Machinima for Dummies

“Hugh, stop making machinima. We’ve got a book to write.”

Johnnie, buried deep in Google Docs.

[Some context - Medieval Total War is very, very addictive to make Machinima with. The phrase “I’ll be right with you - just want to take one more shot!” has been uttered more than is reasonable in the last few hours.

MovieStorm has a similar effect. “Ooh, look, a new balaclava model” rapidly became “Er, I think I’ve got the first five minutes of a pilot for the new series of ‘24’”. - Hugh]

[EDIT I’ve closed comments for this post, because it was turning into the World Spamfest Championships. If you really desperately need to say something about it, just comment on another post and I’ll move it - Johnnie]

If you want to hear what happens when two Machinima experts are taken out for many drinks by another two Machinima experts, and are then interviewed by a (counts on fingers) fifth Machinima expert who is not nearly as trolleyed as the first two Machinima experts, you may wish to hear this week’s Overcast.

Or, to put it another way, You Know What We Did Last Tuesday.

Or, yet another, here’s the Overcast we recorded with Phil “Overman” Rice last Tuesday, in the middle of the madness that was the MfD Roadtrip. Enjoy. We haven’t listened to it yet - I’m waiting for Johnnie to get into the office to do so. So we have no idea how much of a collective idiot we made of ourselves.

UPDATE: Now we have, and it’s quite good. There’s a good chunk of us talking about the book, our writing process, and what we’re covering. There’s also a lot of us being rather the worse for wear.

In other news, with two days to go before the deadline for the book, we’re staggering through a fairly startling workload. We completed the MovieStorm chapter yesterday (which was… dense. And long.) and today we’re on to Medieval Total War. It’s War. It’s Medieval. And it’s pretty darn Total.

And so, we have returned. We’re back. We’re bad. He’s bla - no, wait. That’s something else.

I had originally intended to post a conclusion to our trip, a set of lessons learned, a summary of everything we have seen, thought, achieved and studied. A veritable cornucopia of content. But I forgot one very important thing. I’m Captain Jack Spa - no, wait. That’s something else too.

We’re half-dead, is what I missed. It has been a fantastic week, and we’ve seen technology that will likely change the world. We’ve had our view of Machinima and our plans for the next while turned upside down and shaken. It’s been tough and it’s been fantastic. It was the best of times, it was the worst of - er. Wrong thing again.

But now, we’re back, and it doesn’t seem like the right time to end anything. Because this is in no way an end, even of the road trip - that end happens around midnight next Wednesday, when we hand in our final 100 pages for the book, and collapse like two sacks of drugged armadillos. I love the smell of drugged armadillo in the morning. It smells like victory. No, wait, wrong again.

So this isn’t an end piece. It’s just a few thoughts, and some ranting dragged from the depth of my tortured mind. And even once we’ve handed the book in, it’s not the end. What we’ve seen this week shows us that the excitement for Machinima is just beginning. There’s so much new stuff coming up. Machinima is getting to the level where visually it has mass appeal. There’s movement toward Open-Source, Massively-Multiplayer game engines that will provide yet more space for Machinima creation. There’s a package coming out which makes it both entirely legal and substantially easy to use. And behind all that, there are looming shadows of larger things: in-home motion capture, viable business models for independent, online video producers, copyright reform.

“We’re off the edge of the map, mateys. Here there be monsters.” And treasures. And wonders. All starting to loom up out of the fog of time.

Now that was the right quote.

I’m told that Strange Company Early Adopter Sally Brewer is the originator of the legendary comment that I used for the post title.

I’m back in glorious Scotland, and feeling - quite frankly - terrible. Not because the Roadtrip (the capital R is obligatory) wasn’t a success. Quite the opposite. I feel like the weasels are trashing Toad Hall inside my skull, and the main reason is that the Roadtrip was a complete success. In fact, it was more of a success than I could possibly have anticipated.

MovieStorm is going to be amazing. I can’t really talk about any of it yet, and I can’t tell you the precise reasons that I think it will be amazing, because I’m under a Non-Disclosure Agreement that’s as savage and water-tight as a rottweiler in fishing waders. In fact, Matt Kelland has made me a solemn promise that if I tell you any of the great stuff I know about, he will never buy me beer again. Since he has set a precedent of buying me more beer than I can drink over the course of an evening, I’m going to hide behind the NDA and make sure that Matt knows that he’s my very special friend and is welcome to visit me in Scotland any time he likes.

This leaves us with a problem. I can’t prove to you that MovieStorm kicks more ass than the Annual Donkey Abuse Championships. You’re just going to have to take my word for it. Rest assured: as soon as I get permission to post a screenshot, video, hint or nugget, I’ll have it up on this blog so fast the Short Fuze lawyers will double their hourly rate. Until then, you’ll have to wait breathlessly like everyone else.

The new movie-making features for Medieval 2: Total War are also amazing, as Hugh’s breathlessly-enthusiastic last post suggested. After Pete had talked us through the basics, Hugh and I could no longer resist getting our hands dirty, so we pushed him unceremoniously out of his comfy office chair and started hacking.

After an hour’s work, we’d produced about 45 seconds of footage that looked better than you could ever have believed. We were right in the thick of the battle, with some authentically shaky hand-held camera work showing the truly amazing Medieval 2 combat animations. To say we left the building speechless would be a lie. We didn’t shut up about it all the way back to Brighton.

Why, then, am I feeling so godawful?

Because these past few days have involved almost constant travel, early mornings, late nights and a lot of hard work. Yesterday was particularly fun. Having established very early on that Creative Assembley were based in the hip English seaside town of Brighton, we were a little perturbed to discover that they were in fact based in Horsham, a tiny rural village about twenty miles from Brighton.

Not a problem, we thought. There’s a direct train, so we just have to get up a little earlier than we were planning to. The train, needless to say, was not direct. We should have changed once. We changed twice because the helpful cockney manning the information desk at Brighton told us to go to completely the wrong station.

Eventually, though, we arrived in Horsham. What follows is a verbatim transcript of several exchanges that occurred between Hugh and myself after we left Horsham railway station. Remember, you’re reading the words of two highly intelligent individuals. Hugh Hancock is a guru of the machinima movement who’s run a successful production company almost single-handedly for ten glorious years. I have a genuinely frightening CV, a wide-ranging skill-set, and several letters after my name.

(our heroes have just left the train station. The birds are singing, the sky is clear, and they’re both feeling pretty optimistic)
J: Shall we get a taxi, then?
H: Nah, it’s a nice day. Let’s walk it.
J: Do you know where we’re going?
H: Yup. Got a map right here. We head down this road, take a right, then another right. The Creative Assembly building should be a few hundred metres down the road.

(a little later)
H: I think it must be just over this hill. This town is so small the map is almost 1-1 scale.
J: Good - it’s getting a bit too hot to walk much further.

(later still)
H: Right. I see what we’ve done wrong. Creative Assembly is not in_ Horsham. It’s _near Horsham.
J: How near, exactly?
H: It’s in Southwater. Just on the other side of town. Well, this side of town, really - we’ve walked right across it.

(even later)
J: Hugh, do you see that bus? It says “Horsham” on the front. People are getting on it. That means that there’s a bus that goes from Horsham out to here. Why did we walk all this way?
H: Well, how was I to know there was a bus?
J: Where are we, anyway? I can’t feel my toes.
H: Nearly there. We just have to cross this motorway.
J: Cross the what now?

(later)
H: Ah-ha! This sign says “Welcome to Southwater”. We’re officially here. Now we just have to find the place.

(oh yes, later still)
J: There’s another sign.
H: What does it say?
J: Erm … “Welcome to Southwater”. Again.

We did eventually find it, by which point we had walked across half of the county and I was beginning to smell - as Hugh so tactfully put it - like a real journalist. I had to stop at a motorway service station to buy deodorant. If you consider for a moment the fact that we were able to stop at a motorway service station halfway through our journey, despite the fact that we walked all the way, you may be able to understand why I no longer place much stock in Mr Hancock’s map-reading skills.

My plane back to Edinburgh arrived in Glasgow at about seven o’clock this morning. It should have arrived in Edinburgh, but I’d booked the wrong ticket. I got a bus into the centre of Glasgow, waited half and hour for the next train to Edinburgh, spent an hour on that train, and then got a bus back to my humble little flat. I finally arrived here at about half-past eleven, having managed about four hour’s sleep in total - on the back of an already-sleep-deprived few days. I’m sure into the office to carry on writing the book in a couple of hours time.

I’m going back to bed.

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.