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Games Entertainment

Machinima Invade Hollywood's Turf? 156

Posted by simoniker from the avatar-trailer-demands-getting-extreme dept.
Thanks to Wired News for posting an article discussing the rise of machinima, which are "animated movies.. utilizing the [real-time] 3-D graphics engines of games like Quake or Unreal." The article cites prominent machinima such as Jake Hughes' Anachronox: The Movie and the machinima-created music video for Zero 7's 'In The Waiting Line', and according to Bill Rehbock of Nvidia, "..machinima methods, in addition to providing a hobby for aspiring filmmakers, are starting to be used in the creative industries far more than is apparent. For example, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies." There's also a significant cash prize for machinima makers as part of Epic's Make Something Unreal competition we mentioned a few weeks back.
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Machinima Invade Hollywood's Turf? More

Machinima Invade Hollywood's Turf?

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  • Movies of Games (Score:5, Interesting)

    by r84x ( 650348 ) <r84xNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:05AM (#6405701) Homepage Journal
    They already are making movies out of games (Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, etc.) Is this just one step closer to a merging of the entertainments? interactive movies? More realistic games? Just an idea I am going to toss out here, hope it is grounds for a nice healthy discussion.

    • Re:Movies of Games (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sleeper0 ( 319432 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:18AM (#6405735)
      Not really any step closer. The examples you use are really just more of a symptom of hollywood being eager to latch on to anything that has an existing brand... like games or old sitcoms, or remakes, or what have you.

      I don't think the article is being very realistic asking if hollywood's turf is being invaded. ILM doing storyboards with a game engine? Great didn't they used to do story boards with pencil and paper? More like animators turf being invaded.

      Once you develop a game system to the point where you have so much character control and facial expression that it rivals cgi films I think you've probably made a CGI development environment and not a game engine.

      • Re:Movies of Games (Score:5, Interesting)

        by danila ( 69889 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:11AM (#6405883) Homepage
        Good point, but wrong. :) When you make an advanced game system, it will either give a lot of control to the developers or just take that control for itself.

        In the first case, developers would be able to edit facial expressions. In the second (a la Half-Life 2) the facial expressions will be generated automatically according to the situation. And while the first case would not be very useful to amateur machinima creators, the second one just might.

        With Half-Life 2 you can have a small team play out the scenes and be sure that game face expression and physics engines will take care of the rest. Look at their trailer - the gameplay already looks close enough to movies.

        The idea is not to replace the physics of the real world with a CGI environment, it is to replace basically everything except the director with software. :) Currently you still need some "actors", because it is easier to control the characters that way, and you need sound and video editors to turn the game footage into the final film. But the rest is done automatically. Once you have a standard renderers (and model/level formats), as John Carmack suggests (in a few years, probably in less than a decade), you will also have access to all the props and decorations you might need. Just what Valve is already doing for Half-Life 2 - they create a library of objects to simplify the level design.

        Then you will be able to quickly select and tweak the models, levels and objects, load up the game engine, take control of the characters, give some orders to AI bots (just look at the Rome: Total War trailer to see how AI-controlled bots can make for "totally awesome" Braveheart-quality footage), may be even recording actions for some characters and then running these recordings to remove the need for additional human players and record the scenes. You can be sure that most of the stunts, the lipsync, environmental sounds, etc. are done automatically by the engine. Then you will have the video and audio footage. Now just load up the editor and make the final film.

        The only remaining question would be the rendering quality, but with the impressive progress done by the game industry every year, I have no doubts that real-time video-realistic graphics can be achieved quite soon, probably in less than a decade, a few years after movie studio CGI reaches that level.

        • Re:Movies of Games (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          What you're describing is essentially Massive, the software that was used to do the large-scale battles in Peter Jackson's LOTR. I believe it's been released for public consumption, to the tune of a couple thousand dollars.

          The footage is very impressive.
          • Massive is certainly nice, but it only solves one (albeit important) aspect of the problem: it makes good AI characters fighting in large groups and also provides some physics. That's why it probably isn't suitable for anything other than medieval battle scenes. We will need everything else as well, like Sims2-style genetics, Half-Life2 facial expressions, Doom3 lightning and sound editing, etc.

        • Re:Movies of Games (Score:2, Interesting)

          by pornjokeguy ( 672666 )
          [have to post from another account somehow i'm unable to post with mine but i'm the guy you replied to]

          Wrong? I guess in your opinion. Just because people look at game engines and say wow, you could make a film doesnt mean that people will be, at least for things you'll go and pay $10 at the theater for. My opinion would be that you've been drinking too much of the kool-aid, at least as much as those who predicted midi would replace studio musicians by now. If nothing else the focus and economics of it
          • [have to post from another account somehow i'm unable to post with mine but i'm the guy you replied to]

            If you're going to do that, the least you can do is throw in a porn joke as well ;-)

          • Re:Movies of Games (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Cromac ( 610264 )
            why would a niche market drive (and take over) a huge market?

            Many Linux advocates have been saying that would happen with Linux on the desktop. A niche market (Linux) taking over a huge market (Windows desktop).

          • Well, I said "useful to amateur machinima creators", not to professional directors like George Lucas (but wait, doesn't Lucas already use Unreal engine?). Anyway, the point is that making movies will become extremely easy. Lionhead is already developing their "Movies" game, where you will be able to film short (a few minutes) trailers (that's interface for you). Half-Life and Unreal now include machinima tools (that's camera controls). Everything else follows and there is nothing stopping that progress.

            The
        • Actually the point that was made was that the fact that the use of video game characters in film has nothing to do with whether or not films and games are coming closer together. In which case, he is exactly right. Your response was also correct, but had nothing to do with his post.
      • "Not really any step closer. The examples you use are really just more of a symptom of hollywood being eager to latch on to anything that has an existing brand... like games or old sitcoms, or remakes, or what have you."

        Exactly. I vaguely recall (sorry I can't find the exact quote) an advertising article in which one of the marketing people working on the new Tomb Raider was talking about how the movie was "a total marketing package" or something of the sort. Basically it was one long commercial. The wa

      • Once you develop a game system to the point where you have so much character control and facial expression that it rivals cgi films I think you've probably made a CGI development environment and not a game engine.

        Game engines are interactive, CGI development environments are pre-scripted. That's the only difference that matters.

      • Well the thing is that the article description is a bit misleading and it's comparing two slightly different things. ILM used the Unreal engine to do storyboarding for Spielberg's AI couple of years ago. The system would allow Spielberg to decide shots, say where to place the camera and actors, any camera movements etc. (this was mostly for the Rouge City seqeunce). It was just a crude system to help the director plan the shot.

        It's not much differrent than say now using CAD programs to design sets inst

    • Re:Movies of Games (Score:5, Funny)

      by heinousjay ( 683506 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:23AM (#6405751) Journal
      The only hope I have for techniques like this one is a further lowering of the barrier to making movies. As the hobbiest tools get more powerful, we can possibly take a step back from the relentless "hit" machine and let some truly creative ideas into the mix.

      Of course, it's really just likely we'll have a whole new breed of porn.

      As far as game movies and movies games? 98% garbage.

    • Not so much merging as maiming.... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quinkin ( 601839 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:49AM (#6405959)
      For those who have read Neal Stephenson "The Diamond Age" will find this concept quite familiar (think 'ractives).

      There is a long tradition of movies being made from books, games, etc. However, this is not merely a blending of different mediums - I believe it will bring about a major shift in the powers that control our allowed entertainment.

      Think of a great movie that you have seen - now imagine that you could choose to download (free/licensed/whatever) the scenery (level) and any assosciated mods/custom scripts etc.

      You and your friends are able to recreate the "movie", either exactly or to your own interpretation, and allow others to watch live or captured recording of your performance.

      I can see the Hollywood Machine quacking in it's boots over this one (despite the fact that if they play their cards carefully they stand to gain much more than they will lose). Although the Casting Association of America is guaranteed to do all within it's power to restrict the casting to union members...

      I for one would love to be able to recreate the marine charge in Aliens.

      It is conceivable that groups of performers will become so popular amongst the audiences that they will be able to become commercial entities (if they so choose) themselves. Kind of analogous to the local community acting groups.

      The largest stumbling block at the moment is the difficulty in portaying emotive content. I can see "Rambo" making an easy conversion to machinama, but "Driving Miss Daisy" may be left lacking...

      What we really need is a system that (through consumer grade USB cameras) can capture the expressions on a face, convert them to relative muscular movement descriptors, and then send this information as modifiers for the model of the character is currently playing. For instance, this should allow characters without a typical humanoid appearance to still represent the facial movements in a mostly understandable way (ie. a smiling dog).

      I believe similar systems are currently being developed for "quasi" video conferencing, so a meshing of the two technologies would greatly benefit both goals.

      There are a large number of issues, which although not immediately obvious, bear some consideration before we rush in. Censorship (never a favourite concept of mine admittedly), copyright and a whole host of others.

      My overwhelming thought? Maybe we will actually get some decent entertainment if we take the power from the hands of the yellow-livered, "let's just do another sequel", mentally challenged, emotionally crippled individuals we currently call Hollywood executives...

      Q.

      • I can see the Hollywood Machine quacking in it's boots over this one
        Am I the only one who didn't get a mental image of ducks in galoshes trembling with fear? I hate to pick on typos (I make enough of them myself), but that one was priceless.
        Thanks for cheering up my morning!
    • At Kuju Entertainment we did this a few years ago with a game called Halcyon Sun. This was some four hours of realtime cinema cut scenes interleaved with about 30 kickass space combat missions. The interesting part was that the game was initially released for free, using a TV model. We designed the game as ten TV episodes, and you could download the story/game piece by piece. With zipping the episodes were under 5 Mb each (though they were bigger if you added the voice .wavs). The publisher went belly-up

  • The graphics aren't the story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:10AM (#6405711) Homepage Journal
    When you make a movie while mesmerized by the gee-whiz factor of what you can do with computers, you inevitably leave out the most important part of the movie: Storytelling.

    Look at films like Final Fantasy, SW1&2, or even LoTR (flame on!). The directors went overboard with the graphics and the story suffered as a result. In FF, the CG was the story. In SW1&2 it is debatable whether Lucas had any story to tell in the first place. And in LoTR, so much time was spent showing battle after battle, landscape after landscape, hokey special effect after hokey special effect, that it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie.

    But considering the current crop of crappy movies out, CG or not, I doubt very much that there is a genuinely original storyteller/director out there getting his work into theaters.

    • Re:The graphics aren't the story (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WankersRevenge ( 452399 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:45AM (#6405810)
      Not to be disrepectful or anything, but this has always been the case with the cinema, and I might extend my argument to encompass art in general. Hell, bring computer science into it, if you want to.

      The artists fall in love with the medium, but ignore the story, hence they create a crappy product. After awhile, water finds its level, and the balance is restored. I am most familiar with the the cinema but I am sure you can find a similar theme running throughout all of art. With the cinema, we had the advent of sound which produced a boat load of crappy sound films. I believe at the time people thought it was a fad and we would go back to silents which of course, would never be the case. Then came color. And with the rise of the blockbuster, we had special effects taking ahold of us in the eighties, and now we are seeing cgi enter the palette of the filmmaker.

      I will even argue the same with trends such as in the forties we had noirs out the ying-yang. In the fifties, we had musicals. In the late sixties early seventies, we had the counter-culture movies. Then the blackpoltation movies. We had slasher films in the eightes.

      All the crap dissappears and we remember the best. But during the time period, we are saturated with all of them. And in time, we will forget.

      This is history. That's all.

      • And strangely enough (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jeroenb ( 125404 )
        when artists ignore the possibilities of the medium such as the abstract artists of the 20th century did and focus exclusively on their on personal expression, people say they're a bunch of frauds for not producing work that shows incredible skill in the field of painting, etc. (think of the New York school of artists like Newman, Pollock and Rothko).

        Perhaps the medium *is* the art to a lot of people. In fact, quite a few think the movies mentioned higher in this thread are wonderful solely because they lo

      • The artists fall in love with the medium, but ignore the story, hence they create a crappy product.

        To debunk this absolute statement, take a look at any of Akira Kurosawa's films, Rashomon, Ran, Throne of Blood & Dreams in particular. Kurosawa began as a painter, and went into cinema falling in love with the camera. He used the camera like no other before him and in a lot of his films he used the camera as a large part of telling the story. It was his canvas. He was a master is considered one

    • A few things (Score:5, Insightful)

      by blissful ignorant ( 208109 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:46AM (#6405812)
      "...it took 3 and a half hours to tell one third of a 2 hour movie." What? Are you suggesting Peter Jackson could have compressed the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy(what, a thousand something pages altogether?) into one 2 hour movie? What LoTR did you see that was filled with hokey special effects? I think LOTR is generally agreed to be a near perfect blend of real stuff(the landscape of New Zealand, actors on horses) with computer stuff(gigantic statues, ruins, gigantic armies.)

      You give examples of bad CGI movies, but ignore the good ones. What about Toy Story, and basically, everything else by Pixar?

      It's easy to say, look at all this crap. The hard part is looking through the crap to find the genuinely good movies out there involving storytelling. And in some cases, so what? Was the story behind T3 compelling? No. Was it still awesome because of all the stuff blowing up and other CGI effects? Yes.

      • Three and a half hours probably refers to the Director's Cut of Fellowship of the Ring. It's an exaggeration to say that only a third of it was shown. It was more like three quarters, but he did add passages, many of which featured CGI effects, that could have been cut in favour of showing more of the actual story.

        I've been underwhelmed with the CGI in both LotR films so far. It's good, but not great. You can't simply forget it, especially when it's shoved in your face so often. For example: CGI not

    • Re:The graphics aren't the story (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RALE007 ( 445837 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:06AM (#6405873)
      I completely agree with you, the graphics are not the story.

      On the flip side, the easier (and less inexpensive) it is for a realistic film to be made, the more likely it is a good story will not be passed by.

      Our "current crop of crappy" movies as you fondly put it (I like how that rolls of my tongue, I'm going to be saying "current crop of crappy (insert noun here)" for weeks now) oh yea where was I. Yes, our "current crop of crappy" movies are the work of the same film companies that have been ignoring wonderful stories since the companies conception. With never available before ease, a small independent production will be able to create a quality film that incorporates a wonderful story with realistic visual and audio. Before now, we were commonly presented with either a bad story with decent effects, or good story ruined by a limited budget. Hopefully, with the advances in effects, and the costs of creating them dwindling, more good stories will be properly recreated in film, and we can just avoid the "crappy crop" as usual.

      Personally, I like the thought of the diversification of quality production that inexpensive realistic methods will allow.

    • ... when you limit the tools you allow yourself to use.

      if you allow yourself to use every new effect, every sound stage technique, every actor that all the money in the world can buy, you hem yourself in.

      its the small budget films that use a very strict set of rules (thusly forcing themselves to exploit those rules far more than someone that can simply add a cgi effect) that are the most creative, the most original, and the most entertaining.

      If you limit your tools when making a movie, you can make a gre
      • I remember reading about how Kevin Smith's first movie "Clerks" was shot on $60,000 from a couple of maxed out credit cards. Since he could mostly only shoot at one location (the store), he was forced instead to write a clever screenplay with lots of good dialogue that made the movie interesting despite revolving mostly around one static shot location.

        I feel that these limitations made Clerks a much better movie than Smith's later big-budget "Dogma". Not that Dogma was a bad movie, it just seemed less "tig
    • You should really watch the "making of" stuff that comes with the LotR DVD set. Those landscapes are real, and I was very surprised at how much of the "CGI" stuff was actually just old-school camera tricks (miniatures and perspective optical illusions). Some of the landscapes are composited, and there are some CG monsters, but there are also quite a lot of cases where they're just super short people in hobbit make-up, or 2D composites of 30' tall miniature sets.

      BTW, any filmmaker knows that audiences would
    • Good point -- concentrating on graphics to the detriment of the story is indeed a real risk. (LOTR I felt only went too far at one point, but to preserve the suspense I won't mention which :)

      Conversely, I suspect that the main reason that Toy Story did so well is because, despite the amazing graphics, they worked very hard on the story; everything you see is designed to tell and support the story.

      I was thinking yesterday that a story is to a film what a melody or vocal line is to a piece of music: it's

    • Look at films like Final Fantasy, SW1&2, or even LoTR (flame on!). The directors went overboard with the graphics and the story suffered as a result

      Look at films like 2001, The Abyss, The Matrix, or any of the other GOOD films that broke new FX technology ground. If you want to talk purely about CG, I doubt that it's fair at this point. The medium is new, and most of the really good work is going to be in the background right now, done by people who are struggling to get into the business. This is t

      • >Ok, name a battle that wasn't in the books. Name a battle that took more time in the movie (proportionate to story) than it did in the books.

        The troll in Moria. Rohirrim versus warg riders. Elves at Helm's Deep (not primarily CGI, but you did ask, and they did get screen time that wasn't in the books). It's not just battles though, there were other scenes added; some of them were benign "subtitles for dummies" scenes, some were nepotism writ large, but the "dwarf tossing" scene added in Moria was

        • So, I asked if you could name battles that weren't in the books, or ones that had an a disproportinately large role in the movies as compared to the books...

          You replied:

          The troll in Moria

          As I recall, the goblins in Moria engaged our heros in a battle in which Frodo's armor was revealed in exactly the way it is in the movie. I didn't ask if you could name a creature that was out-of-place, obviously you compress some things from the books rather than simply throwing them away (like trolls), and that was
      • I suppose I should not follow up to my own follow up, but in re-reading it I realized I came off as a bit of a gushing LoTR fanboy. Let me make it glowingly clear that I want there to be a trillogy that comes along next year and blows me away, and makes LoTR look poor by comparison.

        Based on the work that's out there, I don't think that's impossible as LoTR is a good but fatally flawed story in the sense that it myopically ignores vast areas of character development. There are some works that come to mind (
        • > I decided morphing hand matured when I saw that movie about the assassin going back to his high school reunion (don't recall the name) and it struck me that a particular scene used morphing, just to compensate for a real-world limitation in the filming (go see the movie, and see if you can spot it).

          http://us.imdb.com/Title?0119229

          "Grosse Point Blank" with John Cusack and Dan Aykroyd, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Which scene used morphing?
          • It was a baby. They mophed a section of its face into an image of a smiling baby face. It was just a little rough so that if you were aware of the technology, you could see it, but I'm sure most folks saw the baby smile on cue, which was kind of stunning to most parents, I'm sure ;-)
    • If you watch the extra stuff on the DVD you'll find that a lot of the computer aided stuff you probably didn't even realize had anything todo with computer graphics.

      And, umm, did you read LoTR? Cause maybe you forgot, but there are battle after battle after battle in the books. Maybe you'd like a G rated version where Gollum is a carebear.
    • But you didn't even mention the very first feature-length computer animated film - toy story. Which goes to show that blaming computers for storyless movies is wrong.
    • Check out the documentaries on the FotR DVD. A lot of the stuff you probably think was "hokey" CG was actually made using older full-analog techniques, such as miniatures (they call them "biggatures", becuase the models are typically 1:4 or so) and forced-perspective. CG was only used where it made the most sense to do so.

  • I wish the ILM Unreal storyboards were on the DVD (Score:4, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:10AM (#6405714)
    Since they went to all the trouble of making the virtual sets, they might as well let us kill stuff in them.

    • they might as well let us kill stuff in them.

      Lucas probably didn't want to admit that he knows that everyone that watches to movie wants to go and shoot Jar-Jar.

      • "Lucas probably didn't want to admit that he knows that everyone that watches to movie wants to go and shoot Jar-Jar."

        Well...after watching some interview with him (or the making of..) on tv...I seem to remember he was asked a question regarding Jar-jar (something along the lines of: What were you thinking? :) and he sort of indirectly implied in a roundabout way that yes, perhaps Jarjar might've possibly been a mistake...maybe :)

  • Animatrix shows the future (Score:5, Interesting)

    by teutonic_leech ( 596265 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:12AM (#6405725)
    I just went to the Anime Expo 2003 in Anaheim and saw the entire Animatrix there. It's simply incredible what they are pulling off these days. I predicted something like this over 10 years ago, when 3D was just getting on to a lukewarm start, but I'm still flabbergasted seeing almost life-like actors completely generated in 3D. Now, give those guys another 10 or 20 years and we will be able to generate realistic movies entirely in a computer. And, I must add of course: Can you imagine a beowolf cluster of these? ;-)

  • Anachronix??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by philovivero ( 321158 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:15AM (#6405731) Homepage Journal
    OMFG, if they think Anachronix is competition for real movies, they're in for a biiiig surprise. Watch more than 5 minutes of it sometime.

    The direction is utter, if I might be so bold, s--t. The camerawork is dizzying for no real cinematic effect. The plot is nearly nonexistant. The mood is dull and always dark.

    If you want to talk about real Machinima competition for hollywood, the only thing I've seen that comes close is the Reds vs. Blues Halo-rendered comedy, which even then is only funny the first two or three episodes. Then it starts to drag on in the way that amateur comedy tends to do.

    I'm afraid we've got a long, long time before the techniques get smoothed out and we stop focussing on technology and start focussing a little on story, direction, editing, and foley art.

    • Re:Anachronox??? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by duffhuff ( 688339 )
      The camerawork is dizzying for no real cinematic effect. The plot is nearly nonexistant. The mood is dull and always dark.

      To be fair, most games with "cinematic" cutscenes tend to do really impossible things with the camera. It's generally because the directors have a full 6-degrees of freedom all the time, and they tend to overuse it. Anachronox is a good example, though I loved the game. Or perhaps they don't move the camera at all, and you get very static, rigid cutscenes (Deus Ex comes to mind).

      Very

    • 99% of machinima copies the plot of Quake II (Score:4, Informative)

      by mayns ( 524760 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @05:14AM (#6406113)
      I've yet to see a Machinima that didn't look like the cutscene from a game. I'm not talking about the render quality or the models and textures. I'm talking about shoddy camera work, nonexistant acting, and most importantly: crappy sci-fi shoot-em-up plotting. Most of these follow the same plot as Quake II or Unreal. "Aliens are running around on a distant planet full of gunmetal grey buildings in the future. Now one person with a bfg will fight them off." Yuck! It makes David Weber books seem high-brow. I'm not expecting for anybody to become the next Hitchcock or even Mamet using CG in their rec room, but could somebody try making something other than the intro movie for Quake IV? Other than the Reds vs Blues stuff, all of these guys are making their own models and textures anyways. Half-Life mod makers have used new models and textures to make worlds revolving around special forces, world war ii, the old west, and even the american revolution. Why then do 99% of machinima films have to ape the subject content of the game they're using as a render engine? I'd love to see a well done machinima western, or a period war film. But not another Unreal III cutscene wannabe!

  • G4 (Score:5, Informative)

    by CyberBill ( 526285 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:26AM (#6405760)
    G4 Network has a series (I cant think of the name right now) which uses in-game movies and added in dialog to do all sorts of shorts and such. Kind of like a soap opera for teenage boys. Personally I think it sucks, but whatever. You can get to the website at http://www.g4tv.com/ Oh, the name of the show is Portal. Seems they only use MMORPG engines (Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, etc). -Bill

  • Short Stories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by retto ( 668183 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:26AM (#6405763)

    The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D. That was one of the funniest skits I've seen about the pen and paper experience.

    I can really see game engines as being a great way for someone to make a short story cheap, but I can't imagine sitting for an hour and a half watching a drama made from Sims footage. It would require VERY good writing, and that is not an easy thing to come by. As the technology advances, I could see it becoming the standard way to story-board or 'pre-edit' a movie before it is even shot.

    I hope some developing film maker could use it like a musician uses a demo tape, and convinence someone to fund smaller projects. At the very least maybe it will lead to a group of people that can create really good in-game cinematics or cut-scenes.

    • the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D
      That was the first thing i thought of too, but if you didn't know, the video is summoner, but the original audio is an old sketch by
      The Dead Alewives [deadalewives.com]. Theres a part two to that, you can probably find it on p2p, one of them brings a girl along, hilarity ensues.

    • Re:Short Stories (Score:4, Informative)

      by Allen Varney ( 449382 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:26AM (#6405910) Homepage

      The first thing I thought of when I saw this article was the easter egg from Summoner making a little good-natured fun of D&D.

      That's a machinima adaptation of a skit by the Milwaukee-area comedy troupe The Dead Alewives [deadalewives.com]. Slashdotters who don't hate Flash can check out a new adaptation by Cybermoon Studios [cybermoonstudios.com].

      I can't imagine sitting for an hour and a half watching a drama made from Sims footage. It would require VERY good writing, and that is not an easy thing to come by.

      Too true, but don't condemn the idea out of hand just because the medium seems unsuitable. One of the greatest works of Japanese drama, the Chushingura (Tale of the 47 Ronin), was written for puppet theater. An early animated feature, Lotte Reiniger's "Adventures of Prince Ahmed" (1926), is told entirely through animated paper cutouts, yet it still holds up quite well as a beautiful artwork. (I know because I just saw it for the first time last week on Turner Classic Movies.) I expect a compelling story can make its impact felt even in machinima. I'd like to try it myself someday.

  • Videos from MMORPGs (Score:5, Informative)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:33AM (#6405776) Homepage
    There have been some nice videos made of MMORPGs. There are some good examples here [stratics.com]. Particularly good are "Hero" and "For Albion" and "Dreams".

    These illustrate very nicely how much you can do with good editing and music, even if the visuals are limited somewhat by the game engine.

    • While we're at it, everyone should check out The Holimion Trailer [ign.com], for a NWN module. This stuff was certainly epic, something that isn't often seen in rest of the NWN but that is possible. Yippee - flying dragons, real war, stuff from the front lines, special effects that bring the NWN engine to knees... and the Koreans weird idea of English =) And most of the bits and pieces in this are available as custom content for the game, too.

      (If you try to find that one from P2P... SHA1: 536844f26e6779961585858d7c

  • Homemade vs. Hollywood (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dexter77 ( 442723 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:34AM (#6405781)
    From the article "The quality of machinima movies today rivals Toy Story five years ago, Rehbock said."

    I think that says it all. There have been home-made videos, home-made (music) CDs, home-made food, etc. for ages. Technology has just made it possible to spread home-mades to another area. The picture itself isn't even half of the movie. Those hundreds of people working on a Hollywood movie, aren't for nothing.

    It doesn't really matter whether you can do those movies at home or not, it still takes hundreds of people to make a quality flick. I've seen many machinimas and in my opinion, this is just hype. Machinimas are a wonderful idea and finally people can do movies about anything they can imagine. But I still believe that machinimas need atleast dozens of people to become even TV-series level.

    • Re:Homemade vs. Hollywood (Score:5, Insightful)

      by uberdave ( 526529 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:58AM (#6405848) Homepage
      No, it doesn't take hundreds of people and millions of dollars to turn out a decent movie. For example, "Blair Witch Project", and "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding". Much of today's music is done with PC driven MIDI synths. A DJ buddy of mine puts together his own tunes using FruityLoops. Sure, you're going to get a lot of schluff, but you're also going to get the tools into the hands of people who know that plot and character, not visual effects, are what makes a movie great.

      In a way, it is the Cathederal and the Bazaar all over again. Hollywood's star maker machinery vs small independants with powerful tools.
      • My Big Fat Greek Wedding was originally a play. Tom Hank's wife saw the play, liked it, and had it funded. It was several million in production costs.

        Oh, the blair witch had a few hundred thousand (maybe even $700,000) in post production applied to the raw footage before it was released to theaters. Of course that example doesn't work as well as "Wedding" but still, the tech isn't there yet to do it on your own unless you are willing to really learn your equipment.
    • Or it takes one (or a few) VERY dedicated people.
    • I agree with you that machima is just hype (most of the stuff is terrible) but I do think advancing technology has allowed hobbiests to do some incredible stuff.

      For example, the anime DVD Voices of a Distant Star [animefu.com], a half hour anime (with cgi graphics) done by a single person (except for the voices) on a Macintosh G4/400. It was quite incredible looking, better than some professional anime with dozens of people involved.

    • The quality of machinima movies today rivals Toy Story five years ago

      I'm really going to have to disagree (with the article) here. The quality of Machinima movies is not even *close* to Toy Story, or hell, even Tin Story (the predecessor of Toy Story).

      Anachronox: The Movie? Made from a game based on the Quake 2 engine. The Ill Clan? Real-time, looks to be about Unreal 1 / Quake 1 level in quality.

      With godly hardware, like a GeforceFX, custom shaders, and a lower resolution it could be possible. Square d

      • >Lip syncing is also pretty touch to do in real-time (The Ill Clan and Anachronox use basic facial expressions), though Valve has had technology which supposedly can do it for a while now.

        The news bimbo on http://www.Ananova.com/video has been doing it for a couple of years. It's a slightly different issue because it's done through Text To Speech and the animation is done at the same time as the phoneme generation. It also does some content and context analysis to try and determine an appropriate mo

  • Red Vs. Blue (Score:2, Informative)

    by gopher_hunt ( 574487 )
    Along the same lines is the Red Vs. Blue series availible at http://www.redvsblue.com/ [redvsblue.com]
    They are working on the Blood Gulch story right now, and have about half of it up for d/l (using Bittorrent)

  • Copyright/licensing issues? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by orbital3 ( 153855 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @02:54AM (#6405833)
    After seeing stuff like Red Vs. Blue [redvsblue.com], I've wondered whether this technically violates copyrights. The models, textures, etc. were created by people other than the ones doing the posing, scripting, etc. Also (I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this one already, but I'll ask in case anyone knows for sure), can you use any game/rendering engine to do things like this with your own models/textures/sounds, or are you technically supposed to license the engine as well?

    I'm really interested in these questions because I think this is a great way for people who want to tell stories but who don't have the resources to use other media to get their material out there, and I hope we see more of it in the future.
    • I think Red vs. Blue (which I love, and am a super sponsor of) and Warthog revisited (in addition to Warthog Jump) get away with this stuff primarily because:
      A) Halo's smart enough to understand that what they're doing is free publicity for the game -- and on a personal note, it works. I didn't particularly want an XBox+Halo, but the only thing stopping me from getting it at this point is the fact the new job is starting in a week and until then I have no money; RvB sold me on the game;
      B) They're not exact

    • WARNING: This post contains half-remembered incidents of years ago, learned second-hand. Until somone more dilligent than I provides factual backup, it should be regarded as rumor.

      I recall a court case of many years ago, where some packager was selling a CD-ROM collection of user-created maps for Duke Nukem 3D (often without the map maker's permission). 3D Realms sued them for copyright infringement, and won.

      Now, on its face, this seems absurd. The CD-ROM contained only user-created data. None of 3

  • Big deal. If 3D animation still looks like animation... then what's the big hullabaloo about? It's still animation, just using new technology.

    I think computer generated images still need to go a long away to be truly photorealistic, which is where they would be the most useful. Even in recent big budget movies, Terminator 3 for example, you can clearly spot some of the CGI. Granted, it looks great; shiny and flawless... maybe a little too much so. Perhaps that is why it stands out so much. I'm sure

    • Still, I'd like to see CGI advance to the point where it is totally impossible to see an visual difference from reality...

      Apparently you haven't seen video of the Half-Life 2 demos. I'd give you a link, but I found it on P2P myself...
  • One other question is how long it will take for CGI to enter the adult industry. After all, so many of the stars have undergone radical surgical alteration that it would have just been easier to create a photo-realistic Lara Croft and send her off into action. Wouldn't need to pay wages or worry about STDs, etc.

    • Re:CGI in the adult industry? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by incest ( 622529 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:57AM (#6405972)
      It'll be a while. Probably a rather long one.

      Models as good as, say, the chick in Final Fantasy or the chick in the first animatrix short (Last Flight of the Osiris) are NOT cheap or easy to build, at least not yet. Look at how much they spent just to make Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within--$100 million+. I'd argue that you need a model at least as good as Aki's (the FF chick), if not better, to get the man on the street to want your porn. Most people, despite what you may have seen on the internet (Caution: that's porn), do not want to watch animated sex of any sort. Porn is usually produced on a shoestring budget (or shall I punningly say g-string?). If you spend $25,000 on your porn film, you're spending a lot, believe it or not.

      With a CG movie, you'd still need to pay the animators, the modelers, and the voice talent, as well as some time on a render farm to actually make the film. I can't help but think that adds up to rather a lot more than $25,000 right now, and probably will for quite a while.

      On the other hand, CG porn probably is coming eventually, and here's why I think it'll happen: reusing old animations and hacking up models to make them look a bit different (rather than building new ones) will result in a big savings over doing things the hard way. If that means some clever camera angles will hide that fact Porn Movie Alpha and Porn Movie Bravo are using the same sex scene, only with marginally different models, well, as long as it was a good sex scene, who cares? Certainly not the pornographer. That's how the cost of making a CG movie will be brought down low enough to make it feasible.

      Great, I just wrote about porn on Slashdot. That means an extra 7 years of no sex.

    • Re:CGI in the adult industry? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by josh crawley ( 537561 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @04:04AM (#6405988)
      The porn czars would really have to factor the cost of a huge render farm amortized over time.

      I mean, they've got an endless supply of fresh faced young whores who'll let 30 guys fuck holes not even discovered yet and spit on them, and drink a gallon of jizm for maybe $500-$1000 a movie. If the hoe wants to make it in the industry, she pays for her own fake tits and brazilian waxes, etc. The profit margin is huge because they can film 10 of them a day and sell every copy for $50 to some sex deprived sticky fingered geek. Even better yet, put it on a website for $29.95 a month, and the geek can whack it as much as he wants.

      I'm sure that there's some cost analysis going on there, for instance to determine that "even a hard core pud whacker can't use more than $X worth of bandwidth a day wrestling the purple headed bishop, and even if he goes over that he'll have to take a day off to recouperate, so the average turkey jerker uses $Y a month of bandwidth; if we make it difficult enough for him to cancel his account, for instance if he has to call an 800 number and ask to cancel his monthly subscription to DIRTY CUM DUMPSTER WHORES DOT COM in person, he'll probably keep his subscription until he cancels his credit card, which means our profits will go SKY HIGH!"

      That being said, barring the emergence of an extremely low-cost photorealistic rendering farm that can generate cum loving whores faster than an L.A. casting couch, this would have to be a long term investment of capital by one of the leading corporations in the porn industry, with views on transforming the porn industry; for instance, being able to cater to combinations of fetishes and deviations not already provided for in the market (necro-sado-bestio-scata-philia?) There would have to be a proven profit potential for any sane person to consider this; in other words, people would either have to pay more or BUY MORE PORN.

      Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?

    • "...to enter the adult industry"? Look, the old law of technology: After any given technology is out of initial testing, someone is going to use it for pornography. So it's not a wonder they've already done that.

      Hmm, merging Machinima and Porn... well, the only example that springs into mind (and that I have seen) is "Metal Pr0n Solid 2: Sons of Libido", but I bet this practice is actually far more widespread than that single example. =)

  • Well (Score:2, Funny)

    by bih ( 674728 )
    Well this certainly makes the movie to video game adaptation easier.

  • Machinima might hold out hope for movies (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ridgelift ( 228977 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:14AM (#6405889)
    If Machinima becomes popular, the immediate improvement in the artform will be storyline. People will become quickly bored of yet-another-machinima-graphics-fest (YAMGF), and gravitate toward [machinimas|machs] that have stories to tell.

    For example, I watched about 5 minutes of Anachronox, then turned it off. The graphics are cool, but the camera pans were too distracting and took away from the story. Hollywood's been guilty of the same thing. There are lots of movies with great special effects that are collecting dust at your local video store. "The Matrix" on the other hand is still a popular title to rent and buy. It worked because the special effects added to the story, and the filmmaking created a larger-than-life environment.

  • Quick, Alert The MPAA (Score:4, Funny)

    by KU_Fletch ( 678324 ) <bthomas1@@@ku...edu> on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:20AM (#6405900)
    MPAA Goon #1: "Those wacky kids on the interweb are undercutting our business again!"
    MPAA Goon #2: "Are they finding a new way to pirate our movies?"
    MPAA Goon #1: "Worse, they're expressing unauthorized levels of creativity and trying alternatives to film."
    MPAA Goon #2: "Those heartless bastards. Don't they know this could result in 20... maybe even 30 dollars in lost profits?"
    MPAA Goon #1: "Better get the lawyers."
  • Much the same battle, it seems. On the one side we have the incumbents using market control to milk a public with inferior but oversold goods, on the other we have the small independents using new technology to provide the public with the stuff they really want.
    Presumably Hollywood will go through the classic cycle: denial, arrogant dismissmal, panic, protectionism, decay, death.
    Don't you just love the way these things go?

  • Half Life2 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tyreth ( 523822 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @03:34AM (#6405928)
    I'm betting that some pretty good movies could be made from the haflife 2 engine, for those who have seen the 500mb gameplay demo.
  • If it's still on the Net, grab a copy of Quake 2 Done Quick (Q2DQ). It's a fairly small download but you'll need Quake 2 to see it.

    What is it? It's a recammed demo (basically a movie) of someone completing Quake 2. In 21 minutes. On "Hard" difficulty setting.

    There's an even older Quake Done Quick, but I haven't seen it.

  • "George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies."

    I have to resist the dark side....must not make obvious comment...aaargh...no....
    <<bangs head against wall>>

    <<Sigh>> I give up...here goes:

    "Used a computer game (engine) to storyboard Star Wars? Wellll...THAT explains a lot!"

  • don't download, quality sucks (Score:4, Funny)

    by Crass Spektakel ( 4597 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @04:10AM (#6405995) Homepage
    The Quality is a shame. Whoever encodet that crime against my eyes should be sentenced stop using videotools for live.

    The Videoterrorist used MPeg-Video-Level1 to encode 640x480 at a rate of 130kByte/s - including audio!
    For Heavens Sake, even using most uptodate codecs like MS-Video9 or H.264 its not possible to achieve anything watchable with that specs.

    The Encodingclone used INTERLACED material, but the codecs obviously wasn't aware of that... which makes the video incredible fuzzy. A five year old knows that this sucks.

    That Eyeball-Necromant even left a LARGE black border around the video - which is also VERY BAD for quality. While the black compresses very well the border to the real video is the problem, MPeg-Video-Level1 wastes incredible amounts of data on those.

    This Eyeball-Knife also is totally darkened, nearly not watchable at all. Even raising the Gamma and Brightness with FFMPEG sucks as there is nearly no contrast left after all those encoding failtures.

    My personal oppinion: The Ideas are smart, the realisation is ok too, but that ridiciulus encoding makes it impossible to watch. Stay away, don't waste bandwidth.
  • If nothing else, Anachronox deserves another chance to shine. I realize that ION Storm tends to rate a fair amount of ridicule in most circles (and rightfully so when you consider Daikatana), but Anachronox was--at least in my opinion--an amazing game. I'm not a diehard CRPG player by any stretch of the imagination, but of all the CRPGs that I have played, Anachronox was by far the most immersive. I guess it was just one of those odd games that got the critics behind it, but never managed to rate much atten

  • Don't forget "Red vs. Blue" (Score:4, Informative)

    by mblase ( 200735 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @08:51AM (#6406557)
    The Blood Gulch Chronicles [redvsblue.com] are a (IMO) very funny series of movies made entirely from in-game footage from Halo with the audio dubbed over. (As a bonus, BitTorrent links are available from the web site for recent episodes.) This is the first I've heard of Machinima, but it sounds like a similar approach using a different genre.

  • Yes! (Score:2)

    by sharkey ( 16670 )
    or example, George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic is using the Unreal engine to storyboard Star Wars movies.

    Fingers crossed: Padme dressed like Aida for the entire movie!

  • bittorrent / mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by RudeDude ( 672 ) * on Thursday July 10, 2003 @10:20AM (#6407003) Homepage Journal
    I'm downloading the 13 available parts (one at a time) and providing torrents and a tracker. Links to torrents can be found here: http://steem.com/bt/ [steem.com]

    If you have the downloads complete, please join the Bittorrent 'network' to share your bandwidth.

  • Something else to check out (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Thursday July 10, 2003 @11:02AM (#6407272) Homepage

    http://www.ananova.com/video [ananova.com]

    Basically a virtual newsreader done through animating a talking head as part of a text to speech engine. The subtlety is that it does content and context analysis to determine an appropriate mood; watch her go serious when talking about road traffic accidents, for example. It's not perfect ("fighting for their livs in hospital"), but given that it selects stories off the news feeds and TTS and renders them 24/7 with no human interaction at all, I find it fairly impressive.

    You wouldn't know it from their marketspeak site, but the company behind it ( http://www.digital-animations.com/ ) are working on expanding the content analysis and tying it to an animation library, with the goal of being able to select appropriate models and act out arbitrary text with minimal human interaction, and eventually do a basic render of a complete film from a (slightly marked up) screenplay.

    Heh, I'd like to see what they'd make of a screenplay of Tron. A computer generated version of a film about a computer generated world. Sweet.

  • I've been predicting for a couple of years now that the pure CGI movies will be going this direction, i.e. rendered real-time in the theatre or your house. We're fewer than 5 years away from being able to render a Monsters Inc. style movie in real time at a high resolution using a $100 video card. We're almost at the level of the original Toy Story right now, with the major piece left being hair (which is a complete bitch to render, and not present in the original Toy Story).

    The current state of CGI is s
  • More power to the technology, but animated crap is no better than real life crap, the problem lies not in the technology of making a feature 'film' but in the creativity and financing department. As we have seen with a few other animated powerhouses, great animation does not a blockbuster provide, especially here in the US, the land of the advertising buck :( What we need is a revolution of the money men, not the film makers....

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