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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!)
Oh my! If this keeps up, in a few years people will think games themselves are a legitimate artform! ;-) Hooray!
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Or else your text ends up in one big paragraph , and those who need to read it won't bother.
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.
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?
-Teiresias
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.
new form of independent filmmaking
Depends on your definition of 'new', I guess. "Machinima" has been around about as long as Quake has.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
After watching (or trying to watch) the first few episodes of Season 2 of RvB, I gave up - there were too many injokes and self-referencing going on, and I'd even watched the first series recently. Sad to say, it wasn't funny. (Nor was the first episode of Strangerhood, though I don't know if it was supposed to be). Not trying to be a smartass, but has RvB gotten funny again?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Machinima and Sims sound similar: both have computers draw characters and scene in real time. Machinima is what Marshall McCluhan calls a "cold" medium: the audience is passively watching a preprogrammed script. On the other hand Sims is a "hot" medium with the audience actively involved creating the action.
I guess author of this story is somehow mistaken. How can someone use engine that uses pre-compiled lights. Using doom3's engine is understandable because 99% of operations are realtime.. I can't find any other alternative with realtime lighting system, only doom3 atm (probably stalker in some way.
Fucking a fat girl is like riding a scooter... it's fun 'til someone sees you.
Or a major movie studio may make a movile completely from computer graphics and- oh, wait...
--- Ban humanity.
Speaking of, if you're going to be in Park City this year, the notorious Slamdance film festival (held simultaneously with Sundance) is showing some machinima on Sunday, Jan 23 @ 10am. They also have an Anarchy Online Competition, with 9 finalists you can watch in Real format.
who will also present a live demonstration of how they produce their hilarious RvB machinima series.
It really isnt that hard to make it. They're making it sound like theres some secret to it.
Makes me want to watch Blahbalicious and Operation Bayshield...
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.
Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine, Spiderman 2, and The Terminal are all plot driven with great characters and writing. Incredibles and Spiderman 2 even mix in a ton of CGI. Of course we have dreck like Catwoman and Van Helsing, but don't make a blanket statement about the decline of writing in Hollywood. I'm a big fan of independent films (my sister just completed a feature length documentary and my brother is producing a new film by Roger Majkowski), but Hollywood actually had a lot of excellent films in 2004.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
...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?
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Am I missing something? Why do we (the audience) care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original artwork? Why do we care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original sets? Why do we care that the original film makers have simply *made do* with limited camera angles and characters?
Over the past decade 3D animation has not only gotten ten times easier with powerful tools and extensive mesh libraries, its also become cheaper: A high end PC loaded up with RAM can easily render scenes far more complicated than these 'Machinima' sets. The amount of talent coming out of places like Eastern Europe is just phenomenal, and animation festivals have become truly unbelievable showcases for what people are doing on PC's at home.
So why do we care about some semi-talented film geeks who hack together serials from other people's creative and ip? It would be one thing if the writing and voice-acting was watchable, but really -- its not. So as an audience member I find myself thinking only: "God that's a nice trick to make a serial without doing any work". And then I think: "So why's that good?"
This is the entertainment equivalent of TinyP2P. Its a good statement. But not worth experiencing.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
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Oh yeah. Substituting non-stop CGI and special effects for story have really done wonders for the Star Wars franchise, haven't they.
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dm6 is in the article title and no one is talking about it? That is still my favorite map of all time.
-prator
Whenever I see articles like this, it bothers me a tiny bit since the demoscene has existed for over a decade earlier than machinima has, and the artform is much more interesting and sophisticated. Yet demos get hardly any recognition from mainstream media because they don't appeal to the common denominator (probably because the art of the demoscene is so nebulous and abstract). Where is the coverage of the stunningly beautiful engines and music of the demoscene?
Then again, coverage of the scene would probably drive it further underground and/or stifle its creativity. Okay, forget I said anything.
True, but keep in mind that Hollywood producers often twist the stories and plots around into something they think are enjoyable, and thus it makes videogame movies less enjoyable for fans.
Case in point: take the upcoming "Doom" movie-- we're no longer dealing with demons anymore but.....mutants? zombies?
But, alas, I digress. Hollywood makes these changes to ensure that all types of audiences, gamers and non-gamers alike, will go out to see their movie. The aim, I guess, is to make the most money out of the picture-- I mean, it's Hollywood we're talking about here.
--UJ
I've actually been trying to archive as much as I can of old stunt island films before they disappear forever. The archive is available here:
http://halelamien.no-ip.org/stunt_island/
Unfortunately, I've only been able to locate a little bit so far. If anyone has old movies lying around on floppy disks or something, please let me know at neuronexmachina@gmail.com
Also, Stunt Island runs like a charm in DOSBox, and you can typically acquire it from an abandonware site like The Underdogs.
Recently the guys behind Far Cry used the game's engine to create a short film, and for some reason people still refered to it as machinima. But it wasn't. In fact, it was really no different than a cutscene from any other game, but without the game.
Machinima isn't just using a game engine for rendering an animation. That would make it no more special than using any other animation/rendering software to do the same. If anything, it's less so, because they are using pre-made animation (or sound effects, etc.) and just making a script, while the computer is doing the acting/filming/effects, etc.
That has nothing to do with what something like Red vs. Blue is about, which is players taking the game characters and using them to ACT in the game's world, along with others that use theirs to control the camera to record the scene or work the props.
In other words, making a film in a virtual world.