Just a quick reminder - the Online Machinima Festival is happening in Second Life this weekend. There’ll be live music, award presentations, and the chance to hang out and chat with other Machinima creators - should be a great evening.
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.
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.
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…
What happens when you expose a bunch of hardcore video gamers to a 200-year-old poem? The reaction is very mixed. Strange Company’s latest machinima piece, When We Two Parted, is a visual interpretation of Byron’s famous poem of love, loss and regret. Hugh (the co-author of this blog and the director of the piece) released it onto YouTube recently, under the Machinima.com channel. The reaction and comments were not what he was expecting at all.
The Machinima.com You Tube channel collates and releases machinima videos by many different people, but it’s fair to say that a lot of the videos are made using games such as Halo 2. They’re often short comedy skits, set in the world of the game in which they’re produced. It’s not often that subscribers to that channel are exposed to something as unashamedly arty as When We Two Parted. So, what would the hordes of gamers and frag-video junkies think of Hugh’s Byron interpretation? Indifference? Confusion? Not a bit of it.
The reactions were extreme. Commentators either loved or loathed the piece. There was no in-between.
Warning: Strong language in a few of these.
The comments that were posted within just a few hours included (sic in almost all cases!):
I think you did a hellova jb on this. The poem was exelent and you oput it all together so beautifuly.
wtf u suck go kill yourself
boo you suck!! machinima dont put this stuff on here i know you guys are better than this
Very well done. An excellent poem presented beautifully ad with a style that is reflective of the poem itself. Great job!
This is fucking shitty. One star. I’d give less, but i can’t.
boo this stinks!. I can smell the doo doo coming out of my speakers
XD that was so awesome.
did u made this? nice!
just kill yourself plz
dude ur a awesome poet
And finally, the rather wonderful
who ever made this should stay in art NOT MACHINIMA
Aside from exposing a woeful lack of basic spelling and grammer skills amongst the Halo elite, this really does expose a larger fact. As Hugh, I and several other commentators have predicted, where once there were a few people making films in games, now Machinima (as it became known) is split into many sub-communities, usually based around a specific machinima engine or game.
The thing that’s of interest to me is that, in a lot of cases, these communities are not aware of each other’s existence. A lot of World Of Warcraft moviemakers think that machinima is “Warcraft movies”, and vice versa. Many Sims 2 moviemakers have never even encountered the word “machinima”. The same is true for many other groups.
Rather than bemoan the dilution and distortion of our precious artform, I’m actually going to give a virtual cheer. What it means – and I’m not sure that any of us have really grasped this yet – is that there are thousands upon thousands of people happily creating and releasing within their particular community. Not only are they not aware of us, crucially, we’re not aware of them either. It means that machinima is a much more widespread technique than we normally consider it to be. It also means that the “next stage” of machinima, that next big step that we’ve all been watching on the horizon for the past couple of years – where machinima spills over into everyday computer tasks and really does enable anyone to tell a story – is well and truly among us. We’re just not in the right position to notice.
The recent discussions on this blog and others as what should and should not be defined as “machinima” have only served to highlight just how different people’s experiences with this technique have been. The commentator who saw When We Two Parted and suggested that Strange Company “should stay in art NOT MACHINIMA” may seem ridiculous at first, but it’s actually a fair comment in the context. Whilst for some it was clearly a refreshing change, for this commentator, machinima is not art or interpretive visual storytelling. It’s Arby ‘n’ the Cheif. It’s Halo movies. What we all must realise, if machinima (and anymation) is to thrive, is that he or she is quite correct. So am I, and so are you. Welcome to the revolution: anyone can play.
Machinima stalwart CJ Ambrosia contacted us to let us know that season 3 of his long-standing series, PEDS, is now underway.
PEDS is a comedy drama which also has the distinction of being the longest-running Grant Theft Auto machinima series ever. It’s also the series that spawned GTA Studios, the de-facto machinima tool for GTA. You can watch the Season 3 Premiere on YouTube. Keep an eye on the Pawfect Films site for new episodes.
Over at Gamers Theatre, mrdougan’s post (which he freely admits is a full-on rant) has triggered some interesting discussion as to what does and does not qualify as machinima.
This is a big question, which prompts strong opinons on all sides. Hugh and I have been predicting for some time now that this will be one of the Big Questions for machinima in the future. My own opinions on the subject are fairly well known: I couldn’t care less. I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, I just mean that I’m not particularly interested in officially designating one creative piece as machinima and another as not. Machinima, as I’ve said before, is nothing more or less than a very useful tool for me. If I find a better tool, I’ll use that instead.
The waters are being muddied a little by the perenial inside-out vs outside-in debate. Many of the machinima community’s auteurs and storytellers get very upset at the idea of game-play and frag videos being included under the same banner as narrative-driven visual storytelling. Unfortunately, I don’t think they have a leg to stand on there – machinima’s origins lie with frag videos and clan-boast recaps. If you follow that through to its most extreme conclusion, then a video entitled How 2 draint@nk Onyxia is the purest form of machinima there is.
Of course I don’t think that my fictional WoW instruction video is the ideal form of machinima. The point I’m making is that there is no ideal form of machinima. There’s just lots of different, and (sorry Outside-in extremists) equally valid forms.
Edit: Phil Rice & Tom Jantol’s Anymation Manifesto (see comments).
Hancock fans might like to note that Hugh is interviewed in the June 08 issue of 3DWorld Magazine, along with several other machinima superstars such as Phil Rice, Paul Marino and Leo Lucien-Bay.
The article is a very good one, and has a much higher accuracy-to-nonsense ratio than most articles on machinima that make their way into the mainstream press. It’s also interesting to read an explanation of machinima from the point of view of hardcore 3D artists. Let’s hope this article encourages more talented 3D artists to dip their toes into the Machinima lagoon.
Yikes. My metaphor-stretching toolkit has just exploded.
The article also features a quote from me. Irritatingly, it’s a single sentence in which I manage to split an infinitive in a manner so magnificent that Gene Roddenberry would weep with pride. That’s committed permanently to print now, and will therefore annoy me till the day I die. I’m described as a “machinima veteran”, a term which is highly complementary but embarrassingly inaccurate. The article also describes Machinima For Dummies as “indispensable”, which made me blush a little.
My personal syntactical blunders aside, the article is highly recommended. UK readers will find 3DWorld for sale in most large newsagents. International readers might have to search a little, but I believe the magazine is exported to Foreign Climes with reasonable regularity.
One of the great joys of being a filmmaker is that all the rules can be broken.
For many years I’ve been saying that there’s not a lot of point shooting a film in Machinima that you could shoot in real life. If you’ve got the locations, the people and the cameras, it’s faster and easier to shoot IRL.
Sam Goldwater just proved I’m totally talking rubbish there.
“Monad” is his wonderful dystopian story about virtual worlds and personal separation. This is the first really modern, post-World of Warcraft social questioning film I’ve seen that works, and it works marvellously.
It’s also just beautiful - the shooting is exquisite, the lighting is astonishing. It’s the first time I’ve seen a film using the HL2 characters which made me forget who they were originally. (To be fair, I’ve not seen “Clockwork” yet).
The writing’s spare, startlingly realistic, and generally excellent, and the acting is first-rate - such a relief!
Oh, and there’s basically no reason it couldn’t have been shot in real life, except that there’s no way it would have looked this good.
Watch. This. Now. And watch ANYTHING that Sam Goldwater does in future.
A few pieces of news for the Azerothians in our midst:
Uber-Machinimator Baron Soosden has been hired by the venerable Machinima site Machinima.com. He’ll be acting as Community Manager there, and also producing new Machinima for them - at least one new series, apparently. Full post here.
There’s another feature-length Machinima piece on the horizon: MMMovie has released their first 10 minutes. It’s a pretty good piece, with great writing and voice acting, in a very “Scary Movie” style - I laughed quite a bit. Having said that, I’ll be interested to see if they can keep it up for a full 90 minutes, or if it starts to drag.
Finally, there’s a new Blizzard Machinima piece on the horizon: they’ve released the trailer for the new Fury of the Sunwell patch. As always, it’s quite impressive Machinima work, although I didn’t feel it was as polished as earlier efforts like their Black Temple backstory piece. Some lovely shots, though.
It’s interesting to note how even high-budget game creators like Blizzard have trouble competing with their own fans - certainly, you could argue that Baron Soosden’s work has been of higher visual standard than some of Blizzard’s!
Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) , will step down as CEO. Rosedale is quick to confirm that his work with Linden Lab will continue, so this is more of a “step sideways” than a “step down”.
A lot of changes and disruption recently among the familiar Linden faces. What repercussions this will all have for Second Life remains to be seen.
Via Massively and LinuxInsider.
That was not the best time for our longterm trackback problem to blossom into a full-fledged Denial of Service. Still, we seem to have fixed it now, I hope.
Apologies for the breakdown in service.
