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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?"
Would any single game engine help you create your own Citizen Kane?
Not right now, but I'm sure this is a direction the video games creators are contemplating because it's an area of expected growth. It would certainly make the creation of cinematics much easier for dev teams if machinima was considered part of the engine.
The problem is that in games like Doom 3 for example, the creation of cinematics is scripted heavily and designed into the levels. Models take weeks to build correctly and integrate, and you have to have strong modelling skills to achieve that. There is no separation of set and action or actors, for the most part. I understand that Half Life 2 has changed this kind of static nature, but it's still very early.
The games would have to have quick modelling system built in, or methods for generating random characters and skins, and voices.
I'm sure that in the next twenty years, this is the direction of video games. It would be a smart approach, IMHO.
You also have to consider the comparison between video game sales and box office/rental sales. Video games are beating the movie industry to a pulp, so film as a medium of expression is likely on the way out, unless the business makes some changes and continues to grow and support new vision. Indy film will always be of a higher quality than blockbusters, IMHO.
Look at the reviews for Alexander. Ebert said the film was crap. That's a film they spent $150mil to create!
With games like Halo 2 grosing $100 mil on the first day, for a much smaller budget compared to Alexander, the bottom line is clear. The age of movies is waning.
Quality of film has declined heavily as far as dramatic content, with the exception of films like LotR. I'm seeing the film expression as being played out for the most part.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The sims? Realism? You're kidding right?
We're talking here about simulated "people" who will quite happily beat the crap out of someone one second and talk about the weather to them the next. "people" who will moan and whinge when the bathroom is in use when there are three other free ones in the house. "people" who will happily stuff their faces whilst their kid is crying it's eyes out after shattin itself. "people" who, when they see a fire, go as close to it as they can manage and burn themselves to death instead of calling the fire brigade as any sensible person would do. "people" who play *exactly* the same game of chess every time (technical limitations, I know)
The actual actions they do are vaguely convincing but overall the sims is *not* realistic!
You were right though, it does have a video recording dooby which the strangerhood has used and with some fiddly work you could create a story.
To create any movie you'd need to know what the engine(s) can do inside and out, and if you're using existing characters, you'd need to know their capabilities inside and out too. So to answer, I think anyone could create something half decent but you're looking at a lot of studying and some very careful planning to get it just right.
Oh, just as a complete sidenote and to make this post as worthwhile (debatably) as possible, for anyone who's interested fraps lets you record pretty much anything happening on your screen such as games etc. so you're not limited to in-game recording to capture footage.
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
Now that Sims 2 is here with its video-recording feature (and the promise of more contemporary realism in the expansion packs)
As if the millions of "cartoonists" taking screen shots of video games and adding moronic thought bubbles wasn't enough of a waste of bandwidth... Now we get to have millions of retards creating movies. *sigh*
Atleast out of the 1,030,205 dopes, we'll probably get a few, clever gems.
Would any single game engine help you create your own Citizen Kane?
1. Find game engine
2.Become Orson Welles
3.Profit!
KFG
is there even anything out there that can do voice simulation?
People.
KFG
I invested a relatively massive amount of time trying to figure a way to do this kind of thing myself, tho not so much for the purpose of a no-budget movie... I was aiming to be able to rapidly create episodes of a show to blend into an ARG. The problem is there's no good way to do this kind of thing now without a massive investment in a gaming engine (with strings attached, of course). You have to go the old-fashioned route, one way or another...
The best way I could see to do it (though it was far too much work for the returns) was to hire someone to write a huge number of Python add-ons for Blender, but even that was a bit wishy-washy from a practical standpoint.
If anyone out there who DOES do Blender scripting/hacking wants to give it a shot, drop me a line (mcm at my website above) and maybe we can do something neat.
But really, Machinima isn't really a viable medium for "new" filmmaking until someone puts those peices together for us.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Your not an actor are you? ;)
No, but I play one on TV.
KFG
Once you got the rough layout, you can start tweaking for more realism.
The funniest (real-time) use of voice-to-animation I have seen till now, is in (the original) Counter-Strike.
Counter-Strike has voice-support built-in ; and when one speaks, the mouth is (roughly) syncing on it.
THe first time i saw this (they introduced it , i think, two version ago, 1.4) , i laughed my arse off :)
Haven't checked yet if they left it in Counter-Strike: Source.
Me and a few friends once created a Quake1 mod that was specifically designed to help with making movies. To my knowledge it was only used one or two times, but we had a lot of fun making it. It used to reside here: http://www.inside3d.com/qmovie/ but the page has since been taken down. You can still see it in the various internet archives though, I'd imagine. I still have the source and all if anyone's interested in it... As an aside, one of the other programmers on the project went on to create a fell remake of the Quake engine with a feature-length movie and TC to go with it. He also created ScummVM which some of us use to play old LucasArts games on various platforms...
A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills
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...".
:P
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"
Machima isn't all about a game type. You can do it without it. UT2004 offers great tools, using it's "Matinee" system you can create complete movies and together with oc3 entertainment's "imposter" tool you can create great things.2 229/
Some examples:
http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=793/
http://www.unrealtournament.com/news/view.php?id=
instead of actually creating a movie this might end up being a damn good way to storyboard (and pre-production is the most important part of successful movie making).
00010111 always try everything twice
I'm an animator and I've made my share of films. Like most filmmakers, I'm interested in getting people to see my work. That usually involves distributing it in the more ubiquitous formats.
I know most people have computers, but game engines can be fussy and platform-specific. This method seems to be more of an idle curiosity than anything. I don't get why people use a format that limits the audience.
Why not go for the most common and stable formats out there - video, streaming video or flash? Make it easy for everyone to see your creation.
Besides, if you don't have animation or art skills, creating your film in a game engine won't make it look all that great. Dragging and dropping motions into game levels just won't cut it. Your characters need to act and emote, which ain't going to happen unless you have acting and animation skills, along with a good set of tools to truly control all aspects of your 3D characters down to the keyframe. Good looking 3D is expensive for a reason.
Just my 2 cents... sorry for the rant.
I really want to see the movie about the intrepid '@' and his adventures in a world of dangerous 'D's, obnoxious 'o's and ravening 'r's. The scene where he's backed into a dead-end '#' by a swarm of killer 'b's, with nothing but a ')' to defend himself, and then his faithful 'f' saves the day, should have audiences laughing and cheering.
:)
Heck, there's no way it could possibly be worse than Dungeons & Dragons: the Movie!
...as well as a plug for my old Quake clan.
...which was actually pretty entertaining, and in that day in age, pretty revolutionary. They even went ahead and created some QuakeC mods to help them through the "filming" process (which was all done over the Internet, I think with a number of latency-challenged modem users).
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb.htm
As far as I know, this was the earliest example of this mode of entertainment. Of course, it was really weak compared to its sequel:
http://machinima.com/qml/quake/rgb2.htm
The Rangers were one of the most well-recognized clans following the release of the original Quake, mostly for their contributions of fiction pieces and, eventually, these two movies. A cool bunch of guys. I joined up with them a little after their heyday, just in time to spend a little time working on the filming of Ranger Gone Bad 3. In spite of being a really neat effort with a lot of custom Quake content, it was so ambitious for its time that it just never got completed.
While I'm at it, I'll give a little footnote to how great the original Quake was. People sometimes deride it as being nothing drastically innovative from a gameplay standpoint, which was a little bit true in the single player game. However, the multiplayer component forged pretty much all of online multiplayer gaming as we know it. It was the moment of critical mass for the formation of long distance social gaming, and the multiplayer model was good enough that virtually every first person shooter since then is based on it (although these days they tend to incorporate a built-in server browsing utility, which was an independent addition called QuakeSpy back then).
In closing, a little write-up that I happened to enjoy reading: http://www.muppetclan.com/history/