Machinima for Dummies

Here at Machinimafordummies Towers, we recently received an email from a guy looking to put together a racing scene. Now, I’ve seen a few pieces of racing Machinima in my time, but it’s always been a minority interest, with nothing like the pull of the flight-sim scene, say.

But a bit of Googling around did come up with a very impressive-looking, highly-modded engine that he could use.

It’s called rFactor, and apparently it’s independent (which means it’d be easier to negotiate some kind of license for commercial work), it’s highly moddable (the official site has dozens of varied addons), fairly pretty (not at the level of the latest racing games, but good enough to play onscreen), and has full camera and replay tools.

Here’s a quick demo of its potential:

Interesting tool!

The producer of This American Life on getting good at creating by starting bad.

Man. This is one of the best pieces on the creative life, how to make good films, how to work through the bits where you know you’re not making good films, that I’ve ever heard. Please, everyone in the Machinima world, listen to this one.

P.S. - so, Overman, you’re all kinds of right with your current approach.

BoingBoing links to this guide to making online videos reusing copyrighted content. It’s long and rather hard going, but provides invaluable tips for anyone making Machinima using any materials copyrighted by someone else.

(Sadly it’s US-centric, of course.)

For example, did you know that making “frag videos” memorialising a performance in a game is actually clearly Fair Use?

Very interesting.

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.”

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.

Gaining an audience is a craft, not a crapshoot.

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

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.

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.

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.