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Xbox As An Indie Movie Studio
jhsiao writes "The NYT has an article about machinima and movies set entirely within video games. In the article they interview a number of machinima artists including the folks at Rooster Teeth Productions who brought us Red vs. Blue." From the article: "He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks."
Lets see red vs. blue just finished season 3, with a insanely large number of fans waiting for season 4. So basically you are totally and completely wrong. I mean at least visit the website once.
Philosophy.
That is not the funniest joke ever. That was the German attempt to counter the funniest joke ever. Oh, and it goes as follows:
Hitler: "My dog has no nose."
Crowd: "How does he smell?"
Hitler: "Awful."
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Don't paint RvB as subversives hunted by The Man- they have a licensing agreement and are cooperating fully with Microsoft.
Animation is *still* an expensive, complex, and labor-intensive process. RvB is easy to produce because it's using animations that took the original studio months to create. All they provided were the scripts, voices, and players to use the extremely simplified character controls in the game- all of these can easily be done in spare time and with zero budget and day jobs. Modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating from scratch are far more complicated processes, and they're not going to be simplified anytime soon because specifying the exact appearance and motions of every single movable part of the human body several times a second for the period of several minutes is an inherently labor-intensive task.
The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences has announced the 2005, not so annual, Machinima Film Festival. The festival will once again be held at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.
Machinima in general has grown in popularity and commercial success since the last festival in 2003 with such recent work as Paul Marino's Half Life 2 music video, "I'm Still Seeing Breen" appearing on MTV2's Video Mods, Rooster Teeth's recent series of shorts for IFC, the Nisha Chronicles for GMD Studios' latest A.R.G. promoting the Audi A3, and The ILL Clan's "Gamer Gags" for SpikeTV.
In all it's been a good year for Machinima, and it's only August.