The Internets are buzzing with the announcement of Project Natal, a camera for the Xbox 360 which will supposedly offer full-body motion capture for use in games.
It’s very, very early days yet (the video floating around the Internet bears the small note “Product Vision - actual features and functionality may vary”), but they seem pretty confident about their tech.
Full-body motion capture at a games console price? We’ll have to wait and see.
Ok, something rather cool today. As you probably know, I’ve recently been extremely impressed with filmmaker and author Chris Jones’ training seminar based on how he got to the Oscar shortlist with a short film. Many of its points are highly relevant to Machinima, and I was really interested to see what Chris would say to Machinima filmmakers directly.
Handily, he was as interested in talking to us!
So, today we present to you a 45-minute podcast between me and Chris, talking about making the best film you can, whether and how you should approach big-name actors, how to market your film and hook audiences in, and the future of professional and amateur filmmaking now that new technology is eating the old models alive.
There’s lots of really useful perspective here from a very accomplished filmmaker outside the Machinima world altogether - I hope you enjoy it!
It’s available here in downloadable MP3 - if you’ve got Quicktime installed, it should just play if you click the link.
Enjoy, and let us know what you think. If you want to know more about Chris and his filmmaking, you can find:
Vimeo seem to be the new darlings of the video hosting scene, but they’re looking less and less good to me.
Just after the fascinating article on video site terms of service in which they didn’t come out too well, we hear that they’ve deleted the incredibly popular “Craft of War: Blind” (one of our Machinima of the Year 2008 list) from their servers, apparently because “videos depicting people playing the game like walkthroughs, strategies, raids, pvp,etc aren’t allowed”, according to author Percula, second comment down.
It’s blatantly obvious from a thirty-second glance at the video (possibly-broken YouTube version here) that this isn’t a gameplay video, but high-quality animation that happens to be set in a gameworld. And this isn’t the first time Vimeo have deleted quality Machinima, either - Baron Soosden has had some of his videos taken down in the past.
Vimeo really need to get their act together. In the meantime, anyone got any recommendations for alternate hosting sites? I’ve really been impressed with Blip.tv, who host BloodSpell, although I know a few other people weren’t so keen - comments? And of course the Internet Archive is still awesome for Creative Commons-licensed content.
There’s a very interesting article available comparing terms of service of the major video hosting sites . Interestingly, current darling of the video hosting world Vimeo doesn’t come out too well, whilst Blip.tv ends up leading the bunch for fair usage.
There’s one question that keeps being asked about the new PS3 Home Machinima tool, and that is - how will users actually capture the video?
I’ve heard from a few people now, and it appears that, barring some miraculous tool popping up on release, in order to create any video using this tool, you’ll need to use an exterior capture device to capture the video from the PS3.
HDMI capture cards like the Blackmagic Intensity cost about $200 minimum, so that puts a pretty hefty pricetag on using the software at all.
I’m guessing we won’t see too much use of the Home Machinima setup unless something changes- pity.
OK, this is very much “just in”, but it appears that Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, have just taken the ground-breaking (in a bad way) step of threatening legal action against a fan comic.
WoWInsider’s Mike Schramm has posted the news, and he’s following up with Blizzard, so hopefully we’ll have more details soon:
First the legal crackdown on fan-made iPhone apps, and now this: German-based webcomic Shakes and Fidget, a longtime sight in our Sunday Morning Funnies column, has apparently been smacked with a cease-and-desist by Blizzard. Our German isn’t that great (and we’ve reached out to the comic’s creators for further comment), but a translation of this forum page tells us that Activision-Blizzard’s legal department suggested to them that there was enough similarity between the official game and the unofficial comic to cause a problem, and while they believe that they’re covered under parody laws, they decided to take the “offending” comics offline anyway, and are apparently currently working on editing them so that they can be put back up without any issues.
(From WoWInsider, Blizzard legal censures Shakes and Fidget)
I’m keeping up to date on this story, and I’ll put up more news as soon as we have it.
Currently, I’d say there’s no immediate threat to Machinima creators, but Blizzard’s actions are tending in a very, very bad direction, and I’d certainly suggest that you might want to consider another engine if you were thinking about making something in WoW. I’m in an internal Strange Company discussion right now where we’re debating just that.
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.
More details on the Home Machinima tool, plus a (very interesting) video can be found over here - http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/05/06/enormous-update-coming-to-playstation-home/
I’m querying a couple of details - notably how video capture works on the system - and I’ll have more details soon.
This could be extremely interesting - I’ve just heard that Sony are about to launch a Machinima tool within the PS3’s “Home” 3D world.
Here’s what I know so far, from Rich Bisso at Loot:
“The reason I’m writing is that I thought you guys might be interested in what we’ve been working on. It’s essentially a machinima tool for Playstation Home. Our goal was to try and create something for PSHome users that combined the two aspects of Home we thought were the most interesting: Social Activity and Interactive Experience.
Instead of making a traditional game, or even an ARG (which is the way a lot of Home development was going), we wanted to make something that would really encourage the player to get together with their friends and have some fun. Being spawned from a movie company, it is pretty easy to see how we were inspired to make a movie stage/set. It’s really cool to walk through the lot every day and peek inside the huge stages, so we figured that other people would be psyched to have their own stage and even make some movies, too. After that, we went crazy putting all sorts of lighting and camera controls, green screens, backdrops, etc in the limited amount of time we had.
It was fun and a bit of a challenge, since we were pushing the development tools in some pretty unconventional directions.”
Very interesting. Apparently the entire thing will go live in about two weeks. Obviously, details are a little thin at the moment, but we’ll let you know more as soon as we hear it.
You probably knew this already, but just in case you didn’t - both Johnnie and I (Hugh) are on Twitter, where we regularly post things of Machinima-esque interest. Recently I’ve been posting about reputations systems and mocap stuff, for example, whilst Johnnie tweets all kinds of Open-Source and Moviestormy things.
We’re hughhancock and johnnieingram over there - check us out if you’d like more 140-character Machinima goodness.
