites who do better jobs of video game praise. Most of these sites don't fancy themselves special for doing it either. Like the garage band, the successful underground scene is the one who doesn't call themselves internet superstars. I haven't seen a single piece of Machinima where I thought they were able to put the whole package together. Something that was skillful throughout. In movies, hundreds of people, all of whom do their job amazingly well, work together to make something that may be a complete flop. Machinima doesn't seem to do any one thing particularly well and is mass produced like pogs or mcdonald's cheeseburgers.
As a kid, my neighbors and I used to put on plays in the basement. Maybe I should put them on the internet and start hyping it as post-modern reflectionism and sell stills on Cafe Press. Get yourself some creditability already.
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?
Paul Marino who compares machinima to garage bands.
How do you mean Paul? I didn't realize Machinima animation artists wore trashy clothes, made a lot of teeth-splintering noise, got famous for 6 months to a year, and eventually died of overdose.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Thanks!
Mike Bouma
MCSE, MCSDT, Microsoft Office Guru, Well Respected VB Scripting Genius
So you can choose what scene will pop up next and follow the story in what ever form you like? (as far as the DVD is going.
To stand up and say Red vs Blue SUCKS? I'll take it on the chin and burn the karma. I thought it was *terrible*. It is *NOT* a new artform.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
As a director, a movie it's a image story you want to tell, this is just another way, but you still need creativity to do it.
I'ts like making remixes with your old tape deck machine and only one turnable in the early 80's.
There is an in-depth discussion about this here
Before, there was bacially no possibility to create any animation in the same way you would create improvised theatre. ( which is an art form, by the way... )
Of course, most of what we see today is still quite rudimentary, if not to say downright crap. But the potential is there.
- 1337poll.tk - check it out!
Has anyone actually watched any of this stuff? It's pretty obvious all they do is sit around & script scenes in video games, and they're actually trying to pass this stuff off as a series?
If you've ever seen R&B, you realize it's chock full of a bunch of kids who got bored with Halo. It's about as deep as "The Anna Nichole Smith Show", minus the boobs. Please don't read in to this folks, if playing video games is art, I would be picasso.
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.
Popularized massively by the quake videos, featured on GameSpotTV on ZDTV.
Red Vs. Blue was great. For about the first 'season'. There were a lot of cute inside jokes about Halo, like the limitless amount of ammo, and some amusing stuff about capture the flag in general("You asked for it? Why didn't we try that?")
However, they then promptly ran out of material. It has now degenerated into a lot of homosexual potty humor(you know, the kind that homophobes make? An entire episode consists of them playing with the android's, um..."switch") and so on. Much of the episodes are just so far out to lunch plot-wise it's like watching a bunch of frat boys trying to do their own version of Whose Line Is It Anyway (which is no great surprise, reading the blog and looking at the author photos. They all seem perpetually stoned). Any clever new ideas have been so severely beaten to death they've long since ceased to be funny.
Basically- it was great because the early episodes were well written and had purpose. Now, however, the plot sucks. Machinima is a nice way to do animation, but it's not even remotely impressive on its own; not even slightly. Watching some poorly written script that consists mostly of a bunch of identical halo characters talking to each other(and these conversations go on for a half episode sometimes!) is downright boring, and I've gone from a huge fan to "oh, they released a new ep? Hmm, well, I guess I'll download it".
Instead of just leaving it to their 15 minutes of fame and wandering off to do something else with their lives, or moving on to a new game (there are plenty, after all- imagine what they could do with GTA:VC!), they're just churning out the same stuff, ep after ep.
Please help metamoderate.
Welcome to the new /. where group think is required.
If you deviate any from the accepted way of thinking your post will be mod bombed because those doing the moding are cowards who would rather hide ideas they do not agree with rather than debate the issues.
IOW, cowards.
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 most amazing thing about RVB is not anything about it being machinima. It's the exact opposite- the fact that it's filmed in a game is utterly irrelevant. They have good writing, good acting, and good direction, and that's why it's good. They could have done it in Halo or Quake or a 3D modeling program or a 2D animation program or with live actors. Machinima is not different from normal moviemaking at all, there's no difference in the skills and talents you need. It's just cheaper than production-quality CG, and it lowers the barrier to entry to the world of film, which is otherwise unchanged by its presence.
RED ONE: You know what really pisses me off about these melee battles?
RED TWO: No, what's that?
RED ONE: Our life expectancy is about 60 seconds.
RED TWO: Yes, it kind of makes the dental plan seem irrelevant.
RED ONE: (gets fragged)
RED THREE: Hi, I'm here to replace Red Two. I'm Steve, what's your name?
RED TWO: Does it really matter?
RED THREE: Guess not. Incoming!
RED TWO: (Dies)
RED THREE: (Dies)
FREE REIGN CRAPFLOOD: http://www.tastymanatees.com/archives/000540.html
Instead of an unpublished novel, now everyone will have an unpublished movie in their drawer.
re: "My Trip to Liberty City"
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/
I am now officially ashamed that I read this shit-heap of a site. Fuck all of you faggots and shove your gay "Crapinima" up your pale, pimply asses.
Mouse and keyboard are vastly superior.
Nah. Instead, they make pretentious and glorified power point presentations made uglier in game engines, while at the same time trying to pretend that their pathetic excuses for plot and artistry somehow can be compared to excellence in literature and top tier movies (when in actuality the material they produce can barely crawl above an undergrad animator's first attempt).
Well, it just so happens that one of my friends goes to the California Institute of the Arts where there's a professor by the name of Eddo Stern who has been doing this since the early 90's...he then cofounded C-Level in 2001.
(oh, and here's the link to the page with the date of his latest lecture at CalArts, just search for his name...)
I read this story in the Toronto Star this morning and .. oh yeah. Never mind.
Didn't MTV have some shows like this?
I think it was called VideoMods
Can anyone find it? It was great show - the took virtual characters and made them dance to the music
... if you think base potty humor is the epitomy of a laugh, and community theater is the height of complexity.
For what it is (a good chuckle), it's pretty good. For anything more... well, go read a book, watch some shorts... even watch an x86 demo! The writing may be entertaining for awhile, but it's the same thing over and over, and it never evolved.
read all about it!
Blahbalicious, Ranger gone plaid..
:) I'd love to see an open-source machinima OpenGL engine..
Some other one I cant remember the name of that was 4 hours long..
Then they can just distrib the movie as a little binary with a data file.
Its always disappointed me that RvB hasn't done a better job with compression and size choices.
They really need to offer a smaller version for the modem people. Lots of my friends love RvB, but have a modem and can't wait forever to download it.
All the sound it voice, why didn't the quicktime qualicomm voice compression? 9:1 or even 20:1 compression.. And 44khz?
Please.. The voice recordings are horrible.. 11khz would do just fine.
But other than that is freaking hilarious.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
See me scrolling through those pages, watch the flames appear as I type them...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
God, that is awful. 4 people standing around moving their heads up and down. It's reminded me a lot of "Stimpy's Cartoon." If that's the state of the art, the art has a long way to go.
As the quality of rendering increases, I can't wait to see Sandra Bullock bury her sixteen inch clitoris up the asshole of Jenny from the Block.
Dunno if anyone remembers this, but when I was younger I used to watch Blahbalicious, which is one of the most hilarious things I've seen in a long time. It's a feature movie made in Quake, and it's incredibly funny.
(no, I didn't make it)
Originally conceived for the Xbox game console as an alien-splattering, intergalactic shoot-em-up, Halo is one of the most popular games of all time.
I think it was running on the Mac long before it ran on the Xbox (and is finally running on Macs again after MS delayed it's release for half a decade.)
http://www.macworld.com/1999/07/bc/18halo/
I cant' wait until that engine becomes available and you can make movies with it...
You can find more info, and a download link, right here : http://www.machinima.com/displayarticle2.php?artic le=411
The thing about the release of a product or a method which allows a larger audience to participate in creation is, that product is available to everyone, including the people who excelled at similar work with the previous methods. They can then take advantage of these tools, and have the experience of the past, and the ease/accessibility of the new product. Talented musicians for example, will always be talented - sure, they might grow slightly in number, but for the most part, talent lies within the person, and not the tool.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
i think its somewhat fallacious to assume that distribution of these personal and custom arts will fit into the framework of widely-known works
yeah probably a good portion of it will be subpar
but i also think its likely it will be created for a much smaller and more personal audience
i imagine that this is how things like homestarrunner and red vs blue started and only gained a wider audience through word of mouth
after being created and shown to a close network of friends those friends showed it to theirs etc
this is afterall the idea behind the blogs, wikis, sites like slashdot and the internet at large is it not? extensibility, customization, etc
utilizing these ideas through new technologies only allows for these new artforms to be created and although (given the lowering cost of access) everyone can use it, this only means that more people have a hobby, which previously was limited to those who could afford it
i can see that there could be a large number of unknown artists (if you will allow) creating works that most arent aware of despite access to via the net
(for example im pretty sure my parents have never heard of red vs blue or probably even slashdot for that matter)
but for those looking for something along those lines (or any others determined by them), it is out there, available
i hate to put forth naively the ideals of democratization that arose with the internet but it isnt hard to imagine that someone can produce work on their own for fun and consequently getting enough recognition to live off of it
[this is infact what happened with the 'brothers chaps' of homestar renown]
and that aint a bad thing
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?
I watched it for a while, thought it was funny, and they made some good jokes about how Halo is stupid, and fps games in general... but after watching a lot of episodes I just couldnt stop thinking "when are they gonna get to the fireworks factory?!" And then they never got there.
(the quote's milhouse watching the itchy and scratchy and poochy show in the simpsons), also Halo really is stupid.
I must have made a million movies in that game. I wish I still had it :(
If you can find a game "backup" on some retro gaming site, it installs and runs nicely in the dosbox emulator.
This would have more validity if the people doing this wrote their own 3D engines. The current set up is more like ... well, some idiots messing around in a 3D game whilst making MST3K type observations. Funny/entertaining? Possibly. Art? Unlikely.
The only act of creation involved is manipulating the art someone else has already created. If I, for example, made a glossy book full of pictures of fine paintings with witty or deep and meaningful captions, is that art? Whatever it is, that is basically all machanima is at the moment: using someone else's creation to tell a story.
Improvised theatre, incidentally, doesn't usually take the form of, for example, rearranging the lines in Hamlet and calling it your own. It doesn't rely on someone else's creation for its entire existence.
Read Pynchon.
The first few episodes are awesome, but once the intial burst of creativity is gone they just keep making more episodes.
G4TV's PORTAL was the best Machinima ever. It still plays, but since it only made it to 3 seasons, its not well known. Not to mention it was so...controversial.
It was all MMORPG-based Machinima. The first episodes were kinda bad, unfocused, but Dave really got his act together after episode 5 or 6.
Anyways, check it out! Hopefully his new show will be just as good... PORTAL
Does that mean they'll replace FPS weapons with walkie-talkies too?
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.
Man, that game was supurb... really helped develop a sense of camera position, editiing etc. in the creation of a movie and narative... excellent, excellent game/sandbox.
Bush baaa-ad.
Wah... waaa-aa-ah!
Cmon! As a creative person you can't hold on to your medium as 'untouchable'. Stop being so pious. Of course they have the creativity. They came up with the idea in the first place. It happens in all creative mediums. Just like music did - going from traditional instrument players in a studio to people at home on a PC creating sample based music. If you have no creativity, people aren't going to like it no matter what what.
Compare what your saying to when they first introduced "talkies" to take over from silent films. I'm sure there were a lot of directors worried that the 'creativity' would be lost in the transition. And what does the mean today? Zip.
it brings down the barrier, but doesn't raise people's skills.
I'd agree that it doesn't raise people's talent, but it does make it possible for everyone, talented or not, to practice the craft. And that will improve their skills.
The main gain is probably all those really talented people who never would have gotten close to making any movies that now get the chance to develop.
this is just another way, but you still need creativity to do it.
God damn, people on /. these days, can't even read the fucking POSTS they're responding to.
Have a Google for this (and Quake 2 Done Quick and Quake III Arena Done Quick - which is the single player levels with bots). Basically they're beautifully recammed recordings of the game played as fast as possible on Nightmare/Hard+ difficulty.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Lot's of people, including me, would like to make 'films' of this kind...we all have favorite cartoon shows, for example, that we would like to give a different ending or improve according to our tastes...or to make crossover 'films' where heros from different and diverse series are put against its other. For example, lot's of people would like to do Star Trek vs Star Wars, or Mr T vs Batman etc.
So, if anyone has the guts, here is a killer app for you: a 3d 'film' making application, where the user inputs the 3d characters, the 3d objects, the 3d environments, the physics laws, the dialogs and the sound, and the application resolves the physics, moves the actors and objects around, etc. This would not be the classic 3D making programs like 3D Studio or Alias Wavefront, it would be a film making app.
For example, it would give the opportunity to the user to say 'have Mr T run from here to there, then say "I pity you full!"', or have Jean Luke Picard say "fire photon torpedos", then the Enterprise would fire...
It would be a great past time, as well as stepping stone for deploying any film making talent out there. I personally can't wait to film my own Star Blazers episodes, 'cause I like dramatic space operas too much.
The Movies.
Just wait until that game comes out later this year... its going to revolutionize machinima by bringing it to the masses.
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
This is not only a fad, but one based on an extremely silly premise (which happens to be a fallacy) - that this is a "budget"-quality ("garage band") method for those who can't afford real filmmaking equipment to break into the art.
For the price of a PC with modern FPS-capable GPU, RAM and CPU someone interested in filmmaking could easily buy the basics necessary to assemble a short film/trailer/fund raiser. El Mariachi was completed on Robert Rodriguez' credit card for less than $3000. Trey Parker and Matt Stone created the proto-"South Park" demos for less than that. "The Blair Witch Project" got started on $2000 and raised $14000 more to complete the film.
What this really is, is Yet Another method of making cut and paste 'art' for people somewhat interested in fooling around but far more interested in gaming and having a gaming PC than pursuing any sort of genuine filmmaking goals or attempting serious projects.
"Artists" who use FPS demos as a basis for their art are IMO about on the level of Ed Wood Jr. with his stock footage...
If I ever hear someone say "Are you into Machinima too?!", I believe I'll crack their skull.
Methinks the gamers are just pissed off because they think that the internet should cater to their minority needs, and they don't like it to be pointed out that the world doesn't revolve around them and their (in the eyes of the public) nerdy little hobbies.
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
Does anyone have or know where a mirror is for this so I can judge for myself?
At deep-discount stores you can get almost-free ripoffs of the classic Disney ripoffs of the classic public-domain stories (e.g., Aladdin). Uhh ... does that count? ;-)
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.