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."
Record Function? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is my Xbox missing something, or is this a lovely little piece of misinformation?
Re:Does anyone else have the balls (Score:1, Interesting)
Sometimes, it's hard to NOT feed the trolls... (Score:3, Interesting)
Super easy movie making? (Score:5, Interesting)
With Machinima, you do still need some technical skills, but you don't need cameras or locations, or a whole lot of photogenic actors. You can create the effects yourself (within the limits of the game engine). I don't think I have any sort of directorial talent, but I still dream of the day when I can just mess around with it, just for fun.
I imagine that if it ever does become super simple for people to create things like music and games and movies, we'll just get lots of crap. But maybe we'll get some gems. Maybe people will be less frustrated if they can express themselves artistically in some way. (Of course, some will be frustrated when they realize they have no talent and no audience.)
For an example of one man's vision, you can check out the anime Voices of a Distant Star, which was written, drawn, animated and I think scored by a single crazy guy.
Remake LOTR... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now what would be great is applying the open source model to work on larger productions. I'd love to see a faithful movie version of LOTR. Done by fans, so no one has to watch Legolas shield-surfing or pointless changes to fit it into a 9 hour trilogy.
Actually, I suppose you could start now as long as you picked open formats for storing the movie elements(dialog, movement, models, etc). Then you can change the renderer over time as things get better.
Imagine a machinima Gutenberg project - producing free versions of all the classic stories Disney ripped off.
Re:Remake LOTR... (Score:3, Interesting)
Blender for the modelling, and it now supports two renderers (internal, and yafray) to output with.
There's no reason the open source tools available now can't output production quality movies.
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:3, Interesting)
People will log on to p2p movie nets to contribute their best characters and best lines in realtime, some will specialise in effects like weather, mist, etc. Clans will form, you've got a guy who's wicked with facial gestures, another who bangs out the perfect tunes at just the right time.
Movies will become dynamic, there's no reason the same story should unfold the same way more than once. Themes and plots will evolve with every viewing.
I hope movies become interactive events, an experience that everyone leaves feeling like they had a role, because they did.
Re:Record Function? (Score:2, Interesting)
Most games, though, like half-life, have the ability built in (called demo recording, mostly used to catch hackers), and everything can be done software-wise. That's the great advantage, anyone who has a modern computer and a few cooperating friends has the ability to get into this hobby. Doesn't get much more accessable.
Re:Welcome to the new /. (Score:3, Interesting)
Gotta say I agree. Frankly, people with a creative spark can make something entertaining with just about anything. Remember the Star Wars kid trailers that hit the net last year? I don't remember a fancy term like machima being used for that. It was a creative outlet, and it was exhausted. We all had a few good laughs, though because some peeps stepped up to the plate and demonstrated some talent.
I'm a little surprised that this is being considered as a new genre. I mean we've had puppets for years, this is essentially a digital extension of it. Eh oh well.
Re:Does anyone else have the balls (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. I also have the balls to stand up and say "Linux blows goats!" Unfortunately, few would honor either of our sets of balls for it since niether of us were smart enough to provide a thoughtful rationale for why we have that opinion. I guess balls alone really aren't enough for this world.
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:3, Interesting)
But but but...
Well, bringing down the barrier is in itself a good thing I think; and...
Different tools allow for different kinds of talents to surface and to get unexpected results, also a good thing; and...
There's the fun factor for those involved, not everybody needs to be a Spielberg.
The downside is of course the amount of crap - but wait... is TV today such a quality medium????
Re:Red Vs. Blue was good...but... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's great that things like DV and Machima have made it easier for movies to be made without millions of dollars in budget...but as we should all already know - having a lot of gear and money to throw at a bad story doesn't make for a good movie. And you can have the crappiest production values in the world (Clerks), but if the story is compelling, that doesn't matter. If you've got a good story and know how to tell it, you can shoot your film on one of those old Fisher Price camcorders that recorded on audio cassettes.
That being said, I have always found the work of ill clan [illclan.com] to be pretty entertaining and well done. Perhaps it's because the creators are all skilled improvisors and know how to tell stories. Or maybe just because I think lumberjacks are inherently funny.
Re:Super easy movie making? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, there's lots of drek, but there's also an increase in the amount of good quality stuff.
You brought the example of cheap pencils and paper. Go back 1000 years and very few people knew how to write. These days a huge percentage of the world's population can read/write, and it's even higher if you only consider so-called western society. So sure, there's lots of crap (looks at Slashdot *g*) but there's also lots of great stuff. We have more books published every year than was published in the entire 2 millenia before the printing press was invented. Most of them are crap, but even if only 1% is great that is still 10s of 1000s of great books per year.
So OK, I agree that the tools don't make the artist and they will still need talent, but an increased number of machinima directors can only be a good thing. You never know who has talent until they give it a go, so the shotgun approach (everyone gets the tools) works really well.
This actually leads into one of my personal peeves with copyright. The copyright cheerleaders claim that the rapid increase in the amount and quality of work over the past 100 years has been a direct result of copyright laws. I disagree. I think it's because the tools of the trade (pens, paper, musical instruments, recording equipment) have gotten cheaper and are more available. While at the same time the training available to the common man has increased dramatically (the "three Rs" are taught in schools, music lessons are cheap, we have libraries). I think copyright does very little to promote the progress of arts and science except in very exceptional cases (eg, large collaborative works). I think copyright has far greater influence on the monetisation of cerebrial material than on its progress.
Re:What machinima misses (Score:2, Interesting)
It does get suspicious when I just have a dumb grin on my face when I am just staring at a C program.
Re:Record Function? (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus, the great thing about doing animation is your cast can have "faces made for radio". That's the downside of live-action filmmaking as a hobby...no matter how indie you are, people still like to look at pretty faces. Or even if they don't...your actors are going to want to make sure they look good on the screen. Especially if you are NOT paying them.
Who remember Stunt Island? (Score:5, Interesting)
My question is, why hasn't anybody created something like this more recently? Although FPS game engines work for this, they certainly aren't designed for it, and there's quite a bit of roughness involved when one actually tries to create a movie. 3D animation modelers can also be used, but generally someone creating a movie has to focus on too many low-level details.
I'm actually considering starting up an open-source project this summer to try to create such a movie-creating tool, making heavy use of pre-existing graphics libraries like OGRE [ogre3d.org]. Would anyone else be interested in helping out with such an endeavour?
Not a new Medium (Score:3, Interesting)
However there has been a lot of really well done low budget fan films over the past few years. In fact I know someone that made videos from Battlefield 1942 from in game where the graphics are boardering on good high quality CGI work.
And I think that trend will continue. We used an Application called FRAPS in windows to pull video from games and save to a file on the Harddrive as we were making a music video using Rogue Spear: Black Thorn for a broadcast class once and then switched to Macs and added sound and such in iMovie.
I think the major thing here, is that the technology has increased to the point where its become easier and cheaper for creative people to share their ideas. But still, it takes quality writing and acting skills to pull these things off, otherwise it is no different than anyother form of eye candy that Hollywood puts out.
Good OSS opportunity (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently, our 3d modelling and animation programs have interfaces that are designed around extreme control, but take *forever* to actually model something. If someone can produce an effective visual side to an animation with nothing more than some people walking around (but can't draw worth a damn or act well), having tools to suit them would be quite useful.
This could actually make an interesting open source project, maybe using something like Crystal Space. Tradtionally , games have not done well in the open source world because of the way games work. Until a game is about 90% complete, it's generally not much fun to play. Open source generally needs interested people using a piece of software and identifying features that they'd like to have -- and implementing those features. In a game, this unbalances things. In a game engine used for machinima, it's possible to later on add in a "flying" feature and still benefit from the existing software that doesn't have such a feature. In a game, adding "flying" would severely unbalance the game.
Crystal Space [sourceforge.net] might be a good base for this.