Machinima for Dummies

It’s that time. The time when we reflect, think back, and consider what we have learned. I’m referring, of course, to the 1st January hangover, when I’m sure I personally will be attempting to remember what happened last night, and considering the concept that next year, I should leave some Laphroaig still in the bottle.

However, some mad fools also use this time to reflect on the year gone by. And this has been an interesting year for Machinima. Machinima for Dummies (of course), Moviestorm, the rise and rise of World of Warcraft (WoW) and Second Life, half the Machinima world disappearing into games companies, and the ongoing fragmentation of the Machinima community.

Let’s go.

This article will be in two parts, today and tomorrow, plus a third part later in the week when Johnnie and I reflect on what might be ahead.

There is no Machinima community

The Machinima world has continued its fragmentation, as I predicted a couple of years ago when I left Machinima.com. (To be fair, that was kinda a gimme.)

The Machinima communities - MPrem, Machinima.com - are incredibly silent. Meanwhile, single-engine Machinima communities - Warcraft Movies, Myndflame, Moviestorm, the various flight-sim, Second Life and Halo communities - go from strength to strength.

There are a couple of reasons for that, I think. Firstly, the range of potential Machinima creation engines is broader than ever before, and those engines have less in common than ever before. There’s not a lot of common ground between a hardcore WoW raider and an equally hardcore Second Life “fashionista”, and with more Machinima than ever being decidedly centered on the issues around that particular game, there’s very little reason for one group to be interested in the output of another.

Added to that, we’ve got the sheer difficulty of popularising video on the Internet right now. If you don’t have a clear and obvious audience (like the WoW community), it’s very easy to find yourself with a tiny or nonexistent audience. Phil “Overman” Rice’s ”What I Love About XMas”, for example, has so far collected 600 views on YouTube, despite being one of the best and most innovative pieces of Machinima work this year. Compare that with Oxhorn, for example (another excellent filmmaker), whose own Christmas Special collected 60,000 views in three days . The audience is a powerful, powerful appeal for a filmmaker considering what to make, and an equally powerful disincentive for people who make work that isn’t of interest to their game community.

At the same time, as the available engines develop, the tools and techniques used for each have diverged wildly. WoW filmmaking is centered on post-processing, using captures from within the Warcraft Model Viewer composited like traditional cel animation in post production - a technique that turns out to be surprisingly powerful. Meanwhile, Second Life Machinima creators have to be expert location scouts and networkers, buying clothing and costuming for their productions, as well as digital artists themselves, and must also deal with the hassles of a real film shoot as every one of their actors must be directly controlled by a human. Moviestorm users, meanwhile, work on a timeline controlling an entire world at once, programming actions and navigating a still-very-much-beta tool, acting as an entire film crew themselves.

As a result, most Machinima creators are currently more invested in a single community than they are in filmmaking as a whole. Meanwhile, the hardcore filmmakers who used to make up the backbone of the Machinima community (people like me, the Ill Clan, and Phil Rice), fed up with legal limitations, are mostly flocking to Second Life and Moviestorm, creating their own single-engine or limited-engine groups.

There’s just not that much common ground between Machinima creators in different engines any more, and what there is tends to center around either 3D art or post-production and editing - both areas where there are lively existing communities with more expertise than the Machinima community currently posesses. Some of this is down to the maturity of the Machinima process - 2007 was the first year where Machinima became really pick-up-and-play, and where problems like capturing video from games were truly solved right from the get-go.

These days the Machinifeed is probably the closest thing to a Machinima community. Even people who do cross over the various engines of Machinima tend to only cover a couple - I follow WoW Machinima, of course, as well as Moviestorm, Second Life (yes, I’m watching you…) and periodically Source. Are we losing something from this? I’m not sure. Certainly, there are occasional films that bubble up from the various game communities that have cross-over interest - notably Baron Soosdon’s work in WoW, for example, or Robbie Dingo’s work in SL - but it’s increasingly seeming that there’s just not that much need for a person interested in fantasy films, for example, to keep up with the Halo community, or the mysterious work of the flight sim Machinima developers.

And, of course, it has all gotten bigger - 2007 was probably the first year where it was really impossible to keep track of all the Machinima out there. Halomovies.org lists 3-4 new Halo movies a day. Warcraft Movies, likewise, shows 4 or more new “storyline” movies every day.

But will we ever see an overall Machinima site again, covering all engines and all genres? I don’t know. Certainly, one of the big trends of 2007 was the disappearance of anything like.

Feature Filmapalooza

2007 has been the year of the Machinima feature film. With 4 feature-length movies coming out - Tales of the Past III, Stolen Life, War of the Servers and my own BloodSpell - the face of Machinima creation has really changed over the last year.

All of these movies are very visually sophisticated - huge battle scenes, complex camerawork, the works. It looks like Machinima is finally living up to its potential as a way for indie filmmakers and hobbyists to make movies that would have previously been off limits to everyone but Hollywood.

Why? Well, some of it is just co-incidence: BloodSpell just happened to get finished at feature length in the same year as Stolen Life. But the number of these films, and particularly the other two, which had noticably shorter production times than either BloodSpell or Stolen Life, show a definite trend: Machinima production is getting a lot faster.

I was amazed at the speed of production of WoW Machinima myself, back in Feburary, when Johnnie and I produced a piece about Fair Trade in World of Warcraft (which just passed the 100,000 viewer mark - woo!). We managed to produce the piece from start to finish in two days. By comparison, Ozymandias, which is about the same length, took around 3 weeks to make in 1999.

And production isn’t going to slow down. Moviestorm is already showing signs of being the fastest and easiest environment yet - I was able to produce a rough draft of an extremely complex music video, using an early beta, in a single evening. Halo 3 is apparently very fast and user-friendly. Whilst no-one really seems to be using Medieval 2: Total War yet, the tools there allow the creation of huge battles in absolutely tiny timescales.

Will we get to the point where it’s possible to create a feature film using Machinima in less time than it takes to write a novel? Well, we ain’t too far off.

Tomorrow I’ll delve into legal issues, hirings and more.

Boingboing has just reported that Second Life’s Chief Technical Officer, Cory Ondrejka, has just left Linden Labs citing “irreconcilable differences”.

Since he was the man behind the movement to Open-Source both the viewer and the server, I can’t help but wonder if those differences had something to do with the apparent reversal in policy on open-sourcing the SL servers which we reported on recently. If so, things don’t look good for Second Life Open-Source right now.

EDIT (Johnnie): The original story was broken on Massively by Moo Money. There are a few follow-ups linked from there too, including Cory’s official response.

A couple of Machinima awards popping up on the radar:

The GuildCafe awards include a section for “Best Machinima”.

The Online Machinima Film Festival awards are looking for nominations.

And in other news, I notice that film festival submissions engine Withoutabox now includes a Machinima category under Animation when submitting a film! I’ll be writing more about Withoutabox soon.

Antics 3D has been around for quite a while now, but up until very recently has had a moderately hefty price tag. Not any more! Along with a shiny new website design, the Antics team have released version 3 of their product for free! Can I get a “woo”, and also a “hoo!”?

The free version is the Version 3 Base Pack – you’ll still need to reach for the credit card if you want the Pro pack (it’ll cost you $595/£295 in fact). Having access to a powerful package like this for free is great news for machinimators everywhere, though.

In much the same way as Moviestorm has been doing, the Antics guys are planning to launch some premium content packs soon. The first 500 downloaders of the free base pack will get the first content pack for free when it eventually launches! You can’t say fairer than that.

The Characters Police pack, of course, is already available and still free.

And some less-good news. According to the Second Life Open Source page,

What source code won’t you be releasing?

We don’t (yet) plan to release the code that runs our simulators or other server code (“the Grid”).

I’m not sure whether this is seriously out of date, or if it represents a change of plan chez Linden. I hope it’s the former. As we’ve blogged before, not to mention also talked about in the book, an open-source SL server would be a fantastic development for Machinima in general, removing or limiting a lot of the existing problems with creating Second Life Machinima. If it’s not going to happen, that’s a real pity.

I’m going to try and get hold of the Lindens to see if I can get a confirm/deny on this issue. Anyone who knows what’s up, please do comment below!

Otherwise, I guess we’re all hoping that Open Simulator (the Open-source SL-compatible server that’s under development right now) comes along well.

It’s CHRIIIIISTMAS! (or it will be soon)

And there are new and exciting engines crawling out of the woodwork left, right and center.

First up, Ricky Grove has written a piece on persuading the Unreal Engine 3 editor to work, both with Gears of War (fail) and Unreal Tournament 3 (pass). It’s an interesting read, and includes links to some great resources too. I’ve had a look at the U3 editor myself, and there’s some real power in there.

Secondly, Cinemassively points us to this Machinima trailer for Pirates of the Burning Sea. Very impressive stuff - nice swashbuckling swordfighting animation, some truly awesome ship combat, and what looks a lot like a lipsynched character. I forsee a lot of pirate Machinima coming out, probably starting with the PotBS open beta, which will open on December 7th.

So that’s four engines at least we need to cover: Halo 3, Source, Unreal 3 and PotBS, plus the updated Moviestorm tutorial. We’ll be getting into those in the new year.

Of course, time is always an issue. Just out of interest - would any of our noble readers be interested in a subscription-based service, where we promise to deliver MfD-the-book-quality content every month or so, in exchange for a small number of your pennies? It’s no more than an idea at this point, but it would potentially allow us to spend more time developing quality Machinima tutorials.

A few days ago I wrote about the release of Moviestorm version 1.0. Among the many boasts I made was that the new release included the Modder’s Workshop that certain prominent machinimators have been jonesing for.

Alas, it was too good to be true. The decision was made to hold back the Mod Shop from this release at the very last second. Overman’s screams of frustration could be heard around the globe.

This time, it’s for real. The Modder’s Workshop has officially returned, with an all-new publishers licence key system. You’ll need to request a key if you want to use it, and we’re limiting the release of them, so if you’re a Moviestorm pioneer, head over to the forums and register your interest right now, that’s my advice.

( Disclosure: I’m employed by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author )

I’m sure I’m late to the party here, and a lot of you will already know about and regularly use the freeware video encoder Super, but just in case there are people who, like me until very recently, have no knowledge of its existence, I’m blogging about it here.

Super is basically a GUI wrapper around the free and open-source ffmpeg codec and encoding library. Although there’s theoretically nothing that Super can do that clever command-line use of ffmpeg couldn’t also achieve, Super makes it oh-so-very-much easier. As regular readers will know, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Linux fanboy, used to working on reasonably complicated tasks using the shell or command line. Unadulterated ffmpeg still makes my head spin.

The reason that I’m bringing Super to your attention specifically is that the latest version of ffmpeg can encode magnificently to Quicktime. We strongly recommend purchasing Quicktime Pro in the book, and I’ll stick by that recommendation as an excellent encoding solution, but ffmpeg wrapped in Super is definately worth considering before you get your credit card out – it’s freeware!

(Windows-only, I’m afraid, * nix fans, although ffmpeg itself is cross-platform.)

Second Life has just had a major graphics upgrade, in the form of the new “Windlight” client. Whilst this doesn’t solve all the problems that we discuss in the book connected to Second Life, it certainly does massively increase its usability for some projects - if you’re doing a primarily landscape-based piece (like Robbie Dingo’s awesome “Watch the Worlds”), you should definitely check this out.

Even if you’re not, the technology is worth a look for compositing purposes - you could, for example, use this to generate an landscape to composite in outside a MovieStorm set.

Here’s a short film highlighting some of the visuals now available in SL, made by the inimitable Fleef of Fling Films.

Moviestorm, which features pretty heavily in the book, officially left Beta status a few hours ago. Moviestorm 1.0 is a brand new release, featuring new base assets, a new interactive tutorial, and – best of all – the long-awaited return of the Modders Workshop! And about darned time too, as Moviestorm Beta users will attest.

Moviestorm 1.0 and the new Base pack are completely free to download and use, and any machinima you create is yours to exploit, so take a look if you haven’t already.

Moviestorm has moved on so much since we wrote Machinima For Dummies that I really wouldn’t recommend trying to follow on with the book using this new version of the software. Not to worry, though – you can safely install and run this new version and the version we supplied on our cover DVD simultaneously. Just resist the urge to click “Yes” when you’re asked if you want to do an automatic update.

If you’re already a Moviestorm user, note that Moviestorm’s automatic update process won’t update to this new release. There’s a fat goody bag of new content, so you’ll have to visit your Downloads page on the Moviestorm site to grab the new gear.

We’ll try to get an updated version of the Moviestorm sections from the book up on the blog soon – both Hugh and I are up to our necks in busy-ness at the moment!

(Disclosure: I’m employed by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author)