Machinima for Dummies

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.

We just finished the chapter of the book entitled “Engines, Engines Everywhere”, in which we go through 16 of the top Machinima engines today and talk about their strengths and weaknesses for movie production.

It’s 41 pages in total in its current form. Ouch. We might need to trim a bit…

(For the curious - the engines we’re covering are Sims 2, The Movies, Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Neverwinter Nights, Neverwinter Nights 2, Medieval Total War 2, Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, MovieStorm, IClone, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Battlefield 2 and Company Of Heroes. Anything we missed?)

A nice obscure title, there.

It was all going well. We’d handed in Milestone 3, we were raring to go on the final four weeks, we were organising trips to Brighton and investigating engines like, er, engine-investigation machines…

And then I got ill. Well, more or less dropped on the spot, actually. You could tell I was really sick and feeble because playing World of Warcraft was too much for me.

But we’re back now, I’m upright and writing again, and we’re all set for the final race. And our lovely, lovely editors have agreed to put the deadline back a week, too. So we might not die in the process.

So! Introduction to 3D modeling, MovieStorm, Medieval Total War 2 (which we’ve been looking at today, and which looks unbelievably cool), a complete overview of available engines, and the Future of Machinima. And then we fall over.

Stay tuned.

P.S. - if you’re reading this blog, we’d be quite interested to hear - what do you think will be the most exciting new engine for Machinima in 2007? UT2007? Crysis? Lord of the Rings Online? Something else?

Well, we’re closing on the third of our four milestones this month - and, particularly with the FairGame project on the go too, this month has been quite a tough one.

One thing we’re really noticing here is the ratio of stuff we want to put into the book compared to the amount of space we’ve got. 400 pages sounds like an intimidating amount to fill, but at this point we’re having to cut ruthlessly not to overshoot that by a country mile.

Hopefully we’ll stick all the stuff we cut up on this blog in the run up to release.

I’ve gotten through the two really intimidating chapters - Storytelling and Filmmaking. The Storytelling chapter, in particular, came out at 10,000 words, way more than intended - I’m going to try and cut it down, but honestly when you’re trying to compress Robert McKee, William Goldman, Jane Espenson and all the rest down into a single-chapter how-to, it’s a tough task.

Next month we’ve got a road trip to do, down to Short Fuze in Cambridge to get training from ex-StrangeCo staffer Ben Sanders on MovieStorm, and then down to Brighton to learn about making movies using Medieval Total War 2. We’ve also got to write chapters on the Future of Machinima (yikes!), an intro to 3D modelling, and start the tidying and editing process anew…

And so we come to the most intimidating part of writing MfD so far - I’ve got to write a chapter on filmmaking. Shots, framing, editing, the lot.

So that would be me attempting to compete with people like Chris Jones, Robert Rodriguez, Per Holmes…

Gulp

I’m a little indimidated. And to cap it all off, I’ve only got 5,000 words to do it in.

My current potential subject list for this single chapter is a little over 40 items…

I just heard something astonishingly cool about some Machinima stuff coming up in the latter part of this year.

Can’t go into details, but let’s just say that Machinima for Dummies might be a really complete one-stop shop for Machinima…

We’ve just handed in half the book, weighing in at a not-too-shabby 204 pages.

That’s tutorials for WoW and The Sims 2, information on organising a virtual shoot, legal info on Machinima, how to read an EULA, how to encode your film to all the various formats, how to set up a recording studio in your bedroom, our top 10 Machinima films and Machinima sites, making sets in various engines, colour theory, use of space, use of lighting, character design, and lots, lots more.

And there’s still half a book to go, with highlights like Medieval Total War 2, MovieStorm, introduction to camerawork, writing your film and lots more.

Bounce!

I’m not talking about phrases in the book here. I’m talking about phrases we used around it…

10. “That’s not a euphemism” Far too many things sound like euphemisms. That’s just an observation there.

9. “I think we might have gone a little over our page-count here.” Inaugurated in the very first draft of the first Sims 2 chapter, which at 17,000 words was maybe a little bit over our 5,000 word budget.

8. “We should really update the blog.” Sorry.

7. “Quick, look in another ‘Dummies’ book and see how they did it!” House styles are a good thing. And the Dummies house style is particularly fine.

6. “F—-ing Google Documents! Work!” It’s fantastic for collaboration, but it’s still … a little … buggle. Buggle! Swear-thump-thump-restart Buggy.

5. “Do you think we should have a chapter on insert engine here?” So many engines, so little time. And new ones keep coming out, the bastards.

4. “We need to write that as late as possible to ensure it’s still current.” So far, it appears we’re writing about half the book in the last week.

3. “Our editors rock.” No, we’re not sucking up here – they really do.

2. “Goddamnit, there are too many good example films for this chapter!” OK, here’s a proposition. You’ve got to choose one WoW film for the WoW chapter. Do you choose The Return, Edge of Remorse, Billy Maclure, Converse Ad, Hardware Store...

and the winner and still champion…

1. “OK, we’ll play a bit of World of Warcraft, then get back to writing.”

Hugh and I spent some time yesterday using Blizzard’s World of Warcraft to create a short film. I’ve not really experimented with WoW’s machinima capabilities up until now, so I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which we managed to achieve what we were looking for. We started storyboarding our basic idea at about noon. By five we were running off the first test render from our editing package. When you take into account the fact that a good hour of that time was dedicated to me tweaking a single tricky frame in Photoshop, that’s really impressive speed. We’ve still got to finalise the editing, and there’s virtually no sound laid on yet, but it’s still quick. We used a combination of live shooting (thank you to all the people we shoved out of the way on the European Steamwheedle server), and map viewer/model viewer compositing. The compositing method works far better than I had anticipated. There’s a little bit of trial and error involved getting the relative camera angles to correspond, and in the end it comes down to guesswork, but (as with a lot of machinima) it’s relatively painless to reshoot.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to put the finished film online sometime soon - it’s a promo for a well-known and ethically sound international charity, but it all takes place in Azeroth. Watch this space.

We’re just submitted six chapters, making up just over 25% of the manuscript. It’s seems incredible that we’ve written a quarter of the book already, but we really have

So far, we’ve written chapters that feature an all-round introduction to machinima (and to the book), set design and texturing, in-engine character design, directing, editing and distribution. We’ve been using The Sims 2 as an example engine for a lot of this content. Most of ours Sims 2 stuff is done now. I’ve got to say, I’ll be glad to see the back of it. It’s a wonderfully flexible and content-rich engine, but it’s just got too many quirks for me. I found myself spending most of my time trying to find away around seeming dead-ends than actually making a film. I know that’s true of all machinima, but it just seemed more prevalent with Sims 2 somehow.

We interviewed Michelle and Kheri from Brittanica Dreams on Monday (via the miracle of Skype, of course). We’re using The Snow Witch as one of our case studies, and we’re hoping to be able to interview other prominent machinimists later in the book.

By far the hardest part of the writing process has been the editing: going over work you’ve already written (often days or weeks ago), and formatting it correctly, correcting the bad spelling and terrible grammar, and deleting the run-on sentences such as the one that you’re currently reading. Not only is it dull, tedious work, but it brings you down to earth with a nasty splat. The lines of witty prose and elegant discourse of you which you were so proud when you composed them last week are exposed to the harsh light of day. And let me tell you, oftentimes they do not look good.

The more you edit, the more depressed you get. It’s 21:30 over here, and Hugh and I have only just finished work for the day - a day which consisted largely of editing. I’ve almost lost the will to live, - but it’s finished, dammit.