Machinima for Dummies: Category Tips and lists

The Power Of Internets

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:07:00 +0100

Gnomic Utterance Week continues. Agree? Disagree?

If you’re one in a million on the internet, that means there are another 1,407 people just like you. Your potential audience is MUCH larger than you think.

Bonus content: There’s an excellent interview with the guys from hit web show The Guild over on Curse Gaming. Really good stuff about how the show is developed and how they got so popular.

Is Love The Law?

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:17:00 +0100

Hello, and welcome to Gnomic Utterance Week(ish), here on Machinima for Dummies. Agree? Disagree? Confused? Let us know.

“Make what you love” has it the wrong way round. Don’t make what you don’t like. But if you only love one idea, you probably need more ideas.

The non-game speedbump

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:48:00 +0100

Machinima creators are in for a bit of a shock.

Let me rephrase that. Machinima creators who move from games engines to non-game engines - as many commentators including me are advising - are in for a bit of a shock.

You see, we’ve become used to Machinima having the potential to reach huge audiences. Strange Company’s Fair Trade piece in World of Warcraft, for example, has reached over 120,000 people by now. Films like Still Seeing Breen, The Return, and of course Red vs Blue regularly attract TV-sized audiences of more than a million people. Certainly at Strange Company we’ve become used to the idea that a film attracting less than 10,000 people hasn’t lived up to its potential.

So how many people are non-game pieces like Tom Jantol’s beautiful Wizard of OS attracting? It’s one of the most feted films in the recent Machinima past. So, surely, a few hundred thousand at least?

Nope. I don’t have figures for Machinima Premiere’s viewing, but for all its other outlets, after more than a month, Wizard of OS, which took 5 months to make, has gotten just over 1,000 views.

The figures carry over. When We Two Parted, Strange Company’s new film, has only broken the thousand view barrier thanks to a high-profile posting on Machinima.com’s YouTube channel - and many viewers there are, shall we say, less than enchanted with it. Even What I Love About Christmas, the seasonal comedy piece from Phil Male Restroom Etiquette Rice has, after 6 months, a lot of pushing, and help from Phil’s millions of viewers, only just crested the 10k mark.

By comparison, Baron Soosden’s I’m So Sick, added only three months earlier, has so far racked up 250,000 views on the ‘tube, which isn’t even the primary medium on which most people watched it. And much as I like the Baron’s work, I’d have to say that Phil’s Christmas rant is at least as good and (you’d expect) more viral.

So what’s happening?

What’s happening is that Machinima creators who move away from games engine lose their inbuilt games audience. Now, the way this works is actually a lot more complicated than it looks, and misunderstanding it could cause you to trip up - it did for me.

What’s going on?

There are basically three components at work here:

Communities. These games have websites associated with them, and people talk about things related to that game on that website. This is very important - it’s not about how many people are interested in a subject, per se, it’s about how many websites there are devoted to that subject, how active they are, and how many viewers they get.

This is an important point to bear in mind when thinking about a film. We tripped up here. We’d reasoned that Byron is a well-known name, and hence we’d be able to raise interest in the movie. However, we forgot that there aren’t that many places on the Internet where people talk about him, and those that do are highly academic and out of our grasp. Hence, despite the fact that lots of people like Byron, we couldn’t find anywhere to talk about the film - unlike World of Warcraft, say, there’s no RomanticPoetsInsider.com desperate for content.

The games world is one of the fastest-moving, content-hungriest, internet-savviest interest groups out there. As soon as we move out of that stream, it’s a lot harder to inject our works into conversation.
Familiarity. “Animation” doesn’t have good associations for most non-animators. Either it references “kid’s stuff”, or obscure Eastern European art films with characters made from matchsticks. Normal people don’t hear “animated film” and think “ooh, I want to watch that”.

On the other hand, millions of people on the ‘net have very positive associations with phrases like “Half-Life 2”.

We avoid the unfamiliar, by and large. Machinima’s engine connections give game Machinima a huge step up by connecting something potentially threatening (a short film made by someone they’ve never heard of) with something very positive (a game engine they love). As soon as you move away from that, into a minority interest like Moviestorm or even pro tools like Tom uses, you lose that connection.

There are ways to combat that, of course, like writing fan-fiction based on existing universes, but ways to combat it whilst not embroiling yourself right back into copyright problems are much, much harder to find.
Catalysis. What are the films that gain the most hits on YouTube in a given day? Well, they’ll either be the ones on the front page, the ones being linked to by MSNBC or BoingBoing, or… the ones that are already popular.

The hardest part of gaining an audience for most films is getting the initial momentum going. With BloodSpell, we were very lucky to get that thanks to an approving post on BoingBoing. With Fair Game, we got it from WoWInsider.

A games audience on its own can’t propel a video to success. For that it needs to be both good and, often, well-marketed, either in concept or after release. But what a games audience does do is offer a few hundred or thousand people who WILL watch just about anything semi-competent produced in the engine. A bit of buzz from them and it’ll rise to 10,000 or so - and news sites will start to hear about it. Above 100,000, a film starts to generate its own momentum - people will simply look at the number of views and conclude it must be something special. And above a million, so I understand, the problem is keeping up with your own film as it rolls.

Getting the catalysing first few hundred viewers, particularly making sure those viewers are likely to be people who will post and talk about your film to others, is much, much harder without a games engine audience to back you up.

So What Can We Do?

Well, I don’t have any real answers. I have a few suggestions, but I’m still feeling this territory out. If you’ve got ideas on how to overcome the PR gap, please do post ‘em in the comments.

Consider making game movies : Yes, I know what we’ve all said. There are loads of good reasons to not make game movies. But there’s one very good reason to do so, too - audience-building. A popular game engine movie or movies can build you up as a name, can ensure that fan sites will report on your next movie even if it isn’t in a game engine, and can ensure that you have the catalysing few hundred or thousand hits from fans of your past work.
Make series : It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the killer app for the Internet video is the series. Blip.tv and Machinima.com both work on this principle, and they’re both right. Series allow you to build an audience over time. They give you multiple release points. They give you opportunities to come up with new angles to publicise your films - for example, BloodSpell got a boost half-way through from the Leipzig Games Conference controversy. And they let you attract an audience that might start with a single video, but will probably check out the rest of your work too. Again, it’s a familiarity thing - the first time they hear about your series you’re an unknown quantity, but if the same person hears about you again and again, you become known, familiar, and eventually they’ll check your work out.
Design movies with an eye on publicity : I know that sounds pretty horrible. But if you’re anything like me, at any given time you’ve got more ideas for movies than you’ve got time to make them. Consider making the one that you can most easily market, if you’re going the non-games engine route. Consider the communities who would be interested in it (and check they actually exist!), consider the news hooks (can you get a famous person involved?), consider, even, if it’s going to have a really striking YouTube thumbnail. All these things matter.
Make movies for yourself, not an audience : I got a good telling off from Johnnie, my co-author on this blog, after I ranted about all the problems I was having publicising When We Two Parted. He asked me what I was making the movie for - to make a good movie, or to get large numbers on a counter on YouTube?

Now, that’s actually a difficult question for some films. For my upcoming non-Machinima series Kamikaze Cookery, I am, in all honesty, primarily making it to make money, which means that I need numbers. But for WWTP, I was making it because it was something I wanted to make, an image I had in my head. And I got that image down onto the screen fairly successfully. Which means that WWTP is a success for me, even if only 100 people had ever seen it.

Be clear why you’re making a film. If you’re making it for yourself and art, then it doesn’t matter how many people see it. Although, obviously, more is nicer than less…

Blue-screened pilots in flight-sim Machinima

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 00:24:00 +0000

Gamerz Theatre has a great little article on putting live-filmed pilots in Machinima aircraft.

This is an excellent idea - particularly for close-ups, which they only just touch on. You could extend this to Eve Online Machinima, various racing games, and even Medieval Total War - a good way to combine the strengths of Machinima with the strengths of DV.

If you’re doing this, make SURE you get a clean green-screen (easy enough to do with some green fabric and some bright halogen work lights, which cost about $15 each), and pay attention to matching your lighting. Lighting will make or break your composite.

I’m really interested to see more of this work.

UPDATE - there must be something in the air today. WoWInsider is showcasing this marvellous video mixing WoW characters with real-life footage, rather than the other way around - very sweet, and I highly recommend it.

And a few days ago, Free Pixel was talking about using Augmented Reality to film real people next to Second Life characters in real-time - very cool indeed.

New Engines for Christmas

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:51:00 +0000

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.

Focus grouping fer cheap

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:15:49 +0000

We recommend focus-grouping your work a bunch of times in Machinima for Dummies - where by “focus-grouping”, we mean “getting people who aren’t you to watch your film before it’s released”.

It’s one of the most valuable processes you can go through. Ideally, it’s most valuable when you can cross-question your audience, but any eyeballs that aren’t yours or your team’s on your work will help pick up the problems that you’re too close to what you’re doing to be aware of.

The problem, of course, is finding people to focus-group on - particularly people you don’t know! By definition, you can’t just call them. Or at least, you couldn’t.

Amazon.com’s new ”Mechanical Turk” technology looks to be perfect for doing low-cost “mall tests” of your film. Essentially, it allows you to hire as many people as you want for a very small task - like, say, watching a short movie and commenting on it. In terms of costs, it’s very cheap indeed - this Slashdot poster paid $1.45 for people to come up with rebuttals to an argument he was making online, for example.

So it would be trivial to set aside a budget of $30 or so - well within reach if you’ve spent a month or two on a film - and use Mechanical Turk to find out what Real People think of your film before release, allowing you to correct any mistakes, make clearer anything that isn’t, polish the bits that clunk, and generally get you closer to that 4,500,000 hit YouTube smash!

Trailers and Machinima

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 15:46:00 +0100

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.

Read (a bit of) Machinima For Dummies for free!

Johnnie Ingram — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:18:00 +0100

Not everybody will be aware that Wiley (the publishing company responsible for the … For Dummies series) regularly provide sample chapters from their titles on their website. Machinima For Dummies is no exception: you can read the first chapter, as well as perusing the contents and the index, at Wiley’s website.

Of course, a mere $19.79 will get you every single chapter plus a DVD packed full of Machinima-related goodness including a complete Machinima creation environment …

Sorry. That was a bit shameless, even for us, wasn’t it?

Decent Window Open-Source video editor?

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 18:09:00 +0100

One thorn in our side throughout the writing of MfD was the ongoing lack of a decent video editing package in Open-Source, Windows-friendly form - hence the fact we use Sony Vegas throughout the book.

It’s pretty much the only major lack in the Windows Open-Source canon these days - there are 3D modelers, accounts packages, audio editing software, but the only half-decent video editing packages are Linux-only.

However, this new package, Viva Video looks promising. It’s fairly simple, but it looks usable, which is frankly more than I’ve seen from a Windows OS video editor before.

Anyone used it? Is it more useful than Windows Movie Maker?

We’ll probably have a look at it in the next little while, if we get a chance.

Update: It only imports PAL DV format video. That’s more than a little limiting, although it still might be of use to some people. The inimitable Phil “Overman” Rice also recommends taking a look at ZS4 , a non-OS but free video editor - I’ve not used it, but it does look featureful.

Blizzard posts Machinima rules!

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 11:38:00 +0100

This is fantastic news: Blizzard have posted their own set of Machinima rules, which are arguably even clearer and allow more than Microsoft’s first draft of their rules.

Key points:

Their “offensive content” clause is pretty clear: keep it within the T for Teen ESRB rating of WoW. That’s a clear guideline that’s easy to work within.
They don’t allow commercial work, but there are exemptions for sponsorship. This is very cool - it’s clear that Blizz’s primary concern is to make sure as many people can see WoW Machinima as possible, and it’s very cool they’re allowing some revenue opportunities within that. The wording here also might imply that RvB style “premium memberships” or selling DVDs is permitted provided that your production is still available to view for free - I’m not at all sure about that, so I’m going to try to get some clarification and report back. I initially misread this clause - don’t take this one to the bank yet.
There are no fanfic or sound usage limitations. Woo!
They’ve got a direct contact address for any Machinima-related questions: machinima@blizzard.com

There are a few downsides:

The “offensive content” clause is clearer than MS’s, but it’s also more limiting. The ESRB’s Teen rating allows “violence, suggestive themes, crude humor, minimal blood, simulated gambling, and/or infrequent use of strong language.” That’s fairly broad, but it’s clear that you couldn’t make Red vs Blue comply with those rules, for example. MS’s rules are less clear - meaning you can be less sure if you’re in trouble - but they also allow more latitude, as MS have said they’ll be making decisions based on quality, not just content.
Blizz request that you seek approval from them before you enter your film into contests and film festivals - this is the only “oh, dear” prohibition for me. Personally, I think that this clause might get changed pretty soon: for example, if I was publicising a Machinima film, I’d be requesting 25 or more of these a month (for film festival entries). Add a few more serious filmmakers into the mix, and you’re talking about having to hire someone full-time just to deal with Machinima.
No mention of a commercial license. Blizzard don’t mention any possibility for commercial licenses for WoW Machinima (except in a clause saying “you can’t sell your work without written permission from Blizzard”). That doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any (and I’ll be looking into that) but initially I don’t get the impression of openness to commercial ventures that the MS license gave.

Overall, this is great news, and it’s great to see Blizzard taking steps to support the Machinima community around World of Warcraft.

And on a personal note - let’s just say this couldn’t have happened at a better time.

(Thanks to Brandon “Oxhorn” Dennis and Bilius at Shattered Keyboard for the tip on this! There’s also some discussion of these rules going on over at WoWInsider.)