Machinima for Dummies

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.

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.

I know Hugh said we’d be going quiet for a wee while, but I had to make a quick post when I saw this: the Havoc physics engine (which is the physics engine behind all the games that tout realistic physics as one of their selling points) will be released for free in May.

Now, this is not the quantum-shift for the machinima world that you might at first think. Make no mistake – Havoc is a stunningly complex beast. It’s effectively a code library on which to build game engines. It’s unlikely to see much use in the machinima world, even from the hardest of hardcore hackers. Nonetheless, you never know. The community has surprised us before, and it’ll do so again. Maybe a dazzlingly clever use of this free physics toolkit will be the next way they do so. So, I’m doing my civic duty and posting about the imminent release of the code, just in case somebody far clever than me is reading and gets inspired. Fingers crossed.

Via kotaku – thanks to Chris Ollis for bringing this to our attention in the first place.

If you haven’t seen ”The Dumb Man”, stop what you’re doing right now and go watch it.

It’s a surrealist piece with a strong Victorian feel, made in Second Life, and it’s just fantastic. The mood and feel are awesome, the imagery is marvellous, the story’s rather good, and it represents a fantastic use of SL for Machinima creation.

The character design, in particular, shows off the increasing strength of Second Life in creating great-looking characters (at least when they’re static), the lighting’s wonderfully done (it’s by Lainy Voom, creator of “Tale from Midnight City” last year), and generally it represents some fantastic Machinima work.

There’s also an interview with Lainy on the project over at New World Notes. Worth a read. Apparently there’s virtually no post-production in the entire thing!

Antics 3D has been around for quite a while now, but up until very recently has had a moderately hefty price tag. Not any more! Along with a shiny new website design, the Antics team have released version 3 of their product for free! Can I get a “woo”, and also a “hoo!”?

The free version is the Version 3 Base Pack – you’ll still need to reach for the credit card if you want the Pro pack (it’ll cost you $595/£295 in fact). Having access to a powerful package like this for free is great news for machinimators everywhere, though.

In much the same way as Moviestorm has been doing, the Antics guys are planning to launch some premium content packs soon. The first 500 downloaders of the free base pack will get the first content pack for free when it eventually launches! You can’t say fairer than that.

The Characters Police pack, of course, is already available and still free.

I’m sure I’m late to the party here, and a lot of you will already know about and regularly use the freeware video encoder Super, but just in case there are people who, like me until very recently, have no knowledge of its existence, I’m blogging about it here.

Super is basically a GUI wrapper around the free and open-source ffmpeg codec and encoding library. Although there’s theoretically nothing that Super can do that clever command-line use of ffmpeg couldn’t also achieve, Super makes it oh-so-very-much easier. As regular readers will know, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fanboy, used to working on reasonably complicated tasks using the shell or command line. Unadulterated ffmpeg still makes my head spin.

The reason that I’m bringing Super to your attention specifically is that the latest version of ffmpeg can encode magnificently to Quicktime. We strongly recommend purchasing Quicktime Pro in the book, and I’ll stick by that recommendation as an excellent encoding solution, but ffmpeg wrapped in Super is definately worth considering before you get your credit card out – it’s freeware!

(Windows-only, I’m afraid, * nix fans, although ffmpeg itself is cross-platform.)

Second Life has just had a major graphics upgrade, in the form of the new “Windlight” client. Whilst this doesn’t solve all the problems that we discuss in the book connected to Second Life, it certainly does massively increase its usability for some projects - if you’re doing a primarily landscape-based piece (like Robbie Dingo’s awesome “Watch the Worlds”), you should definitely check this out.

Even if you’re not, the technology is worth a look for compositing purposes - you could, for example, use this to generate an landscape to composite in outside a MovieStorm set.

Here’s a short film highlighting some of the visuals now available in SL, made by the inimitable Fleef of Fling Films.

I tend to watch music videos for a good sense of the state of the art in FX and editing - what you see there will get to feature films about two years later.

If you want the same kind of insight into Machinima right now, I recommend you watch the world of Baron Soosden, combining World of Warcraft, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life 2 and some truly spectacular editing using Sony Vegas and After Effects.

Seriously, this stuff (particularly his latest videos, I’m So Sick and Unlimited Escapism vol. 0 ,) is just amazing. Incredibly high-quality work for video editing as a whole, never mind just Machinima. Not particularly narrative, but technically stunning. He’s one of not a lot of Machinima creators whose new work I immediately watch.

Check it out.

We interrupt your regular MfD for this news…

The feature-length cut of BloodSpell is now available for viewing. This is a full feature film, made in Machinima using Neverwinter Nights, that took us (by which I mean me and a crew of about 25 other people coming in and out) four years to make. It has been featured on the BBC, Suicide Girls, Boingboing, USA Today’s blogging site, in the Guardian, the Telegraph, SFX magazine, and more.

It’s a “punk fantasy” adventure story - see here for the full scoop.

We’re really proud of it, and we think that it shows the full power of Machinima to enable people to make movies they couldn’t make any other way.

Enjoy.

You are very much invited to the BloodSpell Launch Party, happening in Second Life this weekend.

Oh, and you are also very welcome to check out the BloodSpell feature film, coming on Sunday, too!