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."

Comments

Just A Game

[MuNansen]

Keep an eye out. Hopefully in about a month I'll be releasing something that should change a few minds. (btw, I created "Ours Again," and am one of the producers referred to working on "Game On" in the article).

Re:More of Microsoft's marketing spin

[ZephyrXero]

This really has nothing to do with MS...lol. It could have just as easily said Gamecube or PS2, but the truth is that most of these machinma shows are made with Halo on an Xbox.

Quake machinima seems forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not 100% certain, I believe machinima began with Quake, yet it's strangely absent from machinima discussions. Arguably the greatest (but certainly the largest and most ambitious) machinima movie for Quake is Seal of Nehahra. It's a background movie to the Nehahra modification (which has extensive cutscenes as well). I think the length is close to three hours. The story was written by a published writer, and it's an expanded version of Quake's originally vague backstory interconnected with Nehahra's own storyline. Custom engine, custom maps, custom music, custom models, multiple voice actors... even before Nehahra and Seal of Nehahra were released, Quake was already forgotten by the rest of the gaming world, so I guess that's why it's never mentioned.

Another movie worth mentioning is Eschaton: Darkening Twilight, which was one of the few attempts at serious machinima (along with Nehahra). I think it had some Cthulhu themes in it. A sequel was made for Quake II (Nightfall), but as far as I know it was discontinued after that.

Quake had a lot of great machinima, far more ambitious than what I've seen these days. I've seen a bit of Red Vs. Blue and it didn't really impress me. Maybe I just watched some lackluster episodes. Over the Counter-Strike had a few funny episodes, but it was really just voice acting in official CS maps. I admit that I don't actively follow machinima, so I don't really know what kind of stuff is being made these days, but the more famous (or "mainstream") machinima like RvsB isn't as good as the older Quake stuff.

The new Half-Life 2 short movie, "A Few Good G-men," is a nice example of what Source can do with its facial expressions and lip synching and such, but I wonder if anyone will take it further by making a longer, original movie.

As for that article, I find it very strange. It makes machinima seem like it was invented by Red Vs. Blue, and that there's something profoundly mysterious and amazing about it. I mean, does RvsB take as much work as making maps, models, music and textures from scratch along with engine modifications? I doubt it. Some of the earliest machinima pieces for Quake were much like RvsB, but they became more complex, and now it seems like we're back at square one.

Re:Quake machinima seems forgotten

[The Evil Couch]

The new Half-Life 2 short movie, "A Few Good G-men," is a nice example of what Source can do with its facial expressions and lip synching and such, but I wonder if anyone will take it further by making a longer, original movie.

I'm in late script-writing phase for an original full-length machinima for UT2004, I'm calling "Skaarj Wars". I'm looking to release it sometime around this time next year. Depending on how soon I can get the attention and efforts of good modelers and mappers, it may get released sooner.

You can poke at Johari Sports Network to keep tabs on my project, if you like, but like I said, it's not going to be done for awhile, so don't expect too much in the near future.

Re:Quake machinima seems forgotten

[ILL Clinton]

Yes, Machinima started with Quake. I know because I directed one of the first Machinima movies, Apartment Huntin'. We used Quake for that. You can see that movie if you scroll to the bottom of this page.

In fact we still sometimes use a modified version of Quake 2 called Qfusion which allows us to use Quake 3 assets within the open source Quake 2 game engine. A nice example of this can be seen in a series of shorts we did for SpikeTV called Gamer Gags.

Just have to say...

[Krater76]

... that you'd be smart if you didn't waste your time doing machinima. I'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not something is funny or interesting, what I am going to talk about is ownership.

I can't remember when I read it but Gabe at Penny Arcade explained why you should not use sprite animations in a comic strip. He wasn't talking about drawing your own sprites, he was referring to making a comic from Mega Man sprites or some other game. The fact is you don't own the sprites and while it's possibly fair use to use them to not make any money, what do you do if you actually do make a good comic? Say you get 5000-10000 readers per day or more? What are you going to sell? Penny Arcade and PvP, as examples, sell a lot of different merchandise, from key chains to t-shirts to laser etched prints.

Red vs. Blue sells t-shirts that are mostly softball team shirts (small icon on the front-left, name of character and a number of the back) and probably do ok. But they can never have a shirt with the characters on it because they don't own the characters.

I don't know the licensing scheme with 'The Strangerhood' characters but that show is just lame anyways. If you bought a shirt from that series you are unquestionably without taste.