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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."
Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking
It is actually pretty cool. I had stopped going to the Sundance film festival a few years ago because they had lost that focus on the small filmmaker and it had become one big Hollywood fest. It started getting quite difficult to get tickets (for the local folks) because the big Hollywood companies were buying them all up in big groups. Things have apparently gotten a bit better, recently with some blocks of tickets reserved for the local folks, but we'll see. For the locals it used to be a place to go to see filmmaking at its finest, but eventually turned into a venue for people to see "stars" and for people to be "seen" in addition to a huge marketing fest which makes it kinda repulsive. I was sitting in the Morning Ray Cafe one day next to a woman whose job it was to give out schwag to celebrities (like iPods and Gucci handbags) and drive them around meeting their every needs and all I could think of was "That has got to be the worst job in the world! Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference......." Of course that's what I was thinking. What I actually said was something like "Oh, that's interesting.....".
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With all the increases in computing power, I can see room for an application where you simply provide a script and the animated characters perform it for you in real time. Just set one of a few supplied scenes, provide the dialogue and direction, and hey presto, one real film! Maybe with your favourite actors "faked" - just imagine Casablanca with David Beckham and your grandmother set on a spaceship. The mind boggles... ...and the pervs drool of course... (yuk!)
Anyone else remember Stunt Island? It was an entire "movie studio" game that allowed you to build and "play" your own sets, making movies out of them in an editing room. Ran like gangbusters on my 486SX/33. It had an entire underground of people who would make their own movies and post them to BBSes. I was one of them. Sigh. Those were good days.
I recall a panel at the 2003 SIGGRAPH questioning whether the economic tilt toward game development was "impeding" the development of other branches of computer graphics. Graphics accerlation boards aimed at game machines lacked the color resolution (48+ bits) that hollywood and sci-viz people were interested. Also they were strongly tilted toward triangle-fill rendering when there were a dozen other rendering methods of interest to other branches of graphics.
I think some of this criticism was abated as the graphics boards have been opended up to more programmer control. Also there was a session at last summer's SIGGRAPH on Hollywoods influence on gaming: the big companies are hiring artistic directors for the games and put feature-film type flourishes in the big money projects.