The Research Roadtrip - Day 2, about 35 seconds after we went to bed.
Apr
In what may be a first, I’m actually posting this from the Macbook Pro laptop resting on, well, my lap. Normally that’s inadvisable, as the heat emitted from these otherwise sublime pieces of hardware is considered a little excessive for close contact with the trouser area. But at this point, even our laptops have red-rimmed monitors and keep posting pitiful requests for us to pour coffee through their cooling slots.
It is safe to say that the badgers are starting to come in from the long grass for us, their chunky, jagged teeth glinting in the moonlight of sleep deprivation. I understand that these are the kind of hours our technical editor and general Machinima impressario Phil Rice keeps on a regular basis. I can only assume the man has frontal lobes which can shatter glass at a hundred paces with nothing but vibration.
We’re about to run off to Short Fuze again, about whom I would say very nice things, but for one small problem. These people are sufficiently wired to the global Interweb that were I to say, for example, that they may succeed in transforming Machinima into something much larger through nothing but their change in outlook and unwillingness to settle for any goal less than “a million kids making movies”, they’d already know that I’d said that by the time we arrive in the office, as the sum total of human knowledge is fed directly into their brains via the unnatural knot of high-bandwidth cabling attached directly into Matt Kelland’s belly.
Were I to say that, in two hours yesterday, I succeeded in crafting a tolerable crowd scene and soliloquy from the Bard, using the Moviestorm software I’d seen exactly twice before, I’d arrive to see it daubed on the wall of their conference room in the excess brain fluid of their army of Daves and Bens.
And were I to say that the raw enthusiasm of the entire staff is energising, and that I’d never seen a Machinima tool development where every single developer seemed to be energetically talking about the films they themselves wanted to make in their spare time using the tool that is their day job, it’s highly possible that Short Fuze would in fact be aware of that statement before I made it, as Dave Lloyd swayed in the grip of an automatic writing trance, eyes glazed, mouth muttering disjointed syllables that might sound to an expert like the last remains of the long-dead Mesopotainian language, and one hand clutching the eldrich remains of a US Robotics 28,000 baud modem through which the dark gods to whom they owe their allegiance whisper the future of the Internet before it is made.
So I won’t. There are some things too strange and fantastic for even your humble correspondants to dare.
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Watch out for that hot laptop! I’ve got a Mac PowerBook and use a high end lap top heat sink pad I got from laplogic.com that works great. Because when I get the Sims 2 or WoW running AND SnapzPro AND Quicktime are open (to get film capture) that computer gets REALLY hot. Machinima is a great art form, but not worth cooking your internal organs for!
By the way, I am really excited that you are a Mac user, and not only for the tired old “Join us! Resistance is futile!” line you hear from so many Mac people, but rather because it gives me hope that your book will contain information for Mac users as well. Will it?
Mac machinimators, unite!
;-)
Macs rock.
It’ll have a bit of information for Mac users, but sadly not terribly much. We’d really like to have included more, but we basically use this Mac for editing, and we didn’t really think we could start a chapter with “First, buy Final Cut Studio”…
As a Mac user, what can you do with Machinima on a Mac for very little cash? We can certainly look at writing some additional articles for the blog.
(There is the possibility that MovieStorm will arrive for the Mac, but probably not immediately. It’s written in Java, so it can theoretically be ported, but it’s not a super-easy task. )
Ooh - Snapz Pro is the Mac equivalent of FRAPS, right? We’ll certainly include THAT information - and point out that you can use WoW on the Mac.
I don’t suppose the model and map viewers work on the Mac, do they?
Hello Hugh
Great Blog. Where do you get the energy to pump out such entertaining stuff and write the book and make the movie and retain everything that has everr been known about machinima and games and filmmaking? What’s really in that coffee?
Cheers
Peter
@1 - Yeah, we’ve got a little bit of mac stuff in there, and even a little bit of Linux stuff for *nix addicts like me. The sad fact is, though, that machinima is a technique built on computer game engines, and nine of out every ten modern games releases are Windows-only. We have to be pragmatic, and tailor the book so that it’s useful to as many people as it can be. Ideally, we’d like to have lots of mac-specific stuff, and linux-specific, and even console-specific too. We’re very limited for space, though, so most of the stuff we’d like to say is unlikely to make it into the book. Hopefully, some of the stuff we cut will find it’s way onto this site eventually.