Machinima In The Cantina

The Guardian Gamesblog has a post up with snippets from an interview with SWG fixture Javier, the mastermind behind the Cantina Crawl Machinima series. These short films feature Entertainers dancing and grooving to music, shot within SWG and edited by Javier. From the article: "Q: What are the unique benefits and drawbacks of making machinima in an online game? A: The benefits, I think, are the flip side of the same coin as the drawbacks. It's all about the other people playing the game. When you shoot a video in an online game, other people actually participate, and sometimes on a large scale. The resulting video is very special to those folks. They can also bring their own unique personalities and actions to the process, much in the way real actors do. The drawback is that, like with real actors, people are often unpredictable, and perhaps even more so in a game which they pay to play."

Comments

Machinima

[FirienFirien]

I had to look up Machinima. Essentially, they're recording an in-game scene, and using that as part of a sequence.

Do the people in the shot know they're being filmed?
Technically you'd expect people to misbehave either way; some react specifically to the camera, and some just react to being in a crowd. I'll bet this takes a large number of shots...

You can bet that if people knew they were being filmed they'd want to be paid though; on the other hand, the privilege of being in the film (as mentioned in the article) might be payment enough.

It's certainly an interesting concept, and may in a way be more natural than animation or real actors, though you've always got the problem of people moving around in imperfect directions (not being in line with a wall, bumping off things a lot more - simply because it's a game with restricted movement control) and movements that are restricted to that of the game engine. For example - if you get a bunch of people in WoW to /dance, you'll start seeing 'mimicry' and repetition fairly rapidly.

Reality MMO dreck

[Red Flayer]

Oh great, now I have to listen to some n00bs chatter about how they were an extra in such-and-such a movie.

If I wanted to hear that crap, I'd go to the bars in meatspace with my media-industry friends.

Machinima is pretty cool, but why can't a game just be a game?

The interviewee in the article is producing the machinima equivalent of reality TV... it's just ego-tripping by the participants.

While it's a phenomenon on SWG, I'd prefer to see machinima used as a production vehicle for scripted shows or movies. I've had enough "Real World" that I don't need a "SWG Virtual World" to get my reality TV fix.

Props to the machinima "directors" who actually create content that they film, taking full advantage of cheap (as-in-beer, not cheap as-in-floozie) animation software.

Machinima

[Doomstalk]

I've always hated the term "machinima". Whats wrong with something self-explanitory like "realtime 3D" or "in game"? "Machinima" just sounds so pretentious- like they're trying to gain legitimacy through buzzwords.