Halo Movie Awards 2004 10
Wolfy writes "The now resurrected Rockets on Prisoner, the Halo Movie Awards begun by Cobalt Nova last year, has begun! Voting will be done by the public, and awards will be hosted by That Weasel Television (with prizes supplied by Red vs Blue, Xbox Ottawa, and That Weasel). Read the rules to the contest and pick your favorite movies from the past year."
Deus ex machinima? (Score:1, Informative)
As it happens, The Economist recently ran an article addressing some of these issues. The article also provides context and perspective that should be of interest to those participating in this discussion. For convenience, the full text is reproduced below; it is also accessible online [economist.com] (may require paid subscription).
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MONITOR
Deus ex machinima?
Sep 16th 2004
From The Economist print edition
Computer graphics: Hollywood movies increasingly resemble computer games. Now a growing band of enthusiasts is using games to make films
PAUL MARINO vividly recalls the first time he watched an animated film made from a video game. It was 1996, and Mr Marino, an Emmy award-winning computer animator and self-described video-game addict, was playing "Quake"--a popular shoot-'em-up--on the internet with a handful of friends. They heard that a rival group of Quake players, known as the Rangers, had posted a film online. Nasty, brutish and short, the 90-second clip, "Diary of a Camper", was a watershed. It made ingenious use of Quake's "demo-record" feature, which enabled users to capture games and then e-mail them to their friends. (That way, gamers could share their fiercest battles, or show how they had successfully completed a level.) The Rangers took things a step further by choreographing the action: they had plotted out a game, recorded it, and keyed in dialogue that appeared as running text. Pretty soon, Mr Marino and others began posting their own "Quake movies", and a new medium was born.
[Image: Is it a game or a film?] [economist.com]
Eight years on, this new medium--known as "machinima" ("machine" crossed with "cinema")--could be on the verge of revolutionising animation. Around the world, growing legions of would-be digital Disneys are using the powerful graphical capabilities of popular video games such as "Quake", "Half-Life" and "Unreal Tournament" to create films at a fraction of the cost of "Shrek" or "Finding Nemo". There is an annual machinima film festival in New York, and the genre has seen its first full-length feature, "Anachronox". Spike TV, an American cable channel, hired machinima artists to create shorts for its 2003 video game awards, and Steven Spielberg used the technique to storyboard parts of his film "A.I." At machinima.com, hobbyists have posted short animated films with dialogue, music and special effects.
All of this is possible because of the compact way in which multi-player games encode information about different players' movements and actions. Without an efficient means of transmitting this information to other players across the internet, multi-player games would suffer from jerky motion and time lags. Machinima exploits the same notation to describe and manipulate the movements of characters and camera viewpoints. The same games also allow virtual environments to be created quickly and easily, which allows for elaborate sets and props.
Games publishers have now begun to incorporate machinima into their products. Epic Games has built a movie-making tool into its spectacularly successful "Unreal Tournament" series, for example, and many games include level-design software that both gamers and machinima artists can exploit. Later this year, Valve Software plans to release "Half-Life 2", a long-awaited game that will include tools specifically geared toward machinima: in-game characters will have realistic facial expressions with 40 different controllable muscles, and eyes that glint. Conversely, machinima creators have built movie-making tools on the foundations of games. Fountainhead Entertainment licensed "Quake III" to create a point-and-click software package called Machinimation, which it used to produce "In the Waiting Line" by the British band Zero 7. It became the first machinima music video to be widely shown on MTV last year.
Just needs more links (Score:1, Informative)