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From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance

Posted by michael on from the entering-new-territory dept.

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."

17 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Focus on the independant filmmaker by BWJones · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.....".

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    1. Re:Focus on the independant filmmaker by GMFTatsujin · · Score: 2, Informative

      The Guild Theater in Albuquerque NM was recently host to Tromadance NM, the first of what will hopefully be an annual local filmmaking event. This was grassroots, homegrown, micro-budget stuff I'm talking about, like about $100 here -- I think $3000 was the max including equipment. I'm sure a lot of the shorter peices were budgeted literally with change dug out from under the sofa cushions. Lloyd Kaufmann of Toxic Avenger fame (among other things) ushered the event in, and everyone had a blast.

      I ran into a few folks that I'd known from high school a decade ago, who I them had the pleasure of seeing on-screen or as directors. It was a bigger thrill than meeting Redford would have afforded. Regular, ordinary folks *love* to make movies, and have some pretty cool stories to tell too. The innovation is amazing considering what some of these guys try to do with so little tech available to them, which ranged from simple Macromedia Flash animations to cheap Sony videocams to (rarely) prosumer-grade DV cams. I would have loved to see some machinima.

      The governor's office in New Mexico has waded hip-deep into local filmmaking, by which I mean Hollywood comes to town for a few weeks and hires local crews. This isn't the kind of local filmmaking I'd *like* to see the governor pimping the state for (SUPPORT FILMMAKERS WHO ACTUALLY WORK AND LIVE IN NEW MEXICO, PLEASE), but I guess it's a beginning. Plus, it means there are plenty of "workforce training" and continuing education classes to get the mad film skizzills. There's a lot to work with for the amateur, hobbyist, and professional filmmaker alike.

      Here are some links for the interested:
      Albuquerque Independent Film Cooperative Forums
      Albuquerque Digital Filmmakers Forum hosted by Blankstare pictures.
      Exhilarated Despair Productions Forum run by Scott Phillips, producer/director of Stink of Flesh.

      I'm leaving a lot of links out, but everyone is pretty much linked to everyone else, so those ones will get you well started.

      And that's it. I'm done shilling.

    2. Re:Focus on the independant filmmaker by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "That has got to be the worst job in the world! Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference......."

      Judge not, lest ye be judged, Asshole.

      Do something with her life? Like what? Write code? Supervise people who write code? Manage people who supevise people who write code? When does the society contribution kick in for that li'l career death-spiral?

      You've got no idea what that woman does with her life, for her kids, her community, her extended family, her church/temple/happy-magick-circle. You're actually defining someone by the means through which they pay their motgage? And all this in a post to that most glorious chrome-sheened temple to mid-90's self-absorbed gadget fetishists, SlashDot!! Wow. I mean, Wow.

      Helloooooo!! 1954 is calling! When you get back from your tour of duty with a Red Cross Tsunami relief team, it would like it's biases back, please.

    3. Re:Focus on the independant filmmaker by RobotRunAmok · · Score: 2, Funny

      Thanks, Bud. I got more karma than the friggin' Buddha, and if I can't burn it in reality-checks like this, then it ain't worth having.

  2. Animation & films by fisheye1969 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!)

  3. A Question To Movie Makers by teiresias · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:A Question To Movie Makers by mblase · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:A Question To Movie Makers by Megaweapon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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)

      --
      I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
    3. Re:A Question To Movie Makers by stratjakt · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  4. This was going on long before Quake.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:This was going on long before Quake.... by RushG60 · · Score: 3, Informative

      No need to remember; It's still going.. Stunt Island Film Group on Yahoo Groups.. http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/sifa/

    2. Re:This was going on long before Quake.... by RichardX · · Score: 2, Informative

      Ahhh, Stunt Island. There's a program that's screaming out for a modern day remake.. It was like a machinima production studio years before the term "machinima" was even coined

      --
      Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
  5. complaints about gaming at 2003 SIGGRAPH by peter303 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Just want to go on record by mdxi · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...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?

    --
    Posted with Mozilla
    1. Re:Just want to go on record by Golias · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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?

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

  7. Re:Let's not confuse clever workarounds for .... by GMFTatsujin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  8. Please let me know if you have old movies by FleaPlus · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.