Machinima (was RE: [extropy-chat] automated sci-fi program)

[Charlie Stross]

On 10 Jun 2004, at 01:57, Emlyn ORegan wrote:

> For those of you who haven't heard of it, check out Machinima. This is
> where (correct me if I'm wrong here), people are using commercial 3D
> games to make movies and soap operas.
>
> For instance, for a high quality Machinima, check out 
> www.RedVsBlue.com,
> which is a soap opera set in the Xbox's Halo. These guys write a 
> script,
> send in actors each playing an in game character, and play out the
> scenes while recording the action (I guess using a "record snapshot"
> feature; I've never played Halo). Then I assume there's some playing
> with POV for the director afterwards, a bit of video editing, and 
> voila!
> Instant 3D animated show. Download some of the episodes in the archive
> and have a look; it's pretty funny stuff.
>
> People are also doing this in Quake, (using Q3Radiant for example).

They're also using much more sophisticated engines from as-yet 
unreleased games. The thing about Machinima, as my friend the machinima 
start-up director likes to explain, is that it gets animation 
production away from the traditional cell-by-cell model (draw a cell, 
draw the next one, rinse, cycle, repeat) to a model more like 
conventional movie-making, with actors and sets and cameras. But there 
are some subtle differences. You can save an event stream for an actor 
in a machinima production then re-run it, attaching a motion controller 
to some other part of the actor's body to iteratively build up a much 
more realistic model than you'd normally expect of a game system 
controlled by joystick. You can make your cameras invisible and fly 
them through the action in ways that would make the Warshawski brothers 
green with envy. You can mess around with time in much more subtle 
manners than simple bullet-time photography allows, speeding it up as 
well as slowing it down and having different visual domains run at 
different speeds. And, most importantly, you can cut the cost of 
production: the best estimates I've heard are that on a budget of 1-2 
million dollars and a crew of a dozen programmers you can produce a 
feature-length machinima movie with about the same quality of rendering 
as Shrek #1.

I'm involved in a machinima production at present. It's a bit of an 
eye-opener ...


-- Charlie