Machinima - Spielbergs with a Joystick 176
securitas writes "The Toronto Star's Murray Whyte writes about the growing popularity of machinima as the birth of a new type of filmmaking and artform. The article largely focuses on Red vs. Blue but also discusses Jim Munroe's My Trip To Liberty City, in which 'Munroe adopts the genteel perspective of a Canadian tourist while meandering the seamy, violent streets of the game Grand Theft Auto.' The most interesting comment comes from the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences' Paul Marino who compares machinima to garage bands."
Socialization of the media (Score:5, Insightful)
I'ts like making remixes with your old tape deck machine and only one turnable in the early 80's.
Re:Its new, its shiny, it smells like a truck stop (Score:5, Insightful)
While your opinion may be that it sucks, a very LARGE number of people think there is some very decent machinima out there, Red Vs Blue being the best example. I think it is one of the funniest cartoons I've seen on the net and the way they produce it shows that they put a lot of effort into planning it out.
You also seem to not understand that they aren't necessarily doing it because they're huge fans of the game, it just happens to be their medium. What an extremely ignorant post.
If you think you can do any better, then please, by all means do so, until then I suggest you not comment on how poor you think the quality of their work is.
so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Before, there was bacially no possibility to create any animation in the same way you would create improvised theatre. ( which is an art form, by the way... )
Of course, most of what we see today is still quite rudimentary, if not to say downright crap. But the potential is there.
Red Vs. Blue was good...but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Vs. Blue was great. For about the first 'season'. There were a lot of cute inside jokes about Halo, like the limitless amount of ammo, and some amusing stuff about capture the flag in general("You asked for it? Why didn't we try that?")
However, they then promptly ran out of material. It has now degenerated into a lot of homosexual potty humor(you know, the kind that homophobes make? An entire episode consists of them playing with the android's, um..."switch") and so on. Much of the episodes are just so far out to lunch plot-wise it's like watching a bunch of frat boys trying to do their own version of Whose Line Is It Anyway (which is no great surprise, reading the blog and looking at the author photos. They all seem perpetually stoned). Any clever new ideas have been so severely beaten to death they've long since ceased to be funny.
Basically- it was great because the early episodes were well written and had purpose. Now, however, the plot sucks. Machinima is a nice way to do animation, but it's not even remotely impressive on its own; not even slightly. Watching some poorly written script that consists mostly of a bunch of identical halo characters talking to each other(and these conversations go on for a half episode sometimes!) is downright boring, and I've gone from a huge fan to "oh, they released a new ep? Hmm, well, I guess I'll download it".
Instead of just leaving it to their 15 minutes of fame and wandering off to do something else with their lives, or moving on to a new game (there are plenty, after all- imagine what they could do with GTA:VC!), they're just churning out the same stuff, ep after ep.
What machinima misses (Score:5, Insightful)
A time honored tradition (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Its new, its shiny, it smells like a truck stop (Score:3, Insightful)
I usually don't go there either - most people who review stuff don't claim they could literally make a better piece, but when the "review" consists of a long list of things that the artists suck at, well, it is tempting.
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... You ask what happens? What happens is you discover, even with the tools only a handful of people ever made *good* music. For every good one, there's thousands of crap mod files, crap flash animations, and now crap "machinima". Having cheap and easy tools can't make everyone a great animator anymore than the availability of cheap pencils and paper made everyone a great writer.
It still takes talent, but what it does do is allow people with that talent but without a ton of money to express their skill. What it may possibly hurt is the control large studios currently have over most entertainment.
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably about the same for book-writing, I would think. Anyone can slap together some sentences and pump it out as a book (or as a post on Slashdot... oh, wait) but how many of those grab your attention? Of every hundred new books that get churned out, you'd be lucky to even hear about one of them. The same will happen for movies. People will produce tons of crap, but you'll only be aware of the ones good enough to gather any momentum (and get moderated up... oh, wait).
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ie, the cream will rise to the top.
Re:Its new, its shiny, it smells like a truck stop (Score:5, Insightful)
You quite definitely don't need to know how to cook to know that something tastes terrible. And you don't need to know how to do machinima to watch one and say it sucks. (Or that it's good!)
You also missed the flipside of your argument -- if you can't comment on it until you've done one, then you shouldn't say it's good, either, because what do you know?
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone else wondered what will happen when it becomes truly simple for EVERYONE to do professional-quality desktop publishing? I mean, what will it be like when absolutely everyone can express on paper what they want as they want it, even without technical skills? Using whatever font they want, different point sizes, 300 DPI, right-justification, kerning, possibly even with pictures included with the text?
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Record Function? (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose it's possible if it's a modded Xbox, but, otherwise, I have no idea how they even got that idea. For an article on Machinima, you'd think they'd at least try to be accurate as to how the recording was done.
Red Vs. Blue appears to suck big time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the new /. (Score:3, Insightful)
This little thread seems to be an excellent example of people modding according to their likes/dislikes and not according to the quality of thought. The original post basically said 'machanima is not a genuine artform or at least has not yet produced anything significant' and for holding this view has been modded back to the stone age. The respondent, on the other hand, like machanima and as such is 'insightful.'
My 2c.
Validity of the medium/creation (Score:3, Insightful)
The only act of creation involved is manipulating the art someone else has already created. If I, for example, made a glossy book full of pictures of fine paintings with witty or deep and meaningful captions, is that art? Whatever it is, that is basically all machanima is at the moment: using someone else's creation to tell a story.
Improvised theatre, incidentally, doesn't usually take the form of, for example, rearranging the lines in Hamlet and calling it your own. It doesn't rely on someone else's creation for its entire existence.
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:1, Insightful)
What the hell? I was never taught anything called 'three Rs'. I can't even think of what they might be. "Reading, Riting, and Retardation"? No, that would be a profoundly stupid thing to suggest to children, who would grow up unable to spell and end up making a web page on geocities.
cerebrial
Muahahahaa, classic.