Machinima for Dummies

It may be safely said, at this point, that I’m sitting in a large, red chair. I’ve got a black trenchcoat on, and you have to assume that I’m working this deal by sound and touch because there is just no way that I can see anything through those sunglasses. And there is a mirror behind me, with is rippling, yea, rippling in a way that would have been very impressive in 1999 where this metaphor originated. And then, I speak.

“No-one can be told how damn cool Medieval Total War 2 Machinima is. You have to see it for yourself.”

Ladies and gentlemen, over the course of this roadtrip we’ve seen some things that, if they are not in fact the Prmoised Machinima Land, play that land on television, much like Ireland does for Scotland, on account of the latter’s fog and the former’s tax breaks.

On occasion, I have been accused of hype. Of hyperbole. Sometimes even of hubris, which diesn’t mean the same as the other two but did make an excellent conclusion to my alliterative processes, by which I do not mean bodily functions that are assisted by peppermint oil.

Well, that time is over. I am smug. Possibly even self-satisfied, as I announce to you that the oft-touted “Helm’s Deep for $30” that I have occasionally claimed as a possibility for Machinima production is no longer a possibility. It is a reality. I have seen the future and it kicks ass.

Johnnie and I arrived at Creative Assembly yesterday after a relaxing train journey* and a pleasant walk through the Home Counties countryside which inspired Tolkein himself^. The relentless squealing sound which had assaulted us through Horsham (said sound being something like “Twee!”) had subsided, and I had stopped marvelling over a town whose tourist map was drawn on a scale of 1 insh to fifty yards, and whose “shopping highlights” appeared to list every single vendor in the entire conurbation, down to and including the pet food stores.

We were ready to go. What we weren’t prepared for was a Machinima experience so marvellous and terrifying that even now we can only speak of it in the mystical secret language used only by those who have been inducted into the deepest secrets of Apache server configuration, or alternatively have spent more than five minutes on a World of Warcraft server.

ZOMG. OMG. !!!111!!oneoneone. The ROFLCopter might have been ready for takeoff, but we left the building riding low in the bucket seat of the Ferrari FTW.

Of our gracious host Peter Brophy I shall say that, given his appointed task that day resembled that of a man attempting to give out free Aberdeen Angus samples to three hundred slavering hyenas, he was remarkably cool about demonstrating what to Johnnie and myself was essentially anti-gravity technology.

Of filmmaking in Medieval Total War, I will say only this: let us say I wish to film a three-hundred-person cavalry charge into a “highland rabble” of some several hundred, whilst around us a battle of approximately the size of the crowd at a well-attended Hearts/Hibernian match raged. We were to start high above the battle, crane down in time to see the ground shake as the cavalry rushed past, then cut to handheld footage of the brutal fighting, in time to see the tragic loss of life as individual soldiers fall.

It would look like this.

And, assuming I had allotted just one day to perform this mighty task, I would have a significant problem.

I would need to figure out what I was going to work on after lunch.

*May contain lies. May not be 100% truth.

^Which I understand Johnnie enjoyed so much* that he’ll be writing more about it later.

To bring you this announcement. Linden Labs have announced that they are going to open-source the Second Life server code.

Well, damn. It’s been in the rumour mill for a while, but this confirmation is big news. It’s also one of the reasons why writing a book like this is such a nightmare in some ways - you’re out of date five minutes after you write - and why this blog exists, to act as the ever-growing errata sheet for the book.

(Of course, this change we’ve caught in time to add it to the book. But you just know that ten minutes after we submit final-final-final edits, Microsoft will announce that Halo 3 will come with a built-in Stephen Speilburg and Lawrence Kazdan to help you make your Machinima, or some such. )

In the book, we’ve fairly skeptical about Second Life as a Machinima platform, but this announcement means we’re going to have to do a fairly major re-think, as it eliminates a good half of the problems we perceived. For starters, the ability to run your own private Second Life island means that we’d no longer need to set aside $20,000 for a couple of years’ island rental if we wanted to make something BloodSpell-scale in Second Life. An open server means that AI-controlled NPCs are a possibility. And so on.

Now all we need is for someone to release a fairly major graphics upgrade to the client, and Second Life could be seriously cooking with Machinima gas.

…

OK, that last metaphor gave rise to a bit of an unpleasant image. Sorry about that. We’ll try not to talk about “Machinima gas” any more.

Written whilst attempting to avoid sleep on the 12:00 midnight train to Brighton

Over the last few days we’ve had quite a few journeys. Journeys by train, journeys by taxi, journeys unfairly early in the morning or hideously late at night. Or, as in the current case, not actually that late at night, but it feels pretty hideous.

Sometimes these journeys have been great. I’ve talked and socialised, seen pretty stuff, gotten stuff done, written pieces I’m proud of, visited places that have memories for me. But sometimes, like now, a journey’s just a bloody inconvenient space where you’re doing nothing whilst being carried somewhere. The guy in the next seat might be having great fun reading his “Metal Hammer!” magazine (headline: “Ten Hard-Rockin’ Bands Wearing Studs And Black Fishnets That Your Mum Secretly Finds Rather Funny”), but you’re just trying to find something to do to stay awake.

And, like any writer worth his salt, I’m heading into Metaphor Country here - without a map, a compass, or a clue. Can the Machinima - or any creative - production process ever be a tedious journey without something being seriously wrong? I don’t know. I remember times when I found BloodSpell production incredibly frustrating. I remember wanting to break stuff. I remember really not wanting to go in to work because I knew that we were hitting a bit that was going to be really hard, and that the day was going to be raw pain, but I don’t remember ever sitting there being carried along and just wishing the journey would end sooner.

It’s one of the things about Machinima - the whole “real-time” bit really cuts down on the sitting around and waiting. Conventional CG is full of “hurry up and wait” - I’ve tweaked that animation, I’ve altered that specular setting, now it’s time to wait for the render. And RealFilm is infamous for it - just wait for makeup, lighting, camera setup, aargh, the sound’s not perfect, there’s an airplane overhead. But, again, I don’t know if you ever end up with the “just finish this journey so I can get on with it” feeling. I suspect you do. Certainly I recall rendering a couple of things, finding they hadn’t worked, and really not being able to face re-rendering them.

it’s odd - in some ways, Machinima people are very tolerant of frustration. Are we, perhaps, attracted to this medium because we’re equally intolerant of boredom? Or is the lack of boredom just a side effect of a medium based around doing more than anyone else can? And what exactly is the difference between the boredom of waiting for a render which you know will probably still be wrong, and the frustration of spending three hours trying to import a texture that just refuses to work?

In what may be a first, I’m actually posting this from the Macbook Pro laptop resting on, well, my lap. Normally that’s inadvisable, as the heat emitted from these otherwise sublime pieces of hardware is considered a little excessive for close contact with the trouser area. But at this point, even our laptops have red-rimmed monitors and keep posting pitiful requests for us to pour coffee through their cooling slots.

It is safe to say that the badgers are starting to come in from the long grass for us, their chunky, jagged teeth glinting in the moonlight of sleep deprivation. I understand that these are the kind of hours our technical editor and general Machinima impressario Phil Rice keeps on a regular basis. I can only assume the man has frontal lobes which can shatter glass at a hundred paces with nothing but vibration.

We’re about to run off to Short Fuze again, about whom I would say very nice things, but for one small problem. These people are sufficiently wired to the global Interweb that were I to say, for example, that they may succeed in transforming Machinima into something much larger through nothing but their change in outlook and unwillingness to settle for any goal less than “a million kids making movies”, they’d already know that I’d said that by the time we arrive in the office, as the sum total of human knowledge is fed directly into their brains via the unnatural knot of high-bandwidth cabling attached directly into Matt Kelland’s belly.

Were I to say that, in two hours yesterday, I succeeded in crafting a tolerable crowd scene and soliloquy from the Bard, using the Moviestorm software I’d seen exactly twice before, I’d arrive to see it daubed on the wall of their conference room in the excess brain fluid of their army of Daves and Bens.

And were I to say that the raw enthusiasm of the entire staff is energising, and that I’d never seen a Machinima tool development where every single developer seemed to be energetically talking about the films they themselves wanted to make in their spare time using the tool that is their day job, it’s highly possible that Short Fuze would in fact be aware of that statement before I made it, as Dave Lloyd swayed in the grip of an automatic writing trance, eyes glazed, mouth muttering disjointed syllables that might sound to an expert like the last remains of the long-dead Mesopotainian language, and one hand clutching the eldrich remains of a US Robotics 28,000 baud modem through which the dark gods to whom they owe their allegiance whisper the future of the Internet before it is made.

So I won’t. There are some things too strange and fantastic for even your humble correspondants to dare.

This is not good.

It’s half past midnight, our time, and Hugh and I are getting ready to record our interview for The Overcast. Hugh’s been up since 5am. I’ve been up since 4am because I live further away from Edinburgh train station than he does. Neither of us, it’s only fair to say, is running on 100% battery power.

Nonetheless, we could have pulled it off. God knows, both Hugh and I have done far worse. The major problem that we have right now, as I kneel on the floor of our B&B desperately combining all the complementary coffee sachets into one unsuspecting mug of wake-up juice, is that we’ve just returned from a night of heavy-to-industrial-strength ale drinking with Matt and Dave of Short Fuze and former Strange Company stalwart (and now Short Fuze employee) Ben Sanders.

Short Fuze are a fascinating bunch of guys. For those of you who don’t know, we’re down here learning how to use Moviestorm, their up-and coming commercially-licensed, dedicated Machinima package. Of all the purportedly commercial Machinima packages, this one’s by far closest to its goal from what we’ve seen today.

It’s also quite complex stuff. The guys at Short Fuze are super-enthusiastic about their product (not to mention geeks to a fault - when you can have a ten-minute conversation with their CEO about the various OGG codecs you know something’s right), and they’ve been forcibly injecting information into our poor, protesting brains all day. The fact that we said “ooh!’ about once every 20 seconds has nothing to do with it. Then they insisted on taking us out to the pub and having fascinating conversation with us over beer. I say it was fascinating. I remember it was fascinating. Remembering anything else, like my own name, is harder. In fact, the last two paragraphs have been mainly ghost-written by Hugh, based on the vague mutterings that I made before I collapsed into a snoring, drunken stupor.

I’ve no idea how this Overcast interview will go, but I think it’s probably wise if I apologise in advance. I’m normally far more witty and articulate, honestly. I blame those b@rs!s at Short Fuze, and their insistence on buying every round.

[[ EDITED for typos. Not too many, bearing in mind how drunk and tired I was when I first typed this ]]

You lucky, lucky people. If you’re UK-based, and happen to find yourself in the quaint little hamlet of London village tomorrow evening (Wednesday the 18th of April), you have a chance to socialise with two old farts.

Hugh and I will be in London tomorrow evening. If you’re in the area and fancy a pint or three, we’d love to meet up. Comment on this post, or throw a casual email in the direction of info AT strangecompany DOT org.

We’ll also be bringing down the general tone of the neighbourhood in both Brighton and Cambridge over the next few days, so if you’re local to either of these blissful regions (what the Scottish would call a “southern jessie”), you may be able to convince us to consume alcohol in your general vicinity as well.

Ugh. I have been awake since 5:15. That’s an unholy time that shouldn’t be seen by man, animal or wildfowl, unless they’re unduly healthy or insomniac.

Hugh - “Oh, god. This is an extreme situation. It’s time to invoke the spirit of gonzo journalism. ”

Johnnie - “You don’t mean - ”

Hugh - “Yes. I’m putting sugar in my tea. No more dental health for me. I’m on the hard stuff. ”

<> powdery sounds <>

Hugh - “Oh, god. That’s not sugar. That’s low-calorie sweetener”

Yes, we’re off the Ethernet leash. We’re unleashed. We’re on some kind of Machinima rampage.

For those of you who don’t know, which at this point is, ooh, everyone, we’re leaving our not-so-native Scotland and descending into the soft, decadent South in pursuit of raw nuggets of Machinima knowledge. Firstly, we’ll be hitting the Machinima cauldron of Short Fuze in Cambridge like a small, unshaved whirlwind.

Then, we’re putting on our pith helmets and concealing ourselves in a movable hide made of copies of the Daily Mail as we forge deep into the terrifying Heart of Southern Darkness. I refer, of course, to Sussex, and to the hip geezas of Creative Assembly, whose brains we will be sucking dry of all useful knowledge with long, flexible straws.

Straws, in my case, with an Apple logo on them.

Along the way, we’ll also be doing a podcast with the inimitable Phil Rice of The Overcast, dropping in on any portion of the London Machinima Massive we can, and generally wreaking a trail of destruction comparable only to the occasion when Celtic were beaten at an away game by unlikely contenders Caledonian Thistle.

In which case, it may be noted that the headline next day was “SuperCallieGoBalisticCelticAreAtrocious!” Try saying it out loud.

The nice train attendant with the free coffee approaches. Like a tiger, I sink back into the long grass of the luggage rack, preparing to leap out, all muscles engaged like a single human Superball, and politely ask her if I can have a refill.

Out.

UPDATE: We have just informed the train attendant that she has been immortialised in print. She now believes us to be mildly deranged stalkers. Whilst not overly offended by this after all reasonable belief, I am mildly irked that she thinks this of me. After all, “deranged stalker” is in Johnnie’s job description.

I have also just attempted to eat the paper sugar packet. This would have been more understandable had I not poured the sugar out of it first.

I was asked to write a response to Paul Marino’s 2004 summary of the Machinima scene, from our perspective in 2007, for the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival.

Since they’ve been so kind as to let me re-post it online for people who won’t be at the festival, I thought I’d post it here.

BTW - the Fantastic Film Festival’s Machinima section sounds very cool. Attend if you can. Sadly it’s over the last week of writing this book for us, or we’d be there!

Second BTW - I wrote this a few weeks ago, before Machinima.com fixed its spam problem. However, I still don’t think my comments are inaccurate.

As you read this, it’s 2007, not 2004. “Diary of a Camper” was created more than ten years ago. No major Machinima producer has typed “demorecord” into Quake for almost half that time. And in four months, I personally will have been working in Machinima for a solid decade, watching it change from a hack to a minor gaming hobby to an Internet sensation to - what?

Machinima is in a strange place right now. Machinima techniques are diversifying to the point that it’s hard to even define the medium. Over half the Machinima Film Festival awards in 2006 were won by pieces which made enormously extensive use of conventional 2D animation techniques, layering, rendering and keyframing tiny clips of game animation together. “Edge of Remorse”, which won two awards, barely touched a game engine, merely making use of the art assets of “World of Warcraft” and not shooting in the game itself.

There is no one single Machinima community. Debates rage around “outside-in” Machinima versus “inside-out” - films that use Machinima purely for its technical advantages versus films that are based inside the world and community of the games that they exploit. Machinima.com, still the largest Machinima site, has aligned itself firmly with the gaming world, showing “frag videos” and game trailers. Much of the Machinima community has deserted it as a result, and you’re more likely to see an advert for “Brittany Spears Spreading” on the Machinima.com forums than a debate over Depth of Field.

Meanwhile, “top-end” Machinima productions now frequently take years to complete - “Bill and John Part 2”, unquestioned winner of the Machinima Film Festival 2006, took over two years to complete, for a twenty-minute film. “BloodSpell”, my own Machinima feature film, took three years, the same development time as a conventional animated feature.

The glass ceiling of Machinima becomes ever more obvious. Rufus Cubed, the creators of “The Return”, were offered the opportunity to develop their award-winning short into an animated series - the dream of every indie producer. But because “The Return” was set in and used art from “World of Warcraft”, the project depended on the goodwill of the game developer, Blizzard. When they decided that they didn’t want to spend time on a non-game project, Rufus Cubed couldn’t work on the animated series any more, even though there was money waiting to develop it. They were left with no way to do anything with “The Return” but to return to the same unpaid, amateur level they started.

The only obvious exit for most successful Machinima creators is into the games industry. And so more and more talented Machinima producers are hired to produce films for computer games, turning their talent at filmmaking in games to improving interstial cutscenes. It’s a way for them to use the skills they’ve learned and get paid - but their work is unlikely to ever enter the professional film world, and their independent Machinima projects suffer as a result.

The debate over Machinima echoes that over mashups, fanfic and found art as a whole. Some people believe that there should be, or already is, a way for producers to make money from the films they create, even though they use art created for another purpose, without the permission of the creator of that art. Others believe that it is inherently wrong to profit from found art, and demand that any professional Machinima production should create all its own art, characters, sets, and special effects - thus removing one of the major attractions of Machinima creation.

Some few people can make money from slipping through the legal cracks, negotiating with games companies, with a light touch on the tiller and a copyright lawyer on speeddial, but the total number of people employed full-time making Machinima as film rather than game adjunct is less than 25 worldwide.

Technology is starting to catch up with the problem of art creation. In-home motion capture continues to slide tantalisingly closer to reality. The Nintendo Wii shows the potential for Machinima creators to act in their own movies, eliminating the need for expensive, time-consuming, highly technical hand animation. But it’s not here yet. Tools for character creation continue to develop apace - but still tied to game engines with restrictive licenses. Professional Machinima packages have started trickling to market. These products promise to offer the same advantages as game engines for Machinima production - available, modifiable art and a real-time 3D engine - but without the legal hassles or game-engine limitations. But they’re still incomplete or in beta-testing, and we won’t know their true effect until one of the several contenders reaches maturity.

Every few years Machinima hits a strange dead-end point, a point where it must change and evolve. It changed from being “Quake Movies” to being “Machinima”. It changed from being entirely first-person-shooter game based to being a wider technique. And now it’s going to change again.

Will Machinima be the medium of the 21st century? Will it democratise film-making, and do all those other wonderful, utopian things that Paul, I, and many others have written and talked about over the last decade? Or will it become nothing more than a reaction to a truly creative medium, that of games design, with game players creating skits or fan-fiction based on their favourite games, and the promised advantages of Machinima for creation on the creator’s own terms vanishing in a cloud of restrictive licensing and alternative technology?

Or will it just be absorbed into the world of film and animation as a whole, its techniques diluted and enhanced, with the most successful creators embracing the mixed-media methods of “Edge of Remorse” - or indeed “300”? Will we even be able to distinguish what is Machinima and what isn’t, in five years’ time, when “Return 2” finally appears with live-action actors, composited frames, hand-animated monsters and a game-engine background? Will we be replacing “Machinimation” with “Anymation”?

It’s going to be an interesting time.

Various people may be interested to know how we keep up with the latest in Machinima. There are, basically, three tools that Johnnie and I use:

• Of course we visit Machinima Premiere daily - indeed, pretty much hourly - as by far the best Machinima news and information source out there right now. Hint - if you’re on MPrem, check both the “latest comments” and “latest forum posts” on the right hand side. DXvid - is there an RSS feed for them?

• We tend to surf Machinima.com and Sims 99 periodically for films, but mostly I tend to check out films when they’re getting some buzz either in the blogosphere as a whole, or on MPrem. So that doesn’t really count as a whole tool! BTW - I’d definitely recommend Sims99’s forums if you’re into Sims 2.

• Machinifeed is just brilliant - it’s an aggregation of a whole bunch of Machinima-related blogs (including this one, Paul Marino’s blog, Z-Studios, 3D Filmmaker, all that good stuff) into a single website and RSS feed. You can subscribe in your RSS reader, if that’s how you roll (I use Bloglines, I’m not sure what Johnnie’s using this nanosecond but he keeps talking about writing his own) or you can just read the page.

• Finally, I’ve got a Technorati watchlist with the word “Machinima” on it. ‘rati watchlists are fantastically useful little devices, which literally alert you whenever a specific word is used in basically the entire blogosphere, ever. There’s a certain skill to surfing them - basically, every post gets one glance, and if it doesn’t look too relevant, then gets summarily ignored - but if you can do that, they’re fantastic for picking up gems others might miss.

Hmm - one thing strikes me here. I wonder if we need a Machinifeed for the various Machinima forums? Rooster Teeth’s Machinima forum, MPrem, Sims99, M.Com now they’ve fixed their spam problem. It’d be quite high-traffic, but it’d be useful.

And today I’ve been figuring out Blender and Sims 2 importing, in preparation for the tutorials in our modeling chapter.

Blender is just amazing - a free, fully-featured 3D package that can indeed compete with $1000+ software like Softimage and 3D Studio Max. But, it must be said, all the complaints I’ve heard over the years about its interface are bang on the money - it’s just insane. Keyboard shortcuts to bring up invisible menus, customisability to the point of insanity, and a total disregard for standard UI - I’ve been beating my head off my desk.

However, once you get to know it, it looks like it’d be super-fast and efficient. Win some, lose some.

Sims 2 object creation, incidentally, is also kinda mental. It’s probably the most intimidating object creation process I’ve ever seen in a game. But we’ve (well, I’ve - Johnnie’s away for the week) cracked it now, and it’s going in the book.