Gnomic Utterances - Everything Must Go

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:09:40 +0100

Well, it’s the end of Gnomic Utterance Week, but I’ve got too many left. So, three for the price of one today. Agree? Disagree? Giraffes? Comment below.

The difference between a Hollywood production and a Strange Company production is that on the latter, there’s no-one the director can’t ignore. Oh, and the budget.

Do you know best? Do you have better ideas for your film than anyone else? Really?

A friend of mine describes the creative life as “throwing a lot of lemmings at a cliff, and waiting to see which one you find looking smug on a sunlounger at the bottom.”

The Machinima calendar

Johnnie Ingram — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:04:00 +0100

As Overman has already mentioned, I’ve set up a Google Calendar which is intended to be specific to Machinima (and Anymation). You can subscribe to the feed for the calendar using any compatible calendaring tool, or just do a search on public calendars for “machinima” if you use Google Calendar.

You can also embed the calendar on your website or in a blog post if you’d like to. I’ve added it to the sidebar on this site.

The exact purpose and scope of the calendar is still up for debate, so if you’ve any suggestions for events or additions to the calendar, or you just want to tell me why you think it’s a good plan or a terrible plan, send an email to calendar at machinimafordummies dot com.

Pure Controversy

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Wed, 21 May 2008 10:59:50 +0100

Gaining an audience is a craft, not a crapshoot.

But Is It Art?

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:57:36 +0100

Films don’t spread because people love them. Films spread because people talk about them.

Questions of Formality

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Mon, 19 May 2008 11:19:00 +0100

If you’ve discussed a movie idea with friends, you’ve done market research. If you’ve shown an unfinished film to your Significant Other and asked what they think, you’ve convened a focus group.

A Moment Of Lust

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Sun, 18 May 2008 12:34:33 +0100

How much do you love your film? Maybe you need to truly, madly, deeply adore a feature, but you probably only need to think a short has a nice ass.

A Matter Of Perspective

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Sat, 17 May 2008 19:49:36 +0100

Gnomic Utterances Week again. Agree? Disagree? No idea what I’m talking about?

Making a film and marketing a film are not two distinct things.

The Power Of Internets

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:07:00 +0100

Gnomic Utterance Week continues. Agree? Disagree?

If you’re one in a million on the internet, that means there are another 1,407 people just like you. Your potential audience is MUCH larger than you think.

Bonus content: There’s an excellent interview with the guys from hit web show The Guild over on Curse Gaming. Really good stuff about how the show is developed and how they got so popular.

Is Love The Law?

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:17:00 +0100

Hello, and welcome to Gnomic Utterance Week(ish), here on Machinima for Dummies. Agree? Disagree? Confused? Let us know.

“Make what you love” has it the wrong way round. Don’t make what you don’t like. But if you only love one idea, you probably need more ideas.

The non-game speedbump

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:48:00 +0100

Machinima creators are in for a bit of a shock.

Let me rephrase that. Machinima creators who move from games engines to non-game engines - as many commentators including me are advising - are in for a bit of a shock.

You see, we’ve become used to Machinima having the potential to reach huge audiences. Strange Company’s Fair Trade piece in World of Warcraft, for example, has reached over 120,000 people by now. Films like Still Seeing Breen, The Return, and of course Red vs Blue regularly attract TV-sized audiences of more than a million people. Certainly at Strange Company we’ve become used to the idea that a film attracting less than 10,000 people hasn’t lived up to its potential.

So how many people are non-game pieces like Tom Jantol’s beautiful Wizard of OS attracting? It’s one of the most feted films in the recent Machinima past. So, surely, a few hundred thousand at least?

Nope. I don’t have figures for Machinima Premiere’s viewing, but for all its other outlets, after more than a month, Wizard of OS, which took 5 months to make, has gotten just over 1,000 views.

The figures carry over. When We Two Parted, Strange Company’s new film, has only broken the thousand view barrier thanks to a high-profile posting on Machinima.com’s YouTube channel - and many viewers there are, shall we say, less than enchanted with it. Even What I Love About Christmas, the seasonal comedy piece from Phil Male Restroom Etiquette Rice has, after 6 months, a lot of pushing, and help from Phil’s millions of viewers, only just crested the 10k mark.

By comparison, Baron Soosden’s I’m So Sick, added only three months earlier, has so far racked up 250,000 views on the ‘tube, which isn’t even the primary medium on which most people watched it. And much as I like the Baron’s work, I’d have to say that Phil’s Christmas rant is at least as good and (you’d expect) more viral.

So what’s happening?

What’s happening is that Machinima creators who move away from games engine lose their inbuilt games audience. Now, the way this works is actually a lot more complicated than it looks, and misunderstanding it could cause you to trip up - it did for me.

What’s going on?

There are basically three components at work here:

Communities. These games have websites associated with them, and people talk about things related to that game on that website. This is very important - it’s not about how many people are interested in a subject, per se, it’s about how many websites there are devoted to that subject, how active they are, and how many viewers they get.

This is an important point to bear in mind when thinking about a film. We tripped up here. We’d reasoned that Byron is a well-known name, and hence we’d be able to raise interest in the movie. However, we forgot that there aren’t that many places on the Internet where people talk about him, and those that do are highly academic and out of our grasp. Hence, despite the fact that lots of people like Byron, we couldn’t find anywhere to talk about the film - unlike World of Warcraft, say, there’s no RomanticPoetsInsider.com desperate for content.

The games world is one of the fastest-moving, content-hungriest, internet-savviest interest groups out there. As soon as we move out of that stream, it’s a lot harder to inject our works into conversation.
Familiarity. “Animation” doesn’t have good associations for most non-animators. Either it references “kid’s stuff”, or obscure Eastern European art films with characters made from matchsticks. Normal people don’t hear “animated film” and think “ooh, I want to watch that”.

On the other hand, millions of people on the ‘net have very positive associations with phrases like “Half-Life 2”.

We avoid the unfamiliar, by and large. Machinima’s engine connections give game Machinima a huge step up by connecting something potentially threatening (a short film made by someone they’ve never heard of) with something very positive (a game engine they love). As soon as you move away from that, into a minority interest like Moviestorm or even pro tools like Tom uses, you lose that connection.

There are ways to combat that, of course, like writing fan-fiction based on existing universes, but ways to combat it whilst not embroiling yourself right back into copyright problems are much, much harder to find.
Catalysis. What are the films that gain the most hits on YouTube in a given day? Well, they’ll either be the ones on the front page, the ones being linked to by MSNBC or BoingBoing, or… the ones that are already popular.

The hardest part of gaining an audience for most films is getting the initial momentum going. With BloodSpell, we were very lucky to get that thanks to an approving post on BoingBoing. With Fair Game, we got it from WoWInsider.

A games audience on its own can’t propel a video to success. For that it needs to be both good and, often, well-marketed, either in concept or after release. But what a games audience does do is offer a few hundred or thousand people who WILL watch just about anything semi-competent produced in the engine. A bit of buzz from them and it’ll rise to 10,000 or so - and news sites will start to hear about it. Above 100,000, a film starts to generate its own momentum - people will simply look at the number of views and conclude it must be something special. And above a million, so I understand, the problem is keeping up with your own film as it rolls.

Getting the catalysing first few hundred viewers, particularly making sure those viewers are likely to be people who will post and talk about your film to others, is much, much harder without a games engine audience to back you up.

So What Can We Do?

Well, I don’t have any real answers. I have a few suggestions, but I’m still feeling this territory out. If you’ve got ideas on how to overcome the PR gap, please do post ‘em in the comments.

Consider making game movies : Yes, I know what we’ve all said. There are loads of good reasons to not make game movies. But there’s one very good reason to do so, too - audience-building. A popular game engine movie or movies can build you up as a name, can ensure that fan sites will report on your next movie even if it isn’t in a game engine, and can ensure that you have the catalysing few hundred or thousand hits from fans of your past work.
Make series : It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the killer app for the Internet video is the series. Blip.tv and Machinima.com both work on this principle, and they’re both right. Series allow you to build an audience over time. They give you multiple release points. They give you opportunities to come up with new angles to publicise your films - for example, BloodSpell got a boost half-way through from the Leipzig Games Conference controversy. And they let you attract an audience that might start with a single video, but will probably check out the rest of your work too. Again, it’s a familiarity thing - the first time they hear about your series you’re an unknown quantity, but if the same person hears about you again and again, you become known, familiar, and eventually they’ll check your work out.
Design movies with an eye on publicity : I know that sounds pretty horrible. But if you’re anything like me, at any given time you’ve got more ideas for movies than you’ve got time to make them. Consider making the one that you can most easily market, if you’re going the non-games engine route. Consider the communities who would be interested in it (and check they actually exist!), consider the news hooks (can you get a famous person involved?), consider, even, if it’s going to have a really striking YouTube thumbnail. All these things matter.
Make movies for yourself, not an audience : I got a good telling off from Johnnie, my co-author on this blog, after I ranted about all the problems I was having publicising When We Two Parted. He asked me what I was making the movie for - to make a good movie, or to get large numbers on a counter on YouTube?

Now, that’s actually a difficult question for some films. For my upcoming non-Machinima series Kamikaze Cookery, I am, in all honesty, primarily making it to make money, which means that I need numbers. But for WWTP, I was making it because it was something I wanted to make, an image I had in my head. And I got that image down onto the screen fairly successfully. Which means that WWTP is a success for me, even if only 100 people had ever seen it.

Be clear why you’re making a film. If you’re making it for yourself and art, then it doesn’t matter how many people see it. Although, obviously, more is nicer than less…

Machinima for Dummies: Category Tips and lists