Machinima for Dummies

Rather than the traditional Guess what? I’m not dead! type of blog post, I’m going to break our recent hiatus by giving you a short list of exciting machinima-related happenings of recent times. If you subscribe to the indispensable Machinifeed, a lot of this will be old news, but I’m aware that not everyone does¹.

• The Machinima Expo, in its moved-to-Second-Life-at-the-last-minute state, was a huge success. I get the impression that it was even more successful than the organisational team dared to hope. The legendary workaholic gestalt that is Phil “Overman” Rice did a monumental job of constructing a multi-exhibit, feature-packed virtual theme park in Second Life, including a very fitting – and rather moving – tribute to the late Peter Rasmussen. Congratulations (and thanks) to Phil, Ricky, Ingrid, Damien and the Expo elves. If you weren’t able to make it to the live event, take a look at some of the footage captured by living machinima database Ben Grussi.

• Antics3D is dead. Long live Antics3D. Actually, rumours of Antics’ death are somewhat exaggerated, but the company has announced that the Antics3D software will no longer be offered for purchase or download, and that subscriptions will not be able to be renewed after 28th November 2008. The move came, seemingly, out of nowhere, and has caused some serious ripples in the machinima pond. If you’re an Antics user, there’s no need to panic. Your current copy of Antics is not going to stop working, but there’ll be no more updates for the program, and official support will cease around June 2009. Perhaps now would be a good time to take a look at one of the alternative machinima-capable engines instead.

• Linux Insider’s series on intellectual property law finished with a very interesting post on copyright law as it pertains to virtual worlds. SLifers, you’ll want to read this one.

• Not breaking news, but a gentle reminder: the monthly machinima-themed audio conference Talk The Machinima Talk is back again this month. If you’ve never been, this is the perfect time to pop in to Second Life and meet some like-minded people. The audio conference is not a cliquey thing at all. Whatever your experience, you’ll be made welcome.

• The 2009 AMAS Machinima Film Festival is on! In New York, at Eyebeam again! Fo’ shizzle! Wait – no it’s not. Yes it is. Erm … it might be.

• Have you backed up your data recently? Are you sure? Go check. Go back up right now – losing data hurts as Zachariah Scott knows all too well².

Sorry for the quiet time at the moment. Hugh and I are both as busy as bees who’ve discovered that the entire hive is off sick and they have to do two-hundredweight of pollen by the end of the day and the pollen-sorting machine is on the blink again so they have to do the whole thing by hand and it’s their wedding anniversary and they forgot to buy flowers for Mrs Bee and she’s a bee so she really likes flowers and oh my god is that the time? In other words, we’ve both very little free time at the moment, and that’s got nothing to do with the recent release of the World of Warcraft Wrath Of The Lich King expansion³.

¹ You’d better have a darned good excuse.

² Big love to Zach – we feel your pain, man.

³ Okay, maybe a little. How great are the Howling Fjord questlines?

Just a quick note- a friend of mine posted a brief and interesting piece on how she’s branding her ebook fiction - basically, attempting to develop a consistent theme and style for her work so that readers who are looking for a certain type of fiction will automatically come to her.

It’s a good idea, particularly if you’re producing a large volume of fiction - carve yourself out a “position”, to use marketing terminology. And it’s an interesting reversal of the knee-jerk that a lot of people, including me, have - which is to feel that you have to have variety in your work and not pigeon-hole yourself.

What do you think? Do your films have a “brand”?

Looks like the 3D camera-based technologies are starting to hit. Mgestyk are showing off their new 3D gesture recognition system, which apparently recognises hand movements and gestures and translates them into computer control.

That’s nice, of course, but what’s really interesting is that this technology could presumably also be used to recognise gestures as… gestures. Cheap home mocap, here we come.

One to watch. Apparently the system will be “the price of a high-end webcam”.

A quick tip: If you’re creating a Machinima piece and you’re not a good enough musician to compose your own work, you should definitely check out music generation programs like Sony’s Acid or Apple’s Garageband.

In many ways, programs like this offer a very “Machinima” approach to music creation - using pre-recorded loops, you can build up a surprisingly sophisticated and varied selection of instrumental music, very quickly.

I’ve been using them on Kamikaze Cookery to great effect - this trailer’s music took about an hour, for example. It’s not the same quality as getting an original score written specifically for your piece, but it’ll build and hold a mood, and that’s often what you need.

I don’t know too much about the differences between the packages. I must admit, I’ve found Garageband a bit wanting for more classical music, but it’s great for rock stuff.

Anyone used these packages on their Machinima? If so, what did you think?

Expect a drop in posting frequency around here for the next few months, I’m afraid.

I’m launching a new non-machinima series (a cooking show, as a matter of fact) right now, so I’m going to be focussing pretty hard on that. Johnnie will still be holding down the fort here, but Moviestorm’s also stepping up, so he’s likely to be pretty busy too.

Don’t worry, though - we will be back.

We’ve just heard the bad news that the Machinima Expo – organised as part of Festival Arcadia by Phil Rice, Ricky Grove, Ingrid Moon and Damien Valentine – has been cancelled, at least in its originally proposed form.

You can read the full sad story at the Expo blog. After the time, effort and expense that the four organisers have poured into it, this is a real shame. The Expo was shaping up to be a superb event for machinimators.

All is far from lost, though. The Expo will still go on, but is now being moved to a virtual event within Second Life. In many ways, this is even better. If you weren’t going to be able to attend in person, now you have no excuse!

Stay tuned to the Expo blog or the twitter feed for updates, and we’ll see you in-world.

Whilst there have been a couple of reports on Siggraph 2008, the premiere graphics conference held in LA last month, no-one’s really talked about the academic papers that were presented there. Since these tend to represent the cutting edge of graphics technology that we can expect to be using in between two and five years, I thought it was worth having a quick look over what came out there.

I wasn’t at Siggraph, so I’m going from the list of papers maintained here. In addition, whilst I can code a bit, I’m not at the level of these guys, so I could have completely the wrong end of the stick on something. If you’re interested, check out the papers linked for more.

There aren’t a hell of a lot of papers directly applicable to Machinima and real-time techniques this year. By far the most obvious trend was work on markerless performance capture - in other words, motion capture without ping-pong balls. Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of this field was Performance Capture from Sparse Multi-view Video - it’s worth watching the attached video, as it shows an 8-camera setup being able to completely recreate an actor and his movements as an animated mesh, without markers, lasers, or anything else, clothing and all. Articulated Mesh Animation from Multi-view Silhouettes appears to do much the same thing, but this time working from a base reference mesh. Markerless Garment Capture is doing the same thing again, but this time just with clothes.

All of this, of course, is very exciting. Motion capture from normal cameras - and the first paper listed notes that it uses normal 25 fps cameras - would massively reduce the cost of this technique and open it up to a huge range of applications. Imagine just being able to capture any motion you needed for your movie right in your living room.

There were a couple of papers on crowd techniques - Clone Attack! Perception of Crowd Variety, which dealt with the problem of avoiding obvious cloning in your crowd scenes, and Group Motion Editing, which talked about editing pre-created group paths - changing where the crowd walks in your film.

The former, in particular, is well worth a look for Machinima practitioners. It’s not a programming paper so much as it is a practical psychology paper, testing the various approaches to “de-cloning” your crowds, and many of its techniques are useful straight away. The latter paper is not so much use, but we’ll probably see its research in RTS games before too long.

The remaining individual papers are all interesting. Real-time, All-frequency Shadows in Dynamic Scenes, one of the few specifically real-time targetted papers, presents some really impressive real-time lighting techniques, which give me a lot of hope for next-generation lighting engines. Worth a look if you want to see the future, or you’re currently programming a renderer (you know whom you are!). Real-time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies is mostly notable for being written by some of the team behind Spore, but presents some fascinating if tricky to understand techniques for animating characters of unknown anatomy. Again, one for the programmers (although the author also links to a much less technical article on Gamasutra giving an overview of the process).

Hair Photobooth: Geometric and Photometric Acquisition of Real Hairstyles does pretty much what it says on the tin, although my reading is that this stuff won’t be real-time for a long while yet. And Statistical Reconstruction and Animation of Specific Speakers’ Gesturing Styles looks fascinating, but I haven’t been able to get it to load yet!

So, not the most fascinating SIGGRAPH ever from the point of view of the Machinima creator, but there’s still some good stuff in there. In particular, the developments in performance capture are really exciting.

It has just occurred to us that we’ve not mentioned this.

Johnnie and I will be running two workshops at the Cambridge Film Festival in just under two weeks, on the Monday and the Tuesday (22nd and 23rd), entitled “Make a Film In Your Lunch Hour”. We’ll be teaching anyone attending not just how to use the tools, but how to make a, hopefully pretty decent, mini-film, all in an hour!

Also, Johnnie and I are appearing on various panels over the Festival. Check the schedule for more details.

The final list of films to be shown in the Cambridge Film Festival’s Machinima lineup has been posted, and it’s a great selection, including both absolute classics (Red vs Blue, Snow Witch, Male Restroom Etiquette) and stuff even I’ve not heard of!

This is looking like a really good event. Stay tuned for a rundown of the event itself later in the week.

Reminder - the Machinima program is on the 22nd and 23rd of September, in Cambridge, UK.

When we finished off the feature-length cut of BloodSpell, one of the single biggest and most impressive changes we made was going over the entire project with colour-correction tools. The results were astounding - the colours were brighter, deeper, more vibrant, and the entire project benefitted as a result. Since then, I’ve been recommending that anyone who makes digital video has to get into colour-correction.

I’ve just been using Colorista, a colour-correction package that a pro editor friend of mine pointed me at, and it’s sufficiently impressive that I had to mention it here.

I’ve always found sophisticated colour-correction a bit of a pain - Final Cut Pro’s colour correction tends to produce rather erratic results compared to what you’d expect, and it’s hard to tweak the 3-way colour corrector to do what you want rather than introducing strange colour casts to the image.

Colorista, however, works exactly as you’d expect it to - when you adjust the high tones, it pulls all the bright parts of the image up, naturally adjusting the image so that it looks like that’s how it was originally shot. When you change the dark tones, it doesn’t affect the rest of the image either. And so on.

It’s only available for higher-end video editors (After Effects, Final Cut, Premiere and Avid), and it costs $199, but the results are astounding. Check out their tutorial videos, and you’ll see what I mean.

Definitely one to consider if you’re hard-core about your editing.