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File:RVB group shot.jpg
A scene from the popular machinima series Red vs. Blue.

Machinima (pronounced [mə.ˈʃiː.nə.mə] or [mə.ˈʃɪ.nə.mə]), a portmanteau of machine cinema,[1] is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre defined by those techniques. As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using real-time, interactive (game) 3D engines, as opposed to high-end and complex 3D animation software used by professionals. Engines from first-person shooter and role-playing simulation video games are typically used. Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms. As a film genre, the term refers to movies created by the techniques described above. Usually, machinima productions are produced using the tools (demo recording, camera angle, level editor, script editor, etc.) and resources (backgrounds, levels, characters, skins, etc.) available in a game.

Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation. It can also produce more professional appearing production than is possible with traditional at-home techniques of live video tape, or stop action using live actors, hand drawn animation or toy props.

As machinima begins to break out of the underground community of gamers and becomes more widely recognized by mainstream audiences, tools are being developed to allow for faster and easier creation of machinima productions. A number of upcoming machinima products are expected to provide machinimators with original assets, as well as advanced features such as a timeline, gesture and sound creation, and precise camera tools.

Although most often used to produce recordings that are later edited as in conventional film, machinima techniques have also occasionally been used for theatre. A New York improvisational comedy group called the ILL Clan voice and puppet their characters before a virtual camera to produce machinima displayed on a screen to a live audience.

History

Precedent

In the 1980s, hackers who cracked software—that is, circumvented any built-in security—often attached introductory sequences, or intros, to modified programs to credit themselves.[2] As the power of personal computers increased, so did the complexity of these intros. The demoscene formed when focus shifted from the cracks to the intros. 3D computer graphics and narratives appeared,[3] and animation was calculated in real-time,[4] but without the use of a pre-existing game engine.[3]

Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 computer game Stunt Island allowed users to create movies by placing props and cameras, orchestrating flying stunts, and splicing takes together.[5] The following year, id Software's computer game Doom included the ability to record gameplay as sequences of events later replayed in real-time by the game engine. Because events, not video frames, were recorded, the saved game demo files were small and easily shared among players,[6] thus developing, as Henry Lowood of Stanford University wrote, "a context for spectatorship.… The result was nothing less than a metamorphosis of the player into a performer."[7] The game also allowed for third-party modifications, maps, and software tools, thus revising the concept of game authorship.[8]

Doom's 1996 successor, Quake, offered new opportunities for both gameplay and customization,[9] while retaining the ability to record demos.[10] Multiplayer games became popular, almost a sport; demo files of matches between teams of players, or clans, were recorded and studied.[11] Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, noted that deathmatches, a type of multiplayer game, began to be recorded with more "cinematic flare".[10] However, at this point, the demo files produced were documented gameplay with no narrative.[12]

Quake movies

A scene from Diary of a Camper, the first machinima production

On October 26, 1996, a well-known clan, the Rangers, surprised the Quake community with the release of Diary of a Camper, the first machinima film. This short, 100-second demo file contained the action and gore of many others, but in the context of a story,[13] rather than the usual deathmatch.[11] Although its narrative was simple, it established the machinima genre; so-called Quake movies quickly became popular. Dedicated demo-processing tools, such as Uwe Girlich's Little Movie Processing Center (LMPC) and David "crt" Wright's non-linear editor Keygrip, were developed;[14] the latter became "known as the Adobe Premiere for Quake demo files".[15] Distribution and review sites for Quake movies appeared; among these were The Cineplex, Psyk's Popcorn Jungle, and the Quake Movie Library.[15] Notable works include Clan Phantasm's Devil's Covenant, the first feature-length Quake movie;[15] Avatar and Wendigo's Blahbalicious, which won seven Quake Movie Oscars;[16] and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield,[15] which used simulated lip synching.[17]

In December 1997, id Software released Quake II, which included support for user-created 3-D models. However, the community continued to create films with the original Quake until editing tools were adapted to the new game. New Quake I productions included the Apartment Huntin' by the ILL Clan and Scourge Done Slick by the Quake done Quick group. Throughout 1998, Quake II editing tools were released; among them was Keygrip 2.0, which supported recamming, the ability to adjust camera locations after recording. Paul Marino called this feature "a defining moment for [m]achinima" because of its power and flexibility.[18] The first Quake II machinima production made entirely with user-created models was Strange Company's 1999 film Eschaton: Nightfall.[19]

The December 1999 release of id Software's Quake III Arena posed a problem to the Quake movie community. The game's demo file format included information needed by the networking code; to prevent cheating, id warned that revealing these details was grounds for legal action. Thus, the editing tools used for previous games could not be upgraded to work with Quake III. Around this time, too, the novelty of Quake movies was disappearing; as Marino explained, "Simply said, the joke was getting old." New productions became less frequent, and the community needed to "reinvent itself" to offset this.[20]

Modern era

In January 2000, Hugh Hancock, founder of Strange Company, launched the website Machinima.com. The new term surprised the community.[21] Machinima was an initially misspelled version of machinema, a contraction of machine cinema, and was intended to dissociate the in-game film production process from a specific engine.[22] The variant with the additional i stuck because it included a reference to anime. The site included tutorials, interviews, articles, and the exclusive release of Tritin Films' Quad God. The first film made with Quake III Arena, Quad God was also the first to be created by recording game-produced video frames, not game-specific instructions.[23] This technique was initially controversial among machinima producers who had preferred demo files and their smaller sizes. However, because it was recorded in a traditional video format, Quad God was accessible to a wider audience, and it was distributed through magazine-bundled CDs.[24]

Machinima soon began to receive mainstream notice. In June 2000, Roger Ebert called it an "extraordinary" new art form and praised Strange Company's machinima setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias".[25] The ILL Clan's 2000 film Hardly Workin' won Best Experimental and Best in SHO awards at Showtime Network's 2001 Alternative Media Festival. Machinima even reached Hollywood; while working on his 2001 film Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Steven Spielberg used Unreal Tournament to test scenes involving special effects.[26] Game developers became interested, too; in July 2001, Epic Games announced that Matinee, a machinima production utility, would ship with its upcoming Unreal Tournament 2003. As involvement increased, machinima releases became less frequent in favor of higher quality.[27]

In March 2002, several machinima makers — Anthony Bailey, Hugh Hancock, Katherine Anna Kang, Paul Marino, and Matthew Ross — met at the Game Developers Conference and formed the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, which held the first Machinima Film Festival during QuakeCon in August of that year. In the event, which was covered by mainstream media, Tom Hall's Anachronox: The Movie won three awards, including Best Picture.[28]

With the improvements in 3D game engine technology many developers added in-game cut scenes to their games. This led to improvements in animation capabilities and soon most game engines had the functionality (although often available to the developers only) necessary to produce machinima.

Unreal and Battlefield 1942 are examples of video games which are currently used to create machinima. Use of the original Unreal Tournament was possible through the third-party tool Unreal Movie Studio (UMS) by UnFramed Productions, and later Real-Time Movie Studio (RTMS) by Mod team reactor 4. Understanding the future potential of machinima, Epic Games, the developers of Unreal Tournament 2003, included a tool called "Matinee" with the game, and sponsored a contest for US$50,000 to create a machinima film with the video game. The Unreal engine was used by director George Lucas for pre-visualization of the later Star Wars movies and by some other directors.

The video game The Sims, which had a "photo album" feature, was used by players to stage elaborate "comic book" stories. For example, over several months in 2003, Nicole Service, a Sims player known online as "nsknight" staged a highly-rated photo album telling the story of three sisters whose mother is murdered. (Wired News) Other players have staged stories of abusive relationships, drug addiction, and interracial adoptions. The Sims 2 has a built-in movie making feature.

The Movies is a game developed by Lionhead Studios that puts the player in the role of a movie director and allow them to create short feature films using the game engine. A similar technique is used on the MTV television show Video Mods that shows music videos, rendered using characters from popular video games and Demos, including The Sims 2, BloodRayne and Dawn. However, the creators of the show only re-use the models, which are manually animated using 3D-animation software, not the game engines.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages

  • Possibly smaller distribution size: To distribute the movie, the producer only has to distribute the movie scripts (and any new resources used in the movie), which are much smaller than the entire rendered movie, though this requires both parties (producer and viewer) to have same rendering engine (same game, that is) and hardware capable of rendering the movie. If the engine and hardware allow it, the movie could be watched at extremely high resolutions, beyond what the average computer was capable of rendering smoothly at the time of release. The size of a rendered video of comparable resolution could put most viewers off, even those on very fast connections.
  • Lower cost and production time: Because of lower hardware requirements (movie can be made and rendered on desktop computers), lower software costs (games cost much less than professional 3D animation software), and lower production time (because low-end 3D engines can render animation quickly, if not real-time). Moreover, mistakes in the movie can sometimes be corrected quickly by simply editing the script and because of the lower rendering time.
  • Arguably easier movie making: Because most games' interfaces are very simple and easy to use, it is easy to make simple movies, though it can be more frustrating to make complex ones because of the limited movie-making capability (see below).

Disadvantages

  • Limited capability: The possibilities (what can be done in a movie, that is) are limited by the genre of the game and the flexibility and (movie-making) capability of the game engine itself. Also, because game engines were primarily designed for game-playing, not for making movies, the movie-making capabilities of game engines (and, consequently, the quality of the produced movies) tend to be limited, when compared to 3D animation software used by professionals. It is important to note that, because of the technical limitations, most machinima uses sharp writing in order to make up for the lack of visual flair (even this depends on the game being used to make the machinima). The puppeteering in machinima offers limited control over facial expressions, gestures, and body posture - all of which are indispensable to the creation of visually meaningful communication.
  • Possibly high playback hardware requirements: Unless the entire rendered movie is distributed, in order to play a movie (run movie scripts), the viewer needs the same rendering engine as the one used by the producer, and a computer with capable hardware (to run the movie scripts to view the movie), depending on the complexity of the rendering engine (the game, that is) and movie. Consequently, this prohibits low-end machines and machines without rendering capability (e.g.: cell phones, PDA, low-end computers, Video CD players) from displaying the movie.

Notable examples by game engine

See also: List of machinima productions

Machinima productions are usually categorized by game engine or by film genre (drama, comedy, action). The following examples are organized using the former method.

Portal

Portal was the first television experience to machinima. It aired on G4 for two seasons largely playing on comedy. It took many MMORPGs, with exceptions like the Sims Online and Second Life. It also had the main host in live action.

Quake

It was with Quake that machinima truly took off, and it was for this game that the first true machinima film was made. Released in 1996 by United Ranger Films, an off-shoot of a then well known Quake clan named The Rangers, Diary of a Camper was the first true piece of machinima. A short silent film, lasting less than two minutes, it told the story of The Rangers rooting out an embedded player (the camper) within DM6, a popular Quake deathmatch map. At this point in time, the term "machinima" had not been coined, and these films were being touted as "Quake Movies". The piece became very popular within the Quake community, and soon spawned other Quake Movies, such as Wendigo and Avatar's Blahbalicious and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield.

One of the more famous Quake machinima groups is Quake done Quick, or QdQ. QdQ produced several speedruns for Quake, and reworked them into movies, using special tools to show speedrun in third person. Their most famous movie by far is Quake done Quicker, and the group itself believes that their movie Scourge done Slick (which requires the Scourge of Armagon expansion pack) is their best work thus far.[29] For a full list of productions, see the Quake done Quick article. As of 2006, the group is still active, making rare speedrun releases.

The ILL Clan is known for their series of shorts featuring Larry and Lenny Lumberjack. Their first movie (and one of the earliest notable machinima pieces) was Apartment Huntin', and was created using Quake. Their award-winning short, Hardly Workin, was created using Quake 2. They have also made three to four live performances in front of audiences in recent years.

Also one of the most notable Quake machinimas is The Seal of Nehahra, which details the story of the original game and expands considerably on the backstory. With a run time of 3:53:34, it's also one of the longest machinima feature movies.

Borg War is a feature-length movie created using the variant of the Quake 3 engine used in the game Elite Force 2.

Halo

The most popular and well known Halo machinima is Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, a comedic machinima series filmed within the Halo series of Xbox games. Created by Rooster Teeth Productions, and premiering online on April 1 2003, the show has so far released five seasons on DVD The series ended in 2007 with 100 episodes.

Another popular Halo machinima group are Fire Team Charlie productions, who started production on Fire Team Charlie in Mid-2003. Fire Team Charlie productions has made a name by delving into the code of Halo and modifying it to increase their movie making possibilities. It ended in 2006 with 19 episodes..

The Codex, Episode 1 debuted on 9 February 2005. Unlike any previous Halo machinima series, The Codex is a drama, and is set within the universe of the Halo games. While previous Halo machinima series focus almost exclusively on comedy, The Codex has a definite story, and has often been described as a movie divided into episodes, rather than a series proper. It is also one of the few series to be set within the confines of the Halo universe, dealing with situations described in the games and happening concurrently with other well-known events.

This Spartan Life also differs from other Halo machinima in that it is a talk show, similar in concept to The Late Show with David Letterman. Every episode of the show is divided into parts that are uploaded on the show's site in a sequential fashion. Every episode features an opening monologue, interviews with guests as well as two fixed features, the Solid Gold Elite Dancers, a group of Covenant Elite dancers, and Body Count, a debate segment featuring players killing each other as they debate their points. Some of the comedy in the show itself is derived from the fact that often, players not involved in the show's making are unaware that the show is being filmed at all, and thus fire upon show contestants as they try to act out their parts.

Rome: Total War

While Rome: Total War's engine has been used relatively widely commercially, there has been much less player-made machinima. The first, and most notable use of Rome was a show made specifically for the History Channel called Decisive Battles, which used the engine's ability to show vast numbers of characters to reconstruct some of the most historically significant battles in history. The game turned out to be an excellent way of visually representing the fight for a mass audience, something traditionally difficult to do. In the UK, the game was also used for the show Time Commanders, which aired on the BBC. This was a kind of game show, in which contestants playing Rome were pitted against an enemy AI in a simulation of an ancient battle, in an attempt to see if the player could reverse history.

The most significant player-made example to date is Nicholas Werner's Potentior, a forty-minute long reconstruction of the Battle of Alesia. Despite its relatively recent release date, it has already sparked controversy on the Internet Archive's Potentior page.

Neverwinter Nights

Whilst there has never been a huge amount of Machinima creation in Neverwinter Nights, the 3D RPG from Bioware, two notable series have used its engine as their basis.

Strange Company's BloodSpell stands as one of the most complex Machinima projects to date. A feature-length "punk fantasy" series about a world where "Blooded" mages spill their blood to use their magic, and they are hunted by the black-clad Church of the Angels, it created an entirely original storyline. Unusually for a Machinima piece, it achieved some critical acclaim in the popular online and offline press, including the Suicide Girls website, the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper, and mega-blog BoingBoing. A "Director's Cut" feature is due to premiere at the Machinima Europe festival in October 2007.

Neverending Nights stands as one of the longest-running Machinima series to date, running 30 episodes (as of September 2007), with the first episode premiered in 2004. A comic fantasy series, it tells the tale of Grayson (a fighter) and Peter (a ranger) in their quest to become rich and famous, and their various mishaps. It is something of a cult favourite within the Machinima community, with luminaries such as Hugh Hancock of Strange Company praising their work.

The Sims 2

The Sims machinima started with the photo album concept in the first Sims game. With the photo album a person could create full stories using all the game's resources. The Sims 2, which came out in the Fall of 2004, included a built in movie making utility for players to film what their Sims do. After the release of The Sims 2, Maxis, The Sims games creators, held contests hosted on their website for the best movie makers. The most notable examples of The Sims 2 machinima are listed below.

Rooster Teeth Productions, the authors of Red vs. Blue, have also created a serial production, The Strangerhood, using The Sims 2. The initial installment of the series introduced eight occupants of a neighborhood, who wake up one morning with no memory of who they are, where they are, or how they arrived. The characters have diverse, quirky, and intense personalities. Owing to the limitations of the simulation engine it was necessary to create a number of clones of each character, each with a different expression (happy, sad, angry, etc.). The unused versions are herded into an out-of-viewpoint room and exchanged as necessary to obtain the various facial expressions.

Company of Heroes

Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes, a 3D real time strategy game for the PC, with some built in machinima capability, was released in September 2006. Relic produced an eleven minute in game machinima piece to publicise the game, which subsequently won the award for Best Virtual Performance: Custom Animation at the 2006 Machinima Film Festival.

World of Warcraft

A scene from one of the machinima portions of the South Park episode titled Make Love, Not Warcraft.

Blizzard Entertainment's popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft has also spawned many machinima productions. Perhaps most famous is the Leeroy Jenkins film, featuring a character of the same name causing the downfall of his party. Xfire, a company that has created a popular internet communications and file sharing tool, has sponsored several contests which have provided incentive for many producers to use the WoW engine. The South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" uses World of Warcraft machinima for some in-game sequences and was made with the full support of Blizzard. Some other popular shorts are "Roflmao", "The anti-elf Anthem" and "Inventing Swear words" created by Oxhorn Brand films (created by Brandon M. Dennis)

Half-Life series

While there have not been many machinima made with Valve Software's first game (Half-Life), there were a few that achieved popularity over the internet. Those include Militia II [1] and ClanWars [2].

But the power and versatility of the Source engine coupled with Valve Hammer Editor and Faceposer have made Half-Life 2 very useful for quality machinima. A notable example is A Few Good G-Men, a machinima produced from the famous courtroom scene from the Rob Reiner film A Few Good Men. One of the most notable features of the Source engine is Faceposer's ability to take any voices in sound form and have an ingame character automatically lipsynch to the words. Faceposer is also used for various choreography functions, such as having ingame characters move to certain positions or play a certain animation. Another fairly known example is Still Seeing Breen, by Paul Marino, set to music by Breaking Benjamin.

Recently, the editing elements would mix with the construction and sandbox gameplay of Garry's Mod to create a full movie by the name of War of the Servers. [3]

F.E.A.R.

Not many machinima productions made with the F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault Recon game engine have gained widespread popularity to date. The best known one is a mini-series called P.A.N.I.C.S., produced by Rooster Teeth Productions (creator of the Red vs. Blue series). P.A.N.I.C.S. spoofs both the F.E.A.R. game that it's filmed inside of, as well as supernatural thriller/comedy movies like Ghostbusters.

The Movies

File:Lionhead movies screenshot dday.jpg
A scene from the DDay Sound Archive movie, created using The Movies editor. This scene is rendered at the "online" resolution for streaming from the company website.

The Movies machinima films are generally simpler to create, as the game contains all the tools required to produce the final movie. As of October 5, 2006, more than 110,000 movies have been uploaded on to the "The Movies Online" website, albeit most movies are not much different from the random movies created by the game itself. However, more serious machinima makers have been continuously striving to make better movies, and their output has become more and more visible within the machinima community. The promise of combining the ease of access to such a large library of scenes, with better outside post-production tools, spell an interesting future for this type of machinima.

Shadowrun

1-800-Magic is a 2007 machinima miniseries from Rooster Teeth Productions, the creators of Red vs. Blue. Using the machinima process of adding new sound and dialog to video game footage, the series is made using Shadowrun, a game for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Windows Vista platforms.[30]

Second Life

A number of machinima have been created using the game engine of Second Life, which supports in-world editing of character appearance, object creation and skinning, and the recording of events. See Second Life Community: Media.

Sam & Max

During the release of Sam & Max Season One, developer Telltale Games also released fifteen short machinima cartoons in between episodes. The shorts range from one to two minutes in length and typically feature Sam and Max interacting with locations and characters from the most recent episode, though the shorts are not part of Season One's storyline. Telltale Games also created several machinima shorts for the 2007 Independent Games Festival in which Sam and Max greet the attendees and make cracks about game design.

Notable examples by genre

The following machinima examples are organized by film genre.

Abstract

Machinima works that eschew a narrative structure, instead focusing on experimentation. Gene Youngblood refers to this type of filmmaking as Expanded Cinema.[citation needed] A handful of exemplary works[citation needed] would include:

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Lowood 2006, 26; Marino, 1, 12; Bailey.
  2. ^ Marino, 5; Green, 1.
  3. ^ a b Marino, 5.
  4. ^ The Demoscene.
  5. ^ Stunt Island manual, 9.
  6. ^ Marino, 3.
  7. ^ Lowood 2006, 30.
  8. ^ Lowood 2005, 11.
  9. ^ Lowood 2005, 12.
  10. ^ a b Marino, 4.
  11. ^ a b Kelland, Morris, & Lloyd, 28.
  12. ^ Lowood 2006, 33.
  13. ^ Lowood 2006, 32.
  14. ^ Kelland, Morris, & Lloyd, 28; Marino 6–7.
  15. ^ a b c d Marino, 7
  16. ^ Showcase: Blahbalicious.
  17. ^ Lowood 2006, 37.
  18. ^ Marino, 8.
  19. ^ Marino, 9.
  20. ^ Marino, 10–11.
  21. ^ Marino, 12.
  22. ^ Bailey; Marino, 12
  23. ^ Marino, 12.
  24. ^ Kelland, Morris, & Lloyd, 30.
  25. ^ Marino, 13.
  26. ^ Marino, 14–15.
  27. ^ Marino, 16.
  28. ^ Marino, 17.
  29. ^ Scourge done Slick.
  30. ^ Dregger.

References

  • Bailey, Anthony (September 9, 2007). "Origins of the word "Machinima"". Retrieved 2007-09-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • "The Demoscene" (PDF). Digitale Kultur e.V. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
  • Disney Interactive Studios. Stunt Island.
  • Dreger, David (June 7, 2007). "Rooster Teeth Shadowrun machinima, Fan Site kit surface". Xboxfanboy.com. Joystiq. Retrieved 2007-06-07. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  • Green, Dave (July 1995). "Demo or Die!". Wired. Condé Nast Publications. Retrieved 2007-08-12.
  • Kelland, Matt (2005). Machinima: Making Movies in 3D Virtual Environments. Cambridge: The Ilex Press. ISBN 1-59200-650-7. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Lowood, Henry (2005). "Real-Time Performance: Machinima and Game Studies" (PDF). The International Digital Media & Arts Association Journal. 2 (1): 10–17. ISSN 1554-0405. Retrieved 2006-08-07. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |quotes= ignored (help)
  • Lowood, Henry (2006). "High-performance play: The Making of machinima" (PDF). Journal of Media Practice. 7 (1): 25–42. doi:10.1386/jmpr.7.1.25/1. Retrieved 2006-08-21. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |quotes= ignored (help)
  • Marino, Paul (2004). 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima. Scottsdale, Arizona: Paraglyph Press. ISBN 1-932111-85-9.
  • Quake done Quick contributors. "Scourge done Slick". Quake done Quick. Retrieved 2006-06-22. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  • "Showcase: Blahbalicious". Machinima.com. Machinima, Inc. January 20, 2001. Retrieved 2007-08-13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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