Best Tools for Machinima?

wrinkledshirt asks: "As a former Creative Writing major with a huge interest in film, I've been thinking about trying to get into Machinima (com, org, and wiki sites -- basically, using game engines to make movies). Probably the most famous use of it for the Slashdot crowd right now is Red vs Blue, which makes use of Halo, but up until recently, most of the other options have involved FPS game engines, which would require a huge investment in time so as to create non-FPS-genre content for non-FPS-genre movies. Now that Sims 2 is here with its video-recording feature (and the promise of more contemporary realism in the expansion packs) and with Pete Molnyeux's The Movies coming out in 2005, is it possible that an amateur writer could make the Machinimatic movies of his or her dreams? Plus, what would the best tools be? What machine would you need? Would any single game engine help you create your own Citizen Kane?"

Comments

The tools are there, it's the art content

[SsShane]

The unreal engine has wonderful abilities to create machinima pieces (I'm sure other engines do as well). I created some cinematics for a video game using the engine and I can tell you that the hard part is not having the animations and sounds that you need. Setting up the scenes is not difficult (relatively) once you know the tools and if you have all this stuff handy, or have the time or a person to do quick animations: "Hey Jon, I need an animation of Captain Zer0 scratching his butt...".

Think about it; for a long "movie" you would need an incredible amount of motions, sounds and voices, even when you modularize them as much as possible (walking, looking left/right, radio chatter, ambient nature noises, blahblah). The beauty is in the subtleties, a quick glance, a raised eyebrow, a certain cock to the shoulders when someone starts to talk about a subject that changes the characters mood, etc. Plus, since voice acting is just as important as how cool the models look, you pretty much need a cast, even though it's "ghosts in the machine" :P

Re:Film & Vids

[Coryoth]

Of course the reality is that there are practically no films at all that make a profit. Certainly every big budget film is guaranteed to make a loss. At least, according to the movie studio accountants.

And in the end that's actually a reasonably large part of where all the real profit comes from. Take a read of this and just look at all the amazing money shuffling methods they have to sweep any semblance of profit under the carpet. Just look at how the account for video and DVD sales for gods sake! Dodgy, dodgy, dodgy.

Jedidiah.