Machinima for Dummies

I’ve been thinking about trailers - as you do.

(Well, actually, if you’ve got a feature film coming out that took four years of your life to make, yes, you do!).

Now, I and other Machinima creators have tended to go one of two ways with trailers:

• Release them well before the release of the film, usually whilst you’re still in production or,
• Don’t have one.

Option 1) is definitely a bad idea. For starters, if you’re still developing the look of the film, your trailer won’t be as slick as your finished product - and your trailer should ideally be the slickest element of your film package. Secondly, no-one ever gets their time estimates right on a Machinima product, for the same reasons that no-one ever gets the time estimates right on software development - too many variables, too much variance. That means that your trailer will come out months and months before your film, in all likelihood - giving people time to forget it.

(I’ll have a piece up on scheduling and estimating Machinima production at some point, but the summary is “don’t if you can help it”.)

At best, a trailer beforehand might help build up some anticipation, but it isn’t guaranteed - and worst case, you’ll actually convince people that your production quality will be lower than it is.

(We speak from experience. The BloodSpell trailer was not well timed.)

Option 2) is a common one, but it’s also not a good idea if your film’s more than about five minutes long. Just as there’s a steep cut-off point for download sizes (a 10 Mb download will attract 5-10 times the number of downloaders as a 100 Mb download), I’m fairly sure that there’s also a cut-off point beyond which people won”t experiment with a long film. I’m not sure what it is, yet, and I think that it’s longer than you might expect, but it’s there - particularly with an unknwon quantity.

And yet, the reluctance to download or watch goes away if you’ve got a track record. Brandon “Oxhorn” Dennis, for example, recently released a 12-minute film, the third in his “Inventing Swear Words” series - longer than I’d normally expect a peak-popularity film. However, he’s getting remarkable figures - 83,000 views in the first week.

So why trail? Because it gives people a “teaser” work to get some idea of the quality they can expect. Given that even if you’re a prolific Machinima creator, there will always be new people coming to your films, having some kind of short work is a good way to go - and having a trailer, particularly if you update it for each part in a series, say, is a good way to ensure that the first part of your work that they watch is the best (a critical problem that we had with the original BloodSpell series - Episode 1, being the first one we made, was by far the weakest episode).

But again, when to release the trailer? Well, taking everything into account, it’s seeming to me that the best time to release a trailer is at exactly the same time as you release your film. It provides a “proof of concept” as mentioned above. It provides a quick way for lazy or harried media types to get a sense of whether you’re worth bothering with. And it hopefully ensures that curious people arriving at your site but not wanting to dive straight into a long piece will look at a recent work full of your best efforts, rather than hunting around for a shorter film you’ve made (which was probably earlier and therefore worse).

We’re going to be trying this approach for BloodSpell. We’ll see how it goes.

So we’re going to be doing a whole bunch of things at the Machinima Europe festival! Here’s a quick summary of the MfD team’s appearances:

Friday

This is the Schools day, not a public day.

Hugh and Johnnie will be running half-hour presentations of the best of Machinima through the day.

Saturday

12:00 - 13:00 : Tools for Machinima. Hugh chairs a discussion with Friedrich Kirschner of MovieSandbox, Matt Kelland of Moviestorm and John Martin of IClone on Machinima tools.

13:00 - 13:30: Hugh and Johnnie will be signing Machinima for Dummies books in the Student Union. This signing will continue after…

13:30 - 14:30 : Machinima for Dummies Recommends… Hugh and Johnnie present an hour of Machinima films that everyone should watch. Updated from the book!

Sunday

11:15 - 12:00 : Second round of signings.

12:00 - 13:00 : European Machinima. Hugh talks about Strange Company’s production work and Euro Machinima with Alex Chen and Tracy Harwood.

13:30 - 15:30 : BloodSpell Feature Premiere This is the big one - the premiere of Strange Company’s feature-length cut of the epic “punk fantasy adventure”, complete with Q&A with the key crew of the film.

After that, we’ll be in the bar!

Hope to see you there! Comment if you’ll be along.

Oh - if you are coming, do the organisers a favour and register beforehand! It’ll help them to know numbers.

Onward, to Machinima…

As most of you will know, Hugh and I have been working pretty closely with Short Fuze, the makers of Moviestorm, over the course of Machinima For Dummies. As well as bundling a copy of Moviestorm on the book’s cover disk, we devoted two large sections of the book to Moviestorm. We also wrote some of the documentation for one of their early beta releases. We did all this because, quite simply, Moviestorm rocks.

I’m delighted to announce that, as of this morning (Mon 1st October 2007), I will be employed full-time by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author.

You won’t see any huge change in my attitude because of this – I raved about Moviestorm before they hired me and I’ll continue to do so now that they pay my wages – but I want to state for the record that Moviestorm’s presence in Machinima For Dummies was not solicited or paid for in any way. We featured it because we love it, and their job offer to me was made after the book was published.

I’m going to continue to work with Hugh to keep this site updated, and to release new and revised content. I’ll also be continuing to work with Strange Company whenever time and practicality allows. I’ll be mentioning Moviestorm on this blog from time to time, but only if there’s something that I think you’ll find interesting or relevant. I won’t be using this blog as free Moviestorm advertising.

I genuinely love Moviestorm. I think it’s one of the best and most exciting things to happen to machinima for several years. It’s all the better for being developed by Short Fuze – they’re all machinima creators and fans, and are crazy keen to work with the community. They’ve already hired several prominent members of the machinima community, and they’re willing to pay machinimators to make movies using their software. Now, how often do you hear that phrase except prefaced by “Wouldn’t it be great if …”, or “Maybe, someday …”? Hopefully, we’ll see Moviestorm go from strength to strength – check out the latest version, which features some amazing built-in cell-shading.

I hope I’ve been honest and comprehensive in this announcement, but if you’ve got any concerns or questions, feel free to contact me in person (johnnie DOT ingram AT strangecompany DOT org, or just comment on this post).

Well, this is exciting! A tip from the inimitable Moo Money at yesterday’s Machinima Talk event led me to Opensimulator.org, which appears to be a fairly successful attempt to build an open-source, publically-runnable Second Life server.

As we mention in the book, having the ability to run an SL server locally will make a huge difference in terms of its usability for Machinima creation. (For those who haven’t heard, we find Second Life interesting and potentially great for Machinima, but it does have a LOT of problems as a Machinima platform right now.)

Being able to run Second Life as a local service on your own hardware will substantially change the SL Machinima game. It’ll take network latency out of the equation, mean that you won’t have to pay for land on which to shoot, give you total control of your environment, theoretically allow you to run computer-controlled avatars - basically give you all the advantages of both Second Life and a LAN-based game, combined.

OpenSimulator doesn’t seem to be there yet - it’s still in alpha testing, and the site says “Some stuff works, a lot doesn’t” - but there’s clearly a lot of development going on, and there are publically-accessible servers running. Something to keep an eye on.

Apologies for the quiet this week. I’m working on the final cut of BloodSpell and Johnnie’s moving house, so we’re a bit preoccupied.

More stuff next week, I hope.

Machinima For Dummies gets its most comprehensive review yet over at Stranger109. Well worth a read.

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, and the chances were pretty high that it was sooner.

I’d like to claim the prize for reporting the first mistake in the book. I’m aware that this may just be because the rest of you are too polite to tell us about the miriad of mistakes you’ve already found, but your timidity is our gain.

It’s not a biggie, but it’s still worth mentioning:

On page 132, the two links to Decorgal’s tools should be http://decorgalinc.com/blog/?p=157 and http://decorgalinc.com/blog/?p=179 (not ?p-179 as printed).

Told you it wasn’t a biggie.

If you’ve read the first chapter of the book (either by buying a copy like a good boy/girl or by reading it for free online), you’ll have read Hugh’s account of the birth of the word machinima. If you’d like to hear the story as told by the man on the other end of the confusion, the original email exchange has recently surfaced from the frighteningly-organised hard drive of machinima legend Anthony Bailey.

Whilst they aren’t up on the official festival page yet, the nominations for Machinima Europe, which is effectively the top Machinima film festival this year, have been announced over on the Machinima Europe Facebook group - you can also see them over at Machinima Premiere.

It’s a fairly broad list, with very few films receiving more than a few nominations. Four pictures/series have three nominations each - ‘Stolen Life’, ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’, ’Pictures of War 2’, and the series ‘Blink’ (which I can’t find online anywhere - anyone?). A further four have two nominations apiece: ‘Instinct’, ’Fallacies of a Stranger’, ’The Ballad of Black Mesa’ and ’BloodSpell’. Obviously we’re not unhappy with that last result - exactly the same nominations we got at the Machinima Film Festival last year, in fact!

The list is fairly heavy on new movies - I didn’t recognise about half the names of the films in the contest. And there are a few surprising names missing - no ‘Beast’, no ’ Morning Run Amok’, no ‘Inventing Swear Words’, no “Snacky’s Journal”, and nothing from Blizzard. On the other hand, last year at the MFF the nominations were a big surprise, and two of those surprises (Edge of Remorse and Bill et John 2) are now firmly seated in the Machinima hall of fame.

I’m looking forward to seeing the surprise winners this year.

It’s hard to tell what the engine mix is, given that I don’t recognise all the films, but my initial impression is that there’s quite a strong lean away from game-based Machinima.

Moviestorm comes out of the gate swinging, with two nominations for “Break Your Concentration” and “Mum’s Been To Iceland”. Obviously, ‘Stolen Life’ isn’t game-based (it’s made with a game development tool), and neither’s ‘Cuckoo Clock’, by Tom Jantol. There’s also very heavy Second Life presence, with at least 6 SL films in the contest - ‘Comcast Island’, ‘When The Postman Spits Twice’, ‘Dreamed Up’, ‘Better Life’, ‘Machinima Island’, and ‘The Grid Review’. The Movies, which I think falls under “isn’t really a game”, has at least two more representatives - ‘Instinct’ and ‘Fallacies’.

There’s also one film that is going to attract heated discussion, particularly if it wins: “Kung-Fu Glitch”, made using a 2D Commodore 64 game. I’m not sure what to think about that myself.

There’s a very limited showing from the Usual Suspects, engine-wise, aside from Second Life: 1 Halo video( ‘Halo Unyielding’), 2 Half-Life 2 vids (‘Ballad of Black Mesa’ and ‘Machinima! With Officer Dan’), 2 Sims 2 videos (a surprising single nom for Snow Witch, plus “Domestic Violence” by Ricard Gras) and 3 World of Warcraft vids (‘Azerothian Supervillains’ and two from the ubiquitous Oxhorn, ‘MtvU Commercials’ and ‘Hark! Hear the Wails.’). There are nearly as many SL vids as all the ‘usual’ top engine vids combined.

Finally, it’s very noticable that flight simulators are still remarkably strong engines to use to make Machinima, at least as far as awards go. That’s now two years in a row that one of the front-running nominees in the big Machinima festivals has been made using a flight sim - Bill et John 2 last year, and this year ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ as well as ‘Pictures of War 2’. Oddly, the original Bill et John and the original Pictures of War were both nominees at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival!

Overall, it’s an interesting line-up. We’ll try to track down links for as many of the front-runners as we can - they’re interesting watching.

Good luck to everyone in the contest!

Wow, the reviews are really rolling in – we’re up to four five-star reviews on Amazon.com now!

And Fulkster has made this short video review using Moviestorm, too! Awesome stuff.

Next week: some content that isn`t Johnnie and me going “OMG, people like the book!” Promise.