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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."

9 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.....".

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    1. 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.

  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?

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    -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)

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  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/

  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.