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.

As promised last year, Moviestorm have now announced lifetime subscriptions, for f £149.99 / €199.99 / $249.99 .

Good stuff. Now, we’re just waiting for that end-of-life policy…

It’s Ada Lovelace Day again and so, in a combination of genuinely heartfelt celebration and bare-faced self-promotion, here’s a link to our article from this time last year, Women Who Have Changed Machinima.

If anything, women have become even more prominent in Machinima and Anymation over the past twelve months. It’s particularly obvious in the more abstract creative communities such as Moviestorm or IClone, but even the communities for supposedly male-oriented games have many prominent female bloggers, movie-makers and celebrity players.

So, let’s once again raise a glass to Ada, and to the women who make our community the vibrant, fascinating and challenging arena it is.

It’s not very often these days that I get excited by a new graphical advance, but this one got me.

Proper clothing! Proper hair! At last! (When it eventually turns up)

It’s amazing how far you can get simply by just asking nicely. People will volunteer their time and skills, give you lots of free publicity – even send you money sometimes. BloodSpell, for example, would not have been possible without the insanely-enthusiastic fan community that built up around the film, who did some can’t-put-a-price-on-it grassroots publicity as well as some can’t-quite-believe-it fan remixes and artwork.

We’ve said all along that, when it comes to casting your movie, if you have a specific actor in mind for a role, it’s always worth asking them to do it. Even if they’re, y’know … famous. You never know.

We’ve been proven right several times over. Machinima pieces featuring some very famous names have started appearing recently. Bathtub Production’s The Chronicles Of Humanity features internet superstar Felicia Day in a minor role, and we hear rumours that The Aventures Of Luke And Joe will soon see an appearance by a very well-known actor.

For Strange Company’s current project, Death Knight Love Story, Hugh has taken the “just ask nicely, you never know” approach to the extreme. The cast list includes Anna Chancellor (Four Weddings And A Funeral, St Trinian’s), Brian Blessed (I Claudius, The Phantom Menace[1]), Jack Davenport (Pirates Of The Carribbean, Flash Forward) and Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous, The New Avengers).

Machinima (and anymation) has always been inovative, but it’s only in the comparitively recent past that the external perception of machinima (and knowledge of its existence!) has become sufficiently strong to attract actors this serious. Fame doesn’t automatically imply talent of course, any more than lack of fame implies lack of talent, but the wider world is now starting to realise what we’ve known all along: Machinima can produce movies that hold their own against any other type of film-making.

It just goes to show: you never know who’ll say “yes” until you ask.

Disclosure of bias: I’m a creative consultant on Death Knight Love Story, and Hugh is the writer/director. We’re as biased as can be, and we’re not pretending otherwise!

¹ Oh alright. Flash Gordon, too.

We received word of a Machinima festival with seven hours (!) of screenings happening in Second Life next weekend - here are the details:

MMIF 2010 MaMachinima International Festival Saturday Feb. 20th , 2010 MMIF sims (SL) + Planetart, Amsterdam (NL)

‘MMIF 2010’ is the second edition of an annual film festival in 3D cyberspace with a screening in physical space (‘RL’). A seven hour movie marathon with a two hour afterparty. MMIF 2010 can also be followed on the web via live stream broadcasts.

The MMIF is a celebration of ‘Machinima’: a new cinematic art form, created with virtual worlds and video games. On 3D Internet platforms like Second Life, any kind of movie sets can be build for very low costs. The MMIF aims to bring machinima to a wider audience, online – and offline. Machinima artists from all over the world are present in real time at the virtual MMIF Theatre. They present over 50 short films and have talks with other machinimatographers and an international audience.

Audience in Amsterdam can follow the MMIF event projected live on a big screen at the Planetart Medialab Artspace. They can bring their own laptop computers to interact with the show on the big screen. Free wireless Internet and electricity is provided. No entrance fee at Planetart, however tickets are required - reservations must be made via email. Details at http://MMIF.org

The MMIF is a volunteer-run non-profit collaboration of MaMachinima with Planetart, UrbanResort, Meta.Live.Nu, Pop Art Lab, VMax, Ystreams.TV, Metaworld Broadcasting, MetaMeets, Gallery Fermate, and many volunteers. MMIF 2010 is financed by donations and gifts. Virtual land sponsored by Linden Lab. The MMIF was initiated by the Dutch Film maker Chantal Harvey.

MMIF 2010 info, promo video, full programme, live streams, contact and latest updates and changes at http://MMIF.org

MMIF 2010 ARTISTS:

Gala Charron - Ogogoro - Lainy Voom - Draxtor Despres - Bryn Oh - Rohan Fermi - Toxic Menges - Tara Yeats - Phaylen Fairchild - Pooky Amsterdam & Russell (Rosco) Boyd - Poid Mahovlich - CodeWarrior Carling - Evie Fairchild - Graham Miami - Kronos Kirkorian - Osprey Therian - Chaffro Schoonmaker - SaveMe Oh - Dulci Parx - Chatnoir Studios - Paisley Beebe - Rysan Fall - Sol Bartz (phil Rice) - Rocksea Renegade - Cisko Vandeverre – Nitwacket (Pyewacket Bellman) - Chantal Harvey - Lowe Runo - Pia Klaar - Al Peretz - Halden Beaumont - Kolor Fall - Binary Quandry - spyVspy Aeon - Animatechnica - Miles Eleventhauer - Lizsolo Mathilde - Delgado Cinquetti - L1aura Loire - Iono Allen - Pyewacket Kazyanenko - Fort Knight - Luca Lisci - Larkworthy Antfarm - Beans Canning - Gtoon Jun - Tutsy Navarathna - Hadji Ling - Colemarie Soleil - Xineohp Guisse - Lorin Tone - Ian Friar - Suzy Yue - Claus Uriza / Emily Hifeng – Meta Lord, and others.

MMIF 2010 TIMES: Saturday 20th of February 19:00 CET (= SL 10 am PST) - DOORS OPEN 20:00 CET (= SL 11 am PST) - Opening ceremony + Machinima film screenings 03:00 CET (= SL 6 pm PST) - THE END + After party online in SL

PHYSICAL LOCATION: Planetart Medialab Artspace Wibautstraat 150 1091 GR Amsterdam (NL)

VIRTUAL LOCATION: MMIF 1, 2, 3, 4 Second Life Teleport links via http://MMIF.org

Runescape’s the 500lb gorilla in the MMO field right now, boasting arguably more players than World of Warcraft. As such, it’s very exciting to hear that the Runescape developers are adding a Machinima tool, the “Orb of Oculus”, to the game - looking forward to seeing what it can do!

UPDATE - the forum thread on this is up to 29 pages already. This could spawn quite a lot of new Machinima…

And the big news at the end of the year keeps on coming:

Pixel Eyes Productions have been trying to get an answer out of Valve Entertainment forever on the subject on Machinima, and finally, they’ve got this:

“”We are not interested in licensing our technology or IP for machinima. This includes providing copyright approvals.”

(Emphasis mine)

Wow. That’s kinda big news. The creators of arguably the best engine out there for high-quality Machinima has no interest in letting it extend beyond YouTube.

Having said that, it’s not new. I’ve had similar conversations with iD Software in the past - the summary being “We’re a games company, not a film company.”

Pixel Eyes have some interesting analysis on their blog. I haven’t really thought through this news yet, so - what do you think?

I’ve just noticed that Moviestorm have announced content rental options for their content packs, for subscribers. In short, rather than buying a content pack outright and being able to use it forever, you’re able to rent it for a day or a month to make your movie, for significantly less money.

That’s a very interesting idea. Most Moviestorm movies won’t take years to make. Being able to rent props for a day or a month, particularly if you’re planning your film well, will significantly reduce your outlay on any given movie.

Obviously, though, again it will result in movies sitting on your hard drive that you can’t play the 3D assets back from. But how much of a problem is that? I’m uncertain - I know I’ve not looked at the 3D assets for BloodSpell since I completed the film, for example.

It’s also interesting I haven’t heard much noise about this feature, and that it’s being dropped in just before Christmas. This is a pretty significant new option, we’ve never seen it before in a Machinima tool, and it represents another modification to the MS biz plan. But there’s not a lot of shouting going on, either from within or outside the MS camp.

What do you think?