Machinima for Dummies: Category Machinima For Dummies recommends

The Demise - fascinating Machinima/hand-drawn crossover

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:53:00 +0100

I always looks forward to the official World of Warcraft Machinima contests. With virtually every one, some sensational work appears and the bar is raised for future Machinima.

And this year is no different, with The Demise premiering some fantastic work and techniques we’ve not seen in Machinima before.

The Demise from Daniel on Vimeo.

It’s a combination of hand-drawn animated stills (a la something like Broken Saints), some of them traced or altered from World of Warcraft frame grabs, and WoW Machinima, often composited together in a single frame. The effect is quite remarkable - the filmmaker, Daniel, has achieved a luminescent, fairytale feel reminiscent of Among Fables And Men with an almost Disney feel.

The story is, perhaps, not remarkable, but the visual and sound work make up for it.

I’ll say right now that the work on display here is likely to be a major influence for me on future movies. If you’re a Machinima creator, I heartily recommend mining every single frame for ideas.

Celtx 1.0

Johnnie Ingram — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:05:00 +0100

It’s already been blogged by Mike Jones and by Bllius too, so our apologies for the duplication to anyone reading this through the machinifeed, but Celtx hit version 1.0 only a few short hours ago.

Celtx, for those who’ve somehow missed it, is one of those astonishing free tools that beats the competition into a bloody pulp, even when the competition is a rather expensive industry-standard tool. Celtx is a scriptwriting tool – a sort of word processor for screenwriters – but it’s so much more than that. You can use a Celtx project to manage almost any aspect of the production process. It’s also got a fantastic online collaborative element, as well as version control and online backup baked in.

If, like us, you’ve been using Celtx for a while now, go and grab the upgrade (Celtx will automatically prompt you to do so the next time you run it). If you haven’t tried Celtx yet … what the heck is wrong with you? “Go get it right now”. Go on. It’s cross-platform and it’s free. Install it, love it, and we’ll say no more about this embarrassing gap in your toolset.

Overman rules

Johnnie Ingram — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:59:00 +0100

Rarely has the category Machinima For Dummies Recommends been so appropriate. Phil “Overman” Rice’s music video for Radiohead’s Bodysnatchers is a brilliant example of the power of machinima and anymation.

It’s hard to imagine any other technique that would have allowed a film like this to have been made, and Phil has taken full advantage of Second Life, Moviestorm and a whole pallete-full of other packages to produce what is, for my money, one of the best pieces of pure, sensuous the-sky-is-no-longer-the-limit machinima that’s ever been released.

Bodysnatchers proves once and for all that Overman is one of the greatest assets this community possesses, and it’s a perfect example of why the man is – well, heck, I’ll say it – a bone fide genius.

Anyone interested in seeing just how flexible machinima can be should go watch Bodysnatchers right now. If you liked the video even a tenth as much as I did, do remember to vote for Overman in the AniBoom Radiohead Music Video Contest.

The Machinima calendar

Johnnie Ingram — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:04:00 +0100

As Overman has already mentioned, I’ve set up a Google Calendar which is intended to be specific to Machinima (and Anymation). You can subscribe to the feed for the calendar using any compatible calendaring tool, or just do a search on public calendars for “machinima” if you use Google Calendar.

You can also embed the calendar on your website or in a blog post if you’d like to. I’ve added it to the sidebar on this site.

The exact purpose and scope of the calendar is still up for debate, so if you’ve any suggestions for events or additions to the calendar, or you just want to tell me why you think it’s a good plan or a terrible plan, send an email to calendar at machinimafordummies dot com.

PEDS Season 3

Johnnie Ingram — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:36:00 +0100

Machinima stalwart CJ Ambrosia contacted us to let us know that season 3 of his long-standing series, PEDS, is now underway.

PEDS is a comedy drama which also has the distinction of being the longest-running Grant Theft Auto machinima series ever. It’s also the series that spawned GTA Studios, the de-facto machinima tool for GTA. You can watch the Season 3 Premiere on YouTube. Keep an eye on the Pawfect Films site for new episodes.

"Machinima Grows Up" - 3DWorld Magazine Issue 104

Johnnie Ingram — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:10:00 +0100

Hancock fans might like to note that Hugh is interviewed in the June 08 issue of 3DWorld Magazine, along with several other machinima superstars such as Phil Rice, Paul Marino and Leo Lucien-Bay.

The article is a very good one, and has a much higher accuracy-to-nonsense ratio than most articles on machinima that make their way into the mainstream press. It’s also interesting to read an explanation of machinima from the point of view of hardcore 3D artists. Let’s hope this article encourages more talented 3D artists to dip their toes into the Machinima lagoon.

Yikes. My metaphor-stretching toolkit has just exploded.

The article also features a quote from me. Irritatingly, it’s a single sentence in which I manage to split an infinitive in a manner so magnificent that Gene Roddenberry would weep with pride. That’s committed permanently to print now, and will therefore annoy me till the day I die. I’m described as a “machinima veteran”, a term which is highly complementary but embarrassingly inaccurate. The article also describes Machinima For Dummies as “indispensable”, which made me blush a little.

My personal syntactical blunders aside, the article is highly recommended. UK readers will find 3DWorld for sale in most large newsagents. International readers might have to search a little, but I believe the magazine is exported to Foreign Climes with reasonable regularity.

Havoc physics engine free for personal use

Johnnie Ingram — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:19:00 +0000

I know Hugh said we’d be going quiet for a wee while, but I had to make a quick post when I saw this: the Havoc physics engine (which is the physics engine behind all the games that tout realistic physics as one of their selling points) will be released for free in May.

Now, this is not the quantum-shift for the machinima world that you might at first think. Make no mistake – Havoc is a stunningly complex beast. It’s effectively a code library on which to build game engines. It’s unlikely to see much use in the machinima world, even from the hardest of hardcore hackers. Nonetheless, you never know. The community has surprised us before, and it’ll do so again. Maybe a dazzlingly clever use of this free physics toolkit will be the next way they do so. So, I’m doing my civic duty and posting about the imminent release of the code, just in case somebody far clever than me is reading and gets inspired. Fingers crossed.

Via kotaku – thanks to Chris Ollis for bringing this to our attention in the first place.

Fantastic surrealist Machinima - just beautiful

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:52:07 +0000

If you haven’t seen ”The Dumb Man”, stop what you’re doing right now and go watch it.

It’s a surrealist piece with a strong Victorian feel, made in Second Life, and it’s just fantastic. The mood and feel are awesome, the imagery is marvellous, the story’s rather good, and it represents a fantastic use of SL for Machinima creation.

The character design, in particular, shows off the increasing strength of Second Life in creating great-looking characters (at least when they’re static), the lighting’s wonderfully done (it’s by Lainy Voom, creator of “Tale from Midnight City” last year), and generally it represents some fantastic Machinima work.

There’s also an interview with Lainy on the project over at New World Notes. Worth a read. Apparently there’s virtually no post-production in the entire thing!

Another free machinima engine on the scene

Johnnie Ingram — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:32:00 +0000

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.

SUPER(b) Video encoder

Johnnie Ingram — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:25:00 +0000

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.)