Machinima for Dummies

As anybody who has ever attempted to do so will tell you, writing a book is not an easy task. It’s immensely rewarding, therefore, when people get in touch with us (as they occasionally do) to tell us how much they enjoyed Machinima For Dummies, or how it’s helped them to improve their machinima skills. Most gratifying of all is to see someone for whom MfD was a first introduction to the world of machinima, who is now producing consistently great work.

John Herd is a step above that again. He’s one of the stars of the Moviestorm community, where he’s known as primaveranz. Like all the best people, John’s a Scot, but he and his partner Alison now live on the island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific where they help to run the famous Wan Smolbag community theatre. Through John’s encouragement and tutelage, Wan Smolbag have begun to use machinima as a performance and production tool, alongside more traditional theatrical productions. They use Moviestorm as their tool of choice.

John’s just written this piece for the UK’s Telegraph newspaper. Reading that article, and realising that our silly book full of geeky jokes and obscure information has played a small part in Wan Smolbag’s success, was genuinely moving. It just goes to show: you never know what effect your work will have.

Nice one, John – keep up the good work.

You can see some of Wan Smolbag’s machinima on their Moviestorm channel, and you can read more about how they’re using Moviestorm in this excerpt from Fallopian Magazine.

In what must be one of the most potentially exciting developments for independent machinima creators in a long time, we’ve just heard that Winch Gate Properties Ltd., the creators of the online MMORPG Ryzom, will be releasing the entire game as an open-source project. It sounds like the developers are keen to work with the community, and will be accepting the best 3rd-party developments into the main Ryzom codebase. Projects already underway include ports of the game to both Mac OSX and Linux.

This is fabulous news for machinima and anymation. An open-source licence like this gives the double benefit of a game that’s easy to modify (because the entire source code can be studied and adapted) and a game without the usual copyright restrictions on use.

The code for both the game client and server, as well as several content creation tools, will be released under the GNU Affero GPL licence. The assets (textures, sounds, etc) will be under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence.

I’ll have to be honest now and say that I wasn’t familiar with Ryzom before this announcement, but I’ll definitely be taking a look now! Open-sourcing a game like this is an incredibly bold move, which deserves the highest praise. It’s crucial that we take advantage of the opportunity, and use this resource to create things which Winch Gate could never have imagined. In doing so, we validate their decision to release the code, we provide exciting tools and assets for the rest of the community to use, and we’ll have yet another tool in our anymation library. Although Ryzom is not the most graphically sophisticated game on the market, the flexibility of an open-source codebase more than make up for that. So, here’s a challenge to the community: go make something cool.

Original press release.

Coming from the “Rise to Power” competition again (what is it with the official Blizzard Machinima competitions that bring out such amazing work? The same thing happened with the Machinima Film Festival), Slashdance’s latest effort didn’t win anything, but probably should have.

I loved “Welcome to the Deadmines”, but this is its equal in its pure simplicity and emotion. Nearly all shot in-game, too. Love it.

I often go on about how Machinima enables scale that you couldn’t get in conventional film. Indeed, it isn’t too many weeks since I got all excited over my ability to shoot an enormous helicopter shot into a floating castle.

But there are other uses for enormous scale than massive landscapes and armies. Uses you might never think of.

Like chorus lines. Big-ass chorus lines.

It’s not a perfect video, but it’s bloody good. The fast cutting disguises the limited animation, there’s fantastic cutting between World of Warcraft sets and new stuff, and of course the music’s great.

I’ve come across a couple of interesting pieces of work lately.

First up, “Alan Smithee” (aka some Moviestorm director who doesn’t want to be identified) has produced, yes, some Machinima (soft) porn (NSFW, but nothing too shocking):

Why’s this interesting? Well, there’s always been a bit of an odd shortage of porn created in Machinima - the occasional bit, but nothing like the flood you’d expect. And this is the first piece of Machinima erotica that actually kinda works. “Sexy” has always been one of those areas where Machinima falls down, so it’s very interesting to see that we’re starting to be able to invoke it, even in quite a crude way.

Why does it work, to the extent that it does? Camerawork is a big part - it’s not just about showing mostly-naked people, it’s also about leading the eye in a teasing, intimate or revelatory way. Subtle animations help, too.

Another interesting element - the areas in which the film doesn’t work. Notably, the walk cycle. We tend not to think too much about the qualities of characters’ walk cycles, but for me, here, the walk cycle of the second character totally breaks the flow of the movie, and destroys the illusion - it’s such a male walk. Interesting to note the effect that a well-made but inappropriate animation can have.

Next up, we have some evidence that Half-Life 2 is continuing to develop to become a very credible engine for all sorts of Machinima creation. Previously, most HL2 work I’ve seen has either been based on the gameworld or carefully limited to minimise the need for new assets (Monad, Jill’s Song) - however, Shelf Life is a very impressive piece of work set, as far as I can tell, outside the HL2 universe, and with a sprawling list of characters and sets.

It’s decidedly slow, but has a genuinely interesting plot, some excellent voice actors, and all the other stuff I keep banging on about being important. Most interestingly, it really shows off why I HL2 currently produces much more watchable-without-game-background Machinima than most other engines (the common thread with the Moviestorm piece) - it’s expressive, the characters’ models have actual character which you can build a personality around, and it’s possible to tell stories and story beats using character expressions and eye movements.

Nothing else so far (sorry, Moviestorm - you’re closest, but not there yet) has managed this level of expression. And if that’s being married with an increasing availability of content and freedom for Machinima creators in the HL2 universe, we could see some very interesting things in the future.

I’ve just finished watching one of the best single resources for a filmmaker I’ve ever come across: http://www.gonefishingseminar.com

If you’ve been following my Twitter over the last few days, you’ll have seen my stream of tweets as I watched it - I only stopped because I was afraid I was giving away half the seminar!

It’s based on the experience of Chris Jones, author of the highly-regarded “Guerilla Filmmaker’s Handbook”, as he tried and very, very nearly succeeded in making a film which would win the short film Oscar. (He got to the shortlist!)

If you’re interested in being a great filmmaker - not just “OK” or “entertaining for a minute on YouTube”, but awesome - and particularly if you’re interested in being a professional, I’d say this is a must-watch. It’s seriously altered my thoughts about my next project and my approach to my career as a whole. Chris covers the entire production process, including showing us his first draft screenplay and taking us right through the entire production, warts and all. The honesty level is spectacular. He talks about casting world-class actors (you WILL recognise at least one of the actors he got), getting a crew of hardcore professionals for no money (his cameraman essentially turned down CSI for his unpaid short), and how a filmmaking career works (which I’ve never seen anywhere else).

He also offers the most honest and professional guide to getting into, attending, winning and surviving film festivals I’ve ever seen. Machinima people generally don’t do nearly enough festival stuff - we should all do more.

Some of the material is very film-focussed, which is less useful for Machinima, but that’s about half an hour of the seven or eight hours of material.

The course is £70 ($100ish). That’s quite a bit, I know. I was pretty dubious about paying that much, and didn’t for ages. But it’s probably the best investment in filmmaking I’ve made this year - better than buying Moviestorm packs (sorry, guys!), better than buying a new camera.

If you’re a new filmmaker, you might get more out of something like the Guerilla Filmmaker’s Handbook. But if you’re experienced, you’ve made a few films, and you’re starting to hit a wall or feel like you don’t know how you’re going to get to greatness, I really recommend it.

If you haven’t seen the new Ulduar trailer for World of Warcraft, you really should, whether you have any interest in WoW or not. (If you don’t, you need to know that for various reasons, the Orcs and the Humans are recently at war after an unstable peace broke down, and the wizards aren’t involved. But that’s it.)

It’s made by, amongst others, Terran Gregory, one half of the team that won a Mackie for their WoW movie The Return, and it really pushes out the boundaries of what you can do with both World of Warcraft and Machinima as a whole. The scriptwriting and storytelling, in particular, stand out - there’s genuine jeopardy, some excellent action sequences, convincing character conflict, and some fantastic use of standard WoW scenes to great cinematic effect. It’s also very interesting how subtle lipsynching really helps to sell the piece.

If you’re interested in writing stories using Machinima, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

You’ve seen ”Where The Hell is Matt”, right? If not, go watch. If so, watch the game equivalent . The Second Life, Frogger and Assassin’s Creed bits are particularly wonderful:

Why feature this on MfD? Because it’s a great example of Machinima as comment on games and on popular culture. Short, funny, and actually surprisingly sophisticated in what it says about games at some points.

It’s also a great example of how to craft a viral video. This thing’s going to pass a million views REALLY quickly if I’m any judge. Riffing off one cultural icon is one thing, but taking a whole swathe of pop culture, then mixing it with another very popular idea, as a very funny satire - incredible work. What other ideas can you think of that might work this well?

Whilst it’s not even really intended as a Machinima piece so much as a game trailer, the Black Mesa trailer for the upcoming Half-Life 2 -> Half Life 1 mod really shows off just how good Machinima can look these days.

Just stunning. And, if you’re a fan of the original Half-Life, very, very evocative too.

We’ve just heard the bad news that the Machinima Expo – organised as part of Festival Arcadia by Phil Rice, Ricky Grove, Ingrid Moon and Damien Valentine – has been cancelled, at least in its originally proposed form.

You can read the full sad story at the Expo blog. After the time, effort and expense that the four organisers have poured into it, this is a real shame. The Expo was shaping up to be a superb event for machinimators.

All is far from lost, though. The Expo will still go on, but is now being moved to a virtual event within Second Life. In many ways, this is even better. If you weren’t going to be able to attend in person, now you have no excuse!

Stay tuned to the Expo blog or the twitter feed for updates, and we’ll see you in-world.