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Machinima Festival and News 56

Posted by timothy from the leaping-media-batman dept.
Hugh Hancock writes: "Machinima (real-time 3D film-making in game engines, what used to be called 'Quake Movies') has a bit of a grab-bag day today -- the New York Times (registration, blah) is running an article on it, prompted by the announcement of the first Machinima-only film festival, sponsored by NVidia!"
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Machinima Festival and News More

Machinima Festival and News

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  • What's the fun in watching interactive movies? The thing is that you walk around by yourself to get a 'personal experience'. Its like watching someone else play Quake; a lot of people get sick from that..
  • Oh, quick note since the last Machinima-related post on /. attracted some comments - Machinima.com [machinima.com] has been redesigned, now with Actually Usable(TM) technology!
  • The festival is to include screenings of the raucous comedy "Hardly Workin' " and Mr. Hancock's "Eschaton: Nightfall," based on the fantasy novels of H. P. Lovecraft. The event will end with an awards ceremony.
    That sounds a lot more fun the looking at some dummy players. You see, some people have enough creativity to actually come up with novel ways of using current technology (yeah, I'm calling Quake a technology). This sounds like a very cool venue for new artists to express themselves, way to go!

  • A good thing (Score:2, Interesting)

    by r6144 ( 544027 )
    Quake (1,2) movies is still one of the few ways to express oneself in video. Of course, it takes a lot of time to make one, but I doubt a DV film will be any easier to make.

    I have watched A Warrior's Life and Hard Workin'. The first has a good plot, but is a little slow-paced. The second is IMHO just a laughmaker, but its graphics looks good. I think they are worth watching if you have the time (and the bandwidth to download them), especially Quake* level designers, modellers, etc.

  • Great for Sub-professional Animators (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bjb ( 3050 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @07:56AM (#3929507) Homepage Journal
    I remember when Hardy Workin' first came out, I was trying to explain to a co-worker why this was so cool. It wasn't that the graphics were rendered completely in graphics hardware, it wasn't that the file size for a 16 minute movie was only a handful of megabytes (most being reusable textures and audio samples) compared to a comparable MPEG that could be played CLEAN at 1280x1024, it was that someone is doing a Pixar on their home computer.

    Think about it. You spend the time creating the backgrounds and characters (basically "cells" for animation, in a sense), and then you direct their movements and so-forth. Sure, there have been home animators for years making their own cartoons, but aren't most cartoons done on computers these days? I just think it is great that someone is making the computer one more way to express themselves. Last wave was the home musicians, now movie makers. What next?

  • Is there some relationship here? This is the second article today with a shameless plug for them, not that I have a problem with NVIDIA, I just hope we are getting the real news, and not news that is adworthy

  • UT 2003 (Score:4, Informative)

    by Quintin Stone ( 87952 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @08:51AM (#3929753) Homepage
    Unreal Tournament 2003 will be a great boon to machinema artists, from what I've seen. During their UT2003 Mod Summit [rps.net], they previewed a lot their tools for movie and cut-scene production. Matinee is the UT2k3 component that movie makers will be able to use in order to execute tailored bot scripts and set up special time- or animation-related notifications to trigger specific events. I'm not really into that kind of stuff myself, but what I saw did look very useful and very powerful. Now if we can all get easy access to the kind of motion-capture systems the industry has....
    • Yes, indeed. Some of Machinima.com's affiliates are working with Epic on Matinee, and it sounds very powerful indeed.

      Fountainhead's new Machinima system (being demoed at the festival) is also very cool.
  • Wasn't there supposed to be a Doom motion picture released sometime ago? Another vehicle for The Rock. Hmm, I think I'll have to skip that. I'll just stick to the Doom books.
  • but what i'd like to see is a way that anyone who makes a truly good movie will actually get attention for it without becoming the MPAA's bitch or getting slammed for so much bandwith that they have to take it offline.

  • Interactive Story... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @09:58AM (#3930155)
    When I had AI, my professor was working on a project using the unreal tournament engine. The idea was to have scripted events triggers, and an evolving storyline affected by the viewer who is allowed the most freedom the engine allows. The demo shown in class was an aquarium where the 'plaques' were generated on the fly using some basic facts, in whatever language the user requested. The plaques never looked the same
    twice and always offered different facts. The english sentences generated were pretty good and convincing enough to think things were scripted, but weren't. Character actions and dialog are not scripted, but instead they have a knowledge base and goals and rules of how goals can be acheived that influence their speech and action. Truly a gargantuan project but really neat to see it in action. Agents showed visible pauses at decision points in the demo. I have a friend who still works on the project with the college. Now this sort of stuff could make for some really interesting experiences when brought to its ultimate incarnation. Currently it requires three high-end systems to run, and even then the pauses are rather annoying, but given time this could be really exciting. Imagine an RPG with this technology where NPCs have goals and knowledge bases instead of scripts... .("Sigh... Times are tough..."). That would kick serious ass.
  • I always thought they should have live online machinima puppet shows where audience members could shout out suggestions for scenes.

    That way, when they suggest that an accountant and his dog visit a volcano in Hawaii. You could actually see an accountant and his dog at a volcano in Hawaii. Or the machinima version of it.

  • QdQ (Score:3, Informative)

    by dogas ( 312359 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @12:57PM (#3931646) Homepage
    I highly recommend watching Quake Done Quicker [planetquake.com]. These guys beat Quake 1 in 12 minutes.. and there are plenty of trick moves to keep the audience entertained... definitely not boring.
  • I saw some early efforts in this direction back in the heyday of VRML, around 1997. The idea back then was to get some stage actors comfortable with improv into a VRML environment, have them do a piece, capture the action, and rerender later with better quality. It didn't work well because VRML avatar movement was too clunky.

    Now, more of the technical problems have been overcome, and there's real potential for this. It's going to be a cheap medium. You have to use people who can act and have good voices, of course.

  • One of the main points people are missing re: the machinima process and what IMHO will be the revolutionary aspect of it when it really hits, is that it's a "real-time 3D animation rendering process." That means no compositing and no rendering. That means possibly shaving 30-40% off of animation production times. That means saving money for TV and video production companies (not film production, not yet). And that means I get to make a living from my favorite past-time, computer gaming (and I can tell all those old girlfriends who gave me grief about the amount of time I spent gaming to kiss my...).

    The other cool aspect is that it's bottom-up, grassroots tech vs. the high end mo-cap suits and big, number crunching, parallel machines. I love that. It gives me a chubby. I like having a chubby.

    Now, if only some of those big fish in Hollywood TV land would take a bite *dangling a machinima budget from a fish hook*. Come one, just a nibble.

    P.S. re: quality of the artwork--high in-game quality, did you see the Doom III demo? Amazing! Low TV quality that does just fine, have you ever watched South Park or Beavis and Butthead? Nuff said.

    ILL Bixby
    www.illclan.com
    Makes of the award winning short "Hardly Workin'"
    • Actually, Bixby, I'd tend to say that compositing still comes into the mix - we use AE an awful lot at Strange Company for Machinima work, 'cos it's just too handy for a lot of FX, titling, and so on not to.

      Rendering, I would agree - even if you end up doing your final production run as a "render" (if you're using FilmBox and Lightwave combo in a Machinima way, say), it's the time saved by not doing all the *preview* renders that's the real life-saver.

  • How bout posting some links to actual machinima vids?

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