From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance

Moe Napoli writes "Machinima producer/author Paul Marino recently posted on his blog that he will be attending Sundance later this month (Jan. 26th to be exact) to moderate a panel discussion about the rising artform of machinima (using 3D games like Half-Life 2 for filmmaking purposes). Amongst the panelists will be Red Vs. Blue/The Strangerhood creators Burnie Burns and the Rooster Teeth team (also featured in the Jan. 2005 issue of Wired), who will also present a live demonstration of how they produce their hilarious RvB machinima series. Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking and even cooler to see how far it has come since some gamers started making Quake Movies."

Comments

Finally, now writing can take some precidence

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood seems to have forgotten that plot, characters, and writing are what drives the moving-going experience, not how many machines you needed to render 4 seconds of some over-blown CGI shot.

That being said, machinima will be a great method for those with writing talents and a lot of patiences to showcase their skills to the biggest test audience of all, the internet.

All I know is I'm waiting for a WW2 movie, either something like a Battlefield 1942's Hogan's Heroes or Saving Call of Duty.

A Question To Movie Makers

[teiresias]

So my question to movie makers is this.

If you insist on making game based movies (Resident Evil, Mario Brothers, the upcoming Doom, etc etc), why not actually use the graphics engine that the game was based on?

Seriously, with the exception of older games the graphics engines are right up there. Throw in some good voice acting, a little airbrushing to give it that Hollywood glow and bam you've got a film. And suprise suprise, it'd be fairly accurate to the game. Am I the only one who see's profit here?

Re:A Question To Movie Makers

[mblase]

Seriously, with the exception of older games the graphics engines are right up there

Define "up there". Hollywood CGI standards are not "Half Life 2" or "Doom3", it's Pixar and Dreamworks. In addition, remember that animation is still, for better or for worse, largely for G and PG stories in America.

There's no profit to be made in a movie that looks exactly like a game. Anybody could throw that together. What makes a movie unique is using real actors, real sets, and really expensive special effects -- not to mention real writers and real directors, which, let's face it, most games are sorely lacking.

Re:A Question To Movie Makers

[Megaweapon]

Huh? There are two reasons Hollywood makes movies based off of games. 1) An already established storyline that some people will be familiar with. 2) It saves Hollywood writers from having to come up with anything original. It's a combination of marketing and idea recycling. Who in their right mind would go pay to see a movie that was rendered on an NES? (Citing your Mario Brothers example... Besides, if that were the case then we'd all miss out on Samantha Mathis)

Re:A Question To Movie Makers

[stratjakt]

If you are targeting a younger (kids) audience, then image quality is pretty high on the list anyways.

You've never seen Pokemon, Dragonball, or any other kids "anime", have you?

Image quality my ass. A still of Goku's head against a flashing background for 15 minutes is "image quality"?

Kids would watch a Pitfall movie rendered on an Atari 2600, if you marketed it to them right.

Just want to go on record

[mdxi]

...as thinking that "Machinima" is the stupidest word ever (except for, maybe, "blogosphere"). It's just animation, people. Animation done with a video game and a software editing package. You could possibly take an extremist view and think of it as puppetry instead of animation, but there's still a perfectly good (pronouncable) word for that.

You digibonerati really irritate me. Get back to work, eh?

Re:Just want to go on record

[Golias]

Animation: All motion pictures made from assembling still-life images into sequence.

Puppetry: All manipulation objects to represent people.

Machinima: Using the pre-rendered animation calculations of a computer game system to manipulate animated characters for the making of a motion picture.

In other words, Machinima is sort-of like puppetry, but with computer-animated figures instead of actual objects.

The reason it's spoken of as something different than traditional cell animation (or even CGI) is that machinima is able to use the motion and physics engine of the game to save all kinds of time. For Pixar to make a ball bounce, they must program a ball bouncing with the proper arc, and then render it.

For Disney to make a ball bounce, they must draw images of a ball, and create repeated cells with the ball in sequencial places on the screen according to how it's supposed to move.

For a machinima creator to make a ball bounce, they must find a game which has physics defined for bouncy balls, and manipulate a game character to drop one. It's a completely different method of production from what has come before. There is no pre-existing word which describes it.

If you want to call the word "stupid", come up with a better one and get it to stick.

Just be glad that it didn't become popular in the early 90s, or it would have been given either a stupid acronym (like "PMP" for "Pre-determined Motion Physics") or multiple capitalized words mashed together, the last one being "Ware" (like "GameFilmWare".)

See, "Machinima" suddenly doesn't sound so horrible, does it?

Re:Let's not confuse clever workarounds for ....

[GMFTatsujin]

Yeah, you're missing something.

Sometimes it's about doing the most you can with the least you've got. Sometimes it's about not having a huge budget, or even a budget at all. Sometimes it's just funnier that way, or the medium carries the message, or... or whatever. Sometimes authors show innovation within their craft by imposing limits on its structure. Might as well ask why Shakespeare "made do" with the constraining rules of iambic pentameter when he could have free-flowing written blank verse instead.

Well, yeah, maybe Shakespeare it's not. But it's fun to do anyway.

Think of it more like Junkyard Wars: cobble together whatever you can to make it work somehow and reach a goal. Why reinvent the wheel when there are plenty of bent and broken ones lying around that can be beaten into a close enough shape?

Also, there aren't that many teams of graphics designers, programmers, and animators sitting around waiting to work on a film that doesn't have big $$$ to pay out. Give these guys a break, huh? Feel free to start your own studio if you want to show them up. While you're at it, why don't you make your own cameras like Lucas did for Episode II?

As for stealing the IP... I don't quite buy it. They're filming themselves playing the game they paid for. It doesn't strike me as an inch out of line with screenshots and demo reels, except that nothing gets shot unscripted.