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From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance 107

Posted by michael from the entering-new-territory dept.
Moe Napoli writes "Machinima producer/author Paul Marino recently posted on his blog that he will be attending Sundance later this month (Jan. 26th to be exact) to moderate a panel discussion about the rising artform of machinima (using 3D games like Half-Life 2 for filmmaking purposes). Amongst the panelists will be Red Vs. Blue/The Strangerhood creators Burnie Burns and the Rooster Teeth team (also featured in the Jan. 2005 issue of Wired), who will also present a live demonstration of how they produce their hilarious RvB machinima series. Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking and even cooler to see how far it has come since some gamers started making Quake Movies."
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From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance More

From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance

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  • Focus on the independant filmmaker (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BWJones ( 18351 ) * on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:25PM (#11290139) Homepage Journal
    Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking

    It is actually pretty cool. I had stopped going to the Sundance film festival a few years ago because they had lost that focus on the small filmmaker and it had become one big Hollywood fest. It started getting quite difficult to get tickets (for the local folks) because the big Hollywood companies were buying them all up in big groups. Things have apparently gotten a bit better, recently with some blocks of tickets reserved for the local folks, but we'll see. For the locals it used to be a place to go to see filmmaking at its finest, but eventually turned into a venue for people to see "stars" and for people to be "seen" in addition to a huge marketing fest which makes it kinda repulsive. I was sitting in the Morning Ray Cafe one day next to a woman whose job it was to give out schwag to celebrities (like iPods and Gucci handbags) and drive them around meeting their every needs and all I could think of was "That has got to be the worst job in the world! Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference......." Of course that's what I was thinking. What I actually said was something like "Oh, that's interesting.....".

    • I went to Sundance in the early days (eighties).

      There were times when I had the theatre to myself, and you could get tickets practically to anything. There was not a movie star to be found anywhere. Many of the movies were truly a labor of love. The film festival didn't even warrant a blurb in many newspapers.

      Today's scene at Sundance is surreal in comparison, and I don't bother hassling the crowds anymore.

      It's good for the economy though.
    • The Guild Theater in Albuquerque NM was recently host to Tromadance [filmthreat.com] NM, the first of what will hopefully be an annual local filmmaking event. This was grassroots, homegrown, micro-budget stuff I'm talking about, like about $100 here -- I think $3000 was the max including equipment. I'm sure a lot of the shorter peices were budgeted literally with change dug out from under the sofa cushions. Lloyd Kaufmann [imdb.com] of Toxic Avenger fame (among other things) ushered the event in, and everyone had a blast.

      I ran into

    • Re:Focus on the independant filmmaker (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RobotRunAmok ( 595286 ) * on Friday January 07, 2005 @03:40PM (#11290870)
      "That has got to be the worst job in the world! Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference......."

      Judge not, lest ye be judged, Asshole.

      Do something with her life? Like what? Write code? Supervise people who write code? Manage people who supevise people who write code? When does the society contribution kick in for that li'l career death-spiral?

      You've got no idea what that woman does with her life, for her kids, her community, her extended family, her church/temple/happy-magick-circle. You're actually defining someone by the means through which they pay their motgage? And all this in a post to that most glorious chrome-sheened temple to mid-90's self-absorbed gadget fetishists, SlashDot!! Wow. I mean, Wow.

      Helloooooo!! 1954 is calling! When you get back from your tour of duty with a Red Cross Tsunami relief team, it would like it's biases back, please.
    • Do something with your life.......Contribute to society somehow!.......Make a difference....... .....post to Slashdot, something!!

      right?

  • Animation & films (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fisheye1969 ( 842355 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:28PM (#11290168) Homepage
    With all the increases in computing power, I can see room for an application where you simply provide a script and the animated characters perform it for you in real time. Just set one of a few supplied scenes, provide the dialogue and direction, and hey presto, one real film! Maybe with your favourite actors "faked" - just imagine Casablanca with David Beckham and your grandmother set on a spaceship. The mind boggles... ...and the pervs drool of course... (yuk!)
    • The ultimate package would be like a 3D filmmaker studio.

      1.) screen writing tools
      2.) 3D script animation engine
      3.) 3D film editing like adobe premiere
      4.) DTS sound editor.
      5.) mpeg compiler to make one big movie

    • so if I convert the script of The Matrix to something keygrip etc could parse... would I be prosecuted for stealing the IP of the wachowsky(sp) brothers ?

      Specially if someone started charging for said movies to cover bandwidth/cpu costs etc.

      I'll refrain from any wise cracks about the ability of bots to act better than Keanu.. or will I ? :).

      Just curious, what do you guys think would happen if someone took the sims engine, or quake engine and made a forest gump, or saving private ryan with the Battlefield

      • Interesting question - of course, IANAL but I guess the if it was parody it might get away with it. Reminds me of the lego films someone makes in their spare time. Didn't someone do the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films?

        It's difficult to say though with all orgs like the RIAA and BSA frothing at the mouth because CD sales are up.

        And actually, lego would be easy to animate on computer...

      • Just curious, what do you guys think would happen if someone took the sims engine, or quake engine and made a forest gump, or saving private ryan with the Battlefield 1942 engine.. or a story very similar to that ? Is that art or pure theft ?

        Queue the onslaught of "not theft" comments....

        Seriously though, I don't think that they would be able to create these for profit. I'm sure there is something in the terms of use for these games that would prevent selling the resulting "movie." I doubt that there i
        • It's a difficult question with no clear answer.

          The underlying legal ground is "Fair Use" of a copyrighted work. Is such cases, courts evaluate the following:
          Does the new work have commercial purpose?
          How much of the copyrighted material does it use?
          How does it affect the market value of the original?
          What is the nature and purpose of the original?

          Typically, this is also conditioned by the tone and nature of the derived work. If the new work is clearly intended as satire, parody, or commentary (especially
    • Recently the guys behind Far Cry used the game's engine to create a short film, and for some reason people still refered to it as machinima. But it wasn't. In fact, it was really no different than a cutscene from any other game, but without the game.

      Machinima isn't just using a game engine for rendering an animation. That would make it no more special than using any other animation/rendering software to do the same. If anything, it's less so, because they are using pre-made animation (or sound effects, etc
      • The only reason why RvB authors can get away with their methods is that the characters lack any expressive capabilities. It's easy to ACT in real time in the game's world when the only thing you can do is repeatedly look up or down to simulate talking. It's not as easy when you need to use hands, the rest of the body, the face, etc. to express the feelings of the character. You simply can't do it in real time. So the solution for MACHINIMA would be to use more scripts instead of relying 100% on human acting
        • You're right that acting with game characters can be limiting, but I think that's what makes it interesting in the first place. A guy who puts on a puppet show obviously has some limitations, but if he can still make an expressive performance, then I don't think he should need to upgrade to less limiting tools.

          As for the Crytek thing, I wasn't really suggesting that the difference was the output format. It's that one is animated, and the other is acted. If something is animated and rendered in Maya, it isn
          • From Machinima.com: "Machinima uses graphical techniques originally developed for computer games to generate its visuals". From Wikipedia: "rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with ordinary PCs and the 3D engines of video games".

            Indeed, machinima is nothing more than "just using a game engine for rendering an animation". As it's currently defined, the term is broad enough to include "The Project" by Crytek. Whether the film is acted or animated is irrelevant. You may think that some types of mach
  • Oh my! If this keeps up, in a few years people will think games themselves are a legitimate artform! ;-) Hooray!

    • Or a major movie studio may make a movile completely from computer graphics and- oh, wait...
    • Oh my! If this keeps up, in a few years people will think games themselves are a legitimate artform! ;-) Hooray!

      Nah, we all know they just incite violence and laziness in children.

    • Probably they'll have to start having plots beyond "you are on mars with a lot of guns, and demons are attacking you." Even the stupidest fucking action movies have a better plot than that, and nobody is calling Vin Diesel movies "art."

  • Finally, now writing can take some precidence (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hollywood seems to have forgotten that plot, characters, and writing are what drives the moving-going experience, not how many machines you needed to render 4 seconds of some over-blown CGI shot.

    That being said, machinima will be a great method for those with writing talents and a lot of patiences to showcase their skills to the biggest test audience of all, the internet.

    All I know is I'm waiting for a WW2 movie, either something like a Battlefield 1942's Hogan's Heroes or Saving Call of Duty.
    • Hollywood seems to have forgotten that plot, characters, and writing are what drives the moving-going experience, not how many machines you needed to render 4 seconds of some over-blown CGI shot.

      Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Hotel Rwanda, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine, Spiderman 2, and The Terminal are all plot driven with great characters and writing. Incredibles and Spiderman 2 even mix in a ton of CGI. Of course we have dreck like Catwoman and Van Helsing, but don't make a blanket statement abou
    • have you seen this short?

      www.munansen.com/oursagain_divx.zip

  • A Question To Movie Makers (Score:4, Insightful)

    by teiresias ( 101481 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:32PM (#11290212)
    So my question to movie makers is this.

    If you insist on making game based movies (Resident Evil, Mario Brothers, the upcoming Doom, etc etc), why not actually use the graphics engine that the game was based on?

    Seriously, with the exception of older games the graphics engines are right up there. Throw in some good voice acting, a little airbrushing to give it that Hollywood glow and bam you've got a film. And suprise suprise, it'd be fairly accurate to the game. Am I the only one who see's profit here?

    • Re:A Question To Movie Makers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mblase ( 200735 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:46PM (#11290337)
      Seriously, with the exception of older games the graphics engines are right up there

      Define "up there". Hollywood CGI standards are not "Half Life 2" or "Doom3", it's Pixar and Dreamworks. In addition, remember that animation is still, for better or for worse, largely for G and PG stories in America.

      There's no profit to be made in a movie that looks exactly like a game. Anybody could throw that together. What makes a movie unique is using real actors, real sets, and really expensive special effects -- not to mention real writers and real directors, which, let's face it, most games are sorely lacking.
      • There is not very much about Pixar or Dreamworks films that can't be rendered using CryEngine, Source or Doom 3 engine if you drop the real-time requirement and add more depth of field and motion blur effects (which are extremely easy to do, just too taxing for current hardware). Other important differences are better models, larger textures and better lighting. It makes perfect sense to start experimenting with deeper integration now.

        However, looking at Pixar is misleading. Have you seen the popular "Rebo

    • Re:A Question To Movie Makers (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Megaweapon ( 25185 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:46PM (#11290339) Homepage
      Huh? There are two reasons Hollywood makes movies based off of games. 1) An already established storyline that some people will be familiar with. 2) It saves Hollywood writers from having to come up with anything original. It's a combination of marketing and idea recycling. Who in their right mind would go pay to see a movie that was rendered on an NES? (Citing your Mario Brothers example... Besides, if that were the case then we'd all miss out on Samantha Mathis)
      • Who in their right mind would go pay to see a movie that was rendered on an NES?

        The same people who went to see the South Park movie instead of going to a Disney one?

        If you have an excellent plot and decent acting, people seem to care less about the actual quality of the images on screen.
        • I doubt that a NES, which was designed to send a pixel-y NTSC signal to a typical home TV would render well on a big movie screen. Granted, the South Park movie did well, but that 1) really wasn't based off a game, and 2) was geared more towards the funny/parody/profanity/semi-counter-culture crowd (not that there's anything wrong with that) than towards some sort of "gaming" crowd (where Hollywood is trying to be "true" to something). If you are targeting a younger (kids) audience, then image quality is
          • If you are targeting a younger (kids) audience, then image quality is pretty high on the list anyways.

            You've never seen Pokemon, Dragonball, or any other kids "anime", have you?

            Image quality my ass. A still of Goku's head against a flashing background for 15 minutes is "image quality"?

            Kids would watch a Pitfall movie rendered on an Atari 2600, if you marketed it to them right.
            • You've never seen Pokemon, Dragonball, or any other kids "anime", have you?

              On TV, yes. On a big screen, no.

              Kids would watch a Pitfall movie rendered on an Atari 2600, if you marketed it to them right.

              Yeah, but kids are idiots. :) Anyways, anime is more of a "style", right? It'd look weird if you tried to render a Pokemon movie on a 2600 since you'd have jerky, pixely movements instead of a usual looking drawn momement. Pokemon and the others work because they are fairly fast paced, colorful, a
          • The point I was trying to make is, Game-based or otherwise, I don't think that the movie industry is going to survive much longer if it keeps on using cookie-cutter-plots.

            • I don't think that the movie industry is going to survive much longer if it keeps on using cookie-cutter-plots.

              I hope you're right, but I think Hollywood will continue to survive for quite some time rehasing the same old crap over and over. Actually, since some people are saying that the video game industry is rivaling Hollywood what else should Hollywood do but embrace it by showcasing other outlets to existing games? Hollywood's movie is just an ad for Corp X's game, so both benefit.
      • ...An already established storyline that some people will be familiar with...It saves Hollywood writers from having to come up with anything original

        True, but keep in mind that Hollywood producers often twist the stories and plots around into something they think are enjoyable, and thus it makes videogame movies less enjoyable for fans.

        Case in point: take the upcoming "Doom" movie-- we're no longer dealing with demons anymore but.....mutants? zombies?

        But, alas, I digress. Hollywood makes these chang

  • This was going on long before Quake.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:33PM (#11290218)
    Anyone else remember Stunt Island [ksu.edu]? It was an entire "movie studio" game that allowed you to build and "play" your own sets, making movies out of them in an editing room. Ran like gangbusters on my 486SX/33. It had an entire underground of people who would make their own movies and post them to BBSes. I was one of them. Sigh. Those were good days.

  • complaints about gaming at 2003 SIGGRAPH (Score:4, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @02:39PM (#11290273)
    I recall a panel at the 2003 SIGGRAPH questioning whether the economic tilt toward game development was "impeding" the development of other branches of computer graphics. Graphics accerlation boards aimed at game machines lacked the color resolution (48+ bits) that hollywood and sci-viz people were interested. Also they were strongly tilted toward triangle-fill rendering when there were a dozen other rendering methods of interest to other branches of graphics.

    I think some of this criticism was abated as the graphics boards have been opended up to more programmer control. Also there was a session at last summer's SIGGRAPH on Hollywoods influence on gaming: the big companies are hiring artistic directors for the games and put feature-film type flourishes in the big money projects.

  • New? (Score:1)

    by JPelorat ( 5320 ) *
    new form of independent filmmaking

    Depends on your definition of 'new', I guess. "Machinima" has been around about as long as Quake has.
    • Depends on your definition of 'new', I guess. "Machinima" has been around about as long as Quake has.

      Even longer than that. Games like Marathon by Bungie used to let you record your games for playback, and were widely distributed back in the good old days of the web.
      • Well, demo recording is one thing, but I've always seen 'machinima' as being a storytelling medium. Scripting events and avatars to tell a story that may or may not have anything to do with the actual game. Not just recording gameplay for playback.
  • After watching (or trying to watch) the first few episodes of Season 2 of RvB, I gave up - there were too many injokes and self-referencing going on, and I'd even watched the first series recently. Sad to say, it wasn't funny. (Nor was the first episode of Strangerhood, though I don't know if it was supposed to be). Not trying to be a smartass, but has RvB gotten funny again?
  • Machinima and Sims sound similar: both have computers draw characters and scene in real time. Machinima is what Marshall McCluhan calls a "cold" medium: the audience is passively watching a preprogrammed script. On the other hand Sims is a "hot" medium with the audience actively involved creating the action.
    • Except: the Sims is mostly about people buying a new fucking couch. Storytelling is such an enormous part of our culture, and has been for so long, that referring it as "cold," compared to the "hot" entertainment of couch-buying-simulators, is just a strange form of arrogance.

      Regardless, whole areas of study and art depend on people critiquing or referring or drawing inspiration from other artworks. Calling it "passive" is a bit of a misnomer. If a person at a party talks to me about the latest action m

  • I guess author of this story is somehow mistaken. How can someone use engine that uses pre-compiled lights. Using doom3's engine is understandable because 99% of operations are realtime.. I can't find any other alternative with realtime lighting system, only doom3 atm (probably stalker [stalker-game.com] in some way.
  • Speaking of, if you're going to be in Park City this year, the notorious Slamdance film festival (held simultaneously with Sundance) is showing some machinima on Sunday, Jan 23 @ 10am [slamdance.com]. They also have an Anarchy Online Competition [slamdance.com], with 9 finalists you can watch in Real format.
  • who will also present a live demonstration of how they produce their hilarious RvB machinima series.

    It really isnt that hard to make it. They're making it sound like theres some secret to it.
  • Makes me want to watch Blahbalicious and Operation Bayshield...

  • Just want to go on record (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mdxi ( 3387 ) on Friday January 07, 2005 @03:55PM (#11291016) Homepage
    ...as thinking that "Machinima" is the stupidest word ever (except for, maybe, "blogosphere"). It's just animation, people. Animation done with a video game and a software editing package. You could possibly take an extremist view and think of it as puppetry instead of animation, but there's still a perfectly good (pronouncable) word for that.

    You digibonerati really irritate me. Get back to work, eh?
    • Animation: All motion pictures made from assembling still-life images into sequence.

      Puppetry: All manipulation objects to represent people.

      Machinima: Using the pre-rendered animation calculations of a computer game system to manipulate animated characters for the making of a motion picture.

      In other words, Machinima is sort-of like puppetry, but with computer-animated figures instead of actual objects.

      The reason it's spoken of as something different than traditional cell animation (or even CGI) is tha
      • Yes, yes it does. Not just horrible either, but so atrociously awful that it mangles the language center of your brain if you pronounce it more than three times in one day. I don't watch many of these videos simply because of that name. It's that bad.

        As glad as I am to see a technological invention get a non i"blank" and non acronym based name, machinima has got to go. It sounds like paraphernalia for machines, like spinners on an arc welding robot.
      • Continuing my rant:

        This doesn't need a new name. No more than computer animated movies needed a name to convey their...computer animatedness. Just call it game animation if you really have to distinguish it from typical movie making and be done with it.
  • Am I missing something? Why do we (the audience) care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original artwork? Why do we care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original sets? Why do we care that the original film makers have simply *made do* with limited camera angles and characters?

    Over the past decade 3D animation has not only gotten ten times easier with powerful tools and extensive mesh libraries, its also become cheaper: A high end PC loaded up with RAM can easily rende
    • Yeah, you're missing something.

      Sometimes it's about doing the most you can with the least you've got. Sometimes it's about not having a huge budget, or even a budget at all. Sometimes it's just funnier that way, or the medium carries the message, or... or whatever. Sometimes authors show innovation within their craft by imposing limits on its structure. Might as well ask why Shakespeare "made do" with the constraining rules of iambic pentameter when he could have free-flowing written blank verse instea

      • >Feel free to start your own studio if you want to show them up. While you're at it, why don't you make your own cameras like Lucas did for Episode II?

        As a former head of a large creative agency I can confidently say that some of the best work, if not the best work, that came out of our studios are the personal projects of the designers and animators that worked there. They're incredible. They worked tireless hours to make things from the ground up that were beautiful, compelling, and quite frankly fo
    • Effort is not quality. Something can be very very easy but still be good. Of course, all other things being equal, increasing effort will usually increase quality, but all things are not equal.

      Using Machinimas, people can (not that they neccesarily do) spend their time on writing scripts, which I think can make up for whatever cheapness may come out of using a Machinima.

      Regarding your little IP comment, I think this is a little like shooting on location instead of building a set. Sure, you didn't create t
  • Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking and even cooler to see how far it has come since some gamers started making Quake Movies.

    Oh yeah. Substituting non-stop CGI and special effects for story have really done wonders for the Star Wars franchise, haven't they.

  • q1dm6 (Score:2)

    by prator ( 71051 )
    dm6 is in the article title and no one is talking about it? That is still my favorite map of all time.

    -prator
    • I agree, I still enjoy a good duel on it now and then. My friend is porting it to hl2dm, hopefully that will work out.

      Until then, retextured quake is plenty sexy [teamfortress.org]

    • Yeah! q1dm6 rules! And recently I was overjoyed to find no less than two remakes of the level for Quake 3 Arena. Great fun. And some time ago we had tons of fun playing this thing 1on1 on Nintendo 64, too. Anyone remade (or re-built) this thing for Doom 3 yet? I just got Doom 3 myself this week and remake of dm6 is exactly what I've been looking for ever since.

      As for machinima angle... ummmm.... well, they should make some based on the level. Definitely. Some cool movies set on those extremely familiar su

  • Whenever I see articles like this, it bothers me a tiny bit since the demoscene [pouet.net] has existed for over a decade earlier than machinima has, and the artform is much more interesting and sophisticated. Yet demos get hardly any recognition from mainstream media because they don't appeal to the common denominator (probably because the art of the demoscene is so nebulous and abstract). Where is the coverage of the stunningly beautiful engines and music of the demoscene?

    Then again, coverage of the scene would pr

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