‘What have they done now?’ Machinima means movies!
The media revolution in computers just keeps rolling like a Texas freight-train, and for animators who once worked in pen-and-ink or with hand-painted ‘cels’ to create the legendary masterworks of Disney or Warner Bros., a development like ‘machinima’ might be viewed with a somewhat sceptical eye. But for the young and the restless (you know who you are) looking for a new and exciting technique to produce animated films or shorts, Machinima represents a genuine advance in animated film production of the sort no one could have predicted 20 years ago. Companies like Rooster Teeth Productions, Strange Company and others have jumped in with highly popular productions in this genre that have earned them a loyal cadre of fans, and the future looks highly pixilated for more and better products.
In case you live under a rock, Machinima is fairly easy to describe (provided you understand what a modern video game is and how video-recording can be done from computer-generated sources). As any parent of a male child more than five years-old knows, modern video games often use a complex and extensive ‘virtual environment’, as well as characters. Games like ‘The Legend of Zelda, ‘Halo’ or ‘Grand Theft Auto’ function for the player as an almost limitless animated world where a gamer can go anywhere, do almost anything, and leap, crawl or fly across endless and ever-changing vistas. In addition, as programs and devices like the X-Box have grown ever-more sophisticated, popular films or story-lines have been incorporated into this type of game environment, with recognizable characters, situations, and goals, etc.
Okay, this much we know. Chances are, Machinima started when some video gamers decided to point a home camcorder at one of their games to record the action as they played. But what is being done by groups like Rooster Teeth and Strange Company to produce animated films, is to feed images from the game environment to a video recorder of some sort (which can be a computer), and then edit each take into a brand new story, with recorded dialogue, etc. What makes this so ingenious, is that a film-maker can take full advantage of the motion-graphics, the sophisticated ‘do anything’ images, all the environments and action potential of a particular game, and use these elements to create a brand-new story-line of his own—that is, a finished film or a short with a beginning, middle and end. This is recorded and can be transferred to DVD, or posted for Internet downloads, and other formats.
It’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea. Hugh Hancock of www.machinima.com calls the technique ‘film-making in a virtual reality’. Like any film story, a Machinima film still requires a script, despite the fact that everything you will be putting on film (or video) originates from a pre-conceived video game or other virtual reality (VR) environment. A common ‘out-cable’ can be routed to a normal VCR to capture action, and then raw video footage can be dumped into a computer for editing. Point-of-view and character controllers (people) have to know their moves, and Hancock says pre-created animated character actions are helpful as the action proceeds. The ‘camera’ point-of-view is set up in each position where a shot is needed. Like any film, the director tells his controllers exactly what he wants as the video tape rolls. Lip-synch is one bugaboo, and minor movements as characters talk, or point a weapon, etc., must be planned. Hancock says a conventional computer animation package can be used to create the nuances of this type of action. 3D Studio Max might run a newbie Machinima artist $3,000 or more, but low-cost solutions are also out there. A video editing program is used to cut together the raw video footage exactly as you want on a computer. Sound is recorded and mixed to the master video, and titles, credits, or effects are created with basically the same programs. Hancock notes that image resolution is different for TV (foreign or US), and also different for the Web. So there’s a lot to know.
At this point in the “artistic revolution” Hancock and other Machinima aficionados talk about on websites like Fountainhead Entertainment (www.fountainheadent.com), its apparent that the majority of the work being done today consists of story-lines based on already-popular video game material. These include satires like “Red Vs. Blue”, also from Rooster Teeth Productions, based on the very popular Halo game series from Microsoft. Rooster Teeth is has also created a similar satire set based on the Sims-2 game from Electronic Arts, which will be called ‘The Strangerhood’ (www.strangerhood.com) . Strange Company is known for their work based on the Matrix games, and there are many others. The mode of distribution for much of this work is to post downloads on-line, which fans can access and either view or keep on their own computers.
The obvious plus-side for these Machinima artists is that their films have a built-in fan base of millions of gamers who already love the games, stories, characters, etc. The down-side is that Machinima finds itself locked into often making films using virtual reality games that already exist, thus limiting the potential for new and original stories from the Machinima artists themselves. To do that, they would have to design their own virtual reality environments based on their own ideas, a process that costs even established companies a lot of money and sometimes months of work with professional video game artists and designers. Hancock says this can be done based on existing video games. But in this sense, Machinima is a bit derivative, and may continue the course of its potential confined to a sort of fan-boy world where a good deal of the Machinima films are satires of popular games, etc.
Another key point you might want to consider before starting you own Machinima artwork is a little thing called “copyright”. It’s hard to say how Rooster Teeth and others have gotten around this, but obviously Electronic Arts, Microsoft and other companies are anxious to protect all rights to stories, characters, VR environments, and animation they have worked hard to create and promote. Many of these games, such as the Matrix, are based on popular films that are also protected. With video and DVD ‘piracy’ laws recently taking on the mantle of an international crisis, Machinima artists may face lawsuits if they don’t watch their step, and will also find it hard to sell or profit from what they create based on existing material.
“You can get the approval,” Hancock (age 27) said in an interview with Skwigly on Oct. 22. “If it’s not for profit, you can get it under a ‘mod’ (modification) license. If you’re doing it for profit, you need to talk to the IP (Intellectual Property) owners. Which we’ve done a few times.”
Which is not to say that the technique is not, indeed, ‘revolutionary’. Could it be, for example, that the world’s next “Toy Story” or “Finding Nemo” will be created by a company with the resources to first create a VR or ‘game’ environment for a new film creation, and then actually produce the film in Machinima? A cost analysis could be employed to compare what’s involved with each technique, and it may just be that Machinima in some form or other would end up being used this way on a large scale.
“You could certainly do the story of Finding Nemo or Toy Story,” said Hancock. ”But there’s a reason Pixar spent $100 million on those films.”
Strange Company boldly claims to have “led the world” in commercial Machinima production for five years. They can produce projects of any length, combining Machinima with traditional CGI for low budget products. Past projects of note include a series of animated shorts for a new painkiller (22 minutes), and a satire of the popular ‘Tomb Raider’ films and games called ‘Tum Raider’ for BBC’s Fiction Lab.
Films and projects completed or in development at Strange Company include ‘Eschaton’, a four-part series with an ‘occult’ adventure (numerous downloads available at the website); ‘Bloodspell’ (in development with regular production up-dates); ‘Ozymandias’, based on the poem by 17th Century poet Percy Shelley; ‘Steelwight’ (“a tale of swashbuckling heroes and Victorian streets”); and ‘Matrix 4X1’, a series of four short Machinima films from Warner Bros. famous feature films of the same name. The company also does a number of classes, seminars and instructional work in the Edinburgh area, and in August, 2003, acted as technical consultants at the ‘Summer Tech Machinima Children’s Film Festival’ at Manhattanville College near New York. Another festival is planned for 2005. Visit www.strangecompany.org for all the details.
Hancock said many of Strange Company’s longer projects could only be done on Machinima due to budget considerations. ‘Bloodspell”, for example, based on the game by Bioware, is being developed as a feature-length film that will end up costing Strange Company only a few hundred dollars to produce. Hancock said his company is hoping to release the product on the Web and at festivals in early 2005.
“We hope it will be a viable feature-length film,” he said. ”For all of these games, it’s made using custom environments and graphics. Most Machinima, you’re perfectly capable of modifying the game.”
He also commented that in terms of feature films and the quality of CGI work seen in Finding Nemo, etc., Machinima depends a great deal more on pre-animated characters, reducing the filmmaker’s ability to generate nuanced and colourful performances. “Machinima is much more like puppetry than traditional animation,” he said.
Rooster Teeth’s ‘Red Vs. Blue’ series of Machinima shorts (www.redvsblue.com) is the brainchild of college buddies and video-gamers Gustavo Sorola, Geoff Fink and Burnie Burns, along with Dan Godwin and Jason Saldana. Based on the very successful ‘Halo’ video games, the shorts are a parody of the characters and action found in that VR game world, and have been funny enough to capture legions of fans on the Internet. Numerous downloads are available. Estimates of on-line views of the ‘Red Vs. Blue’ series run into the millions.
Websites of interest you may wish to visit in your quest for the low-down on Machinima include the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (www.machinima.org); File Planet (www.fileplanet.com, with viewable Machinima shorts based on Star Wars; and Encyclopaedia: Machinima at www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Machinima. Numerous FAQs and tutorials are also available on-line, and Paraglyph Press is publishing a 496-page book called ‘3D Game-Based Filmmaking: the Art of Machinima’ which includes a CD-ROM and tutorial for $39.99 (US).
New technology makes new kinds of art-work possible. In the same way that traditional animation has moved aside to make way for 3D CGI artworks, Machinima will take its place as a viable technique with much to offer the professional or amateur animation community. Although the genre has limitations, the development of gaming and VR environments makes it possible for Machinima to go all the way from parody and satire shorts of popular games, to full-on original animated feature films. Currently, a theatrically-released animated film produced in Machinima has not appeared, but that may simply be a matter of time. Hancock’s website has 1,000 members or more, and receives 500,000 hits per month, and many of those Machinima artists may want to be the first. Kudos to those pioneers who have explored this new wave of animated entertainment, and for those who will follow.