Machinima for Dummies

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.

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.