Still Seeing Breen - take 3

I'm finally back in NY and getting back to a regular schedule again. My sleep pattern has been off quite a bit as of late, so I've been putting some of that time to productive use.

To that, I put together the high quality version of Still Seeing Breen - version 1.1 in WMV format. Actually, there's a few more tweaks to it since the low quality WMV, but nothing radical, so I left the version number the same (and updated the low quality as well). I had a number of requests for this version, so hopefully the wait was worth it.

Spoiler warning: this machinima music video contains spoiler footage of Half Life 2.

Still Seeing Breen: WMV - 640 x 480 - 64mb

Still Seeing Breen: In addition to these versions, I was forced to consider one more format. This week saw the latest volley of the handheld media players - a huge salvo called the Sony PSP. I preordered mine back in January as I had been anticipating its release since playing with one at E3 last year. I can wax on about how great a little device it is, but there's plenty of sites/blogs doing that. Still, I'm in love with the damn thing, so I immediately created an MP4 for it.

Some PSP love for those who own:

Still Seeing Breen: MP4 - 320 x 240 - 25mb

Ok, I'll be back in a day or so, with thoughts on some great new Machinima works I've come across (yes, I'll be finally covering something other than this vid). Huzzah!

Still Seeing Breen - version 1.1

Yikes - another posting in less than 12 hours - I guess I'm making up for lost time. However, with brevity in mind, I will try to keep this posting under a thousand words.

First off, thanks to all of you who posted comments or wrote to me in regards to the Still Seeing Breen machinima vid. The response was pretty amazing. I received mails from quite a few people who really liked what I put together - even giving some incentive to create their own work. That's awesome - and pretty much the intention behind the piece (besides me giving myself a pet project to produce).

Some of the great responses came from Valve themselves - where I exchanged mails with the key folks behind the Source tech (Ken Birdwell and Bill Van Buren). One item they pointed out was in the G-Man clips themselves.

For most of the video, I recored shots right within HL2 itself. This was done by recording demo files of the scenes I wanted and then exporting the recorded scenes using the HL2 command "startmovie" which generates sequential TGA files.

In the case of the G-Man, I captured the video right from the FacePoser application using FRAPS. This was a much simpler method than building a map and triggering the G-Man in-game. However, something I didn't notice was that the animation of the G-Man inside of FacePoser (or any other character for that matter) is less fluid than in the game engine itself - mostly because it follows a different rule set (this is where Valve chimed in). IOW, you create draft versions of your choreography scenes in FacePoser and the polished versions are generated inside of Source.

So, armed with this new info, I went the extra step, and triggered the G-Man clips in-engine, recorded demo files and then exported the scenes with startmovie - which resulted in the G-Man scenes having much smoother movement. With that, here's version 1.1 of "Still Seeing Breen" in WMV format (512kb bitrate).

Just to repeat it...Warning: this machinima music video contains spoiler footage of Half Life 2.

• Video removed - new version to come
  

I plan on creating a HQ version of the vid once I return to NY.

Braving the Machinima whirlwind...

Woo-hoo! Post in a few days, my eye! (c: Nothing like a set of conferences to make a liar out of ya!

Anyway, I'm finally back in NY after having attended both the 2005 GDC in San Francisco and the Living Game Worlds Symposium at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Both events were extremely cool and great to be part of. It was also great being able to spread the word about Machinima.

The 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC)

This year, the Academy was invited to be part of NVIDIA's GDC Booth, to assist in promoting this year's Machinima Film Festival. Here, we owned a "pod" of the NVIDIA booth, and showed some great Machinima films such as Friedrich Kirschner's The Journey (Winner of the MSUC Machinima Category), Fountainhead's evergreen Anna, Ethan Vogt's groundbreaking Game On and Tom Palmer's fabulous Bot.

In addition to the films, I also demo'ed Fountainhead's brand spankin'-new Machinimation 2.0 for Doom 3 at the NVIDIA stage. We drew a lot of attention with their software, rivaling the crowds brought together by the Unreal 3 demo (really cool in its own right). In turn, we also gave away copies of my book and Academic versions of Machinimation 1.0. A very big thanks to FE in helping with this year's booth!

GDC presentations aside, we also had an impromptu GDC Machinima meeting, with the always-cool Friedrich Kirschner hanging out with the AMAS team and visits by Don Alvarez and Mark Parry (The Showdown's crack team), Jake Hughes (he says "Hello!" to all you Anox fans) and Tom Mustaine (Ritual big-wig and main man behind the Quake Movie classic, Operation Bayshield).

While I went to GDC with the anticipation of a great event, I could have never planned the exciting one we had. I'm already looking forward to the 2006! (back in San Jose -w00t!)


Living Game Worlds Symposium honoring Will Wright

Straight from SF, I flew into Atlanta to take part in the Georgia Tech's Living Game Worlds Symposium, honoring Will Wright. A cooler event to be part of, I couldn't have found. It's hard to describe all the great things that I experienced at this event.

The obiligitory "I hang out with cool people" photo - yours truly with Will Wright and Janet Murray at the Living Game Worlds Symposium

Between meeting up with such luminaries as Chris Crawford (who shared his recipe of work/life balance by chopping up firewood)), Bing Gordon, Ken Perlin (who I found shares Sideways as his fave film of last year ) and of course, Will Wright., it was a great feeling being included in this event - which I found out afterwards, was directly related to interests of Will's (Machinima being one of them). Will previewed his new game Spore at his address speech - which looks to be yet another extremely fun time killer. The game is based on Will's fascination of Charles Eames "Powers of Ten" (somewhat obvious given the Sim series of games), however Spore gives users the ability to create life at the organism level and cultivating it into more advanced life forms, eventually gaining control at the planetary (and intergalatic) level. It really looks like a great game - enough so that I was nearly repeating "Wow" at timed intervals...out loud.

During the last panel, I had the chance to present Machinima to the conference body. In the very beginning of the presentation, I first polled the conference attendees to see how many knew of Machinima. Astoundedly, about 2/3's of the 300 or so audience raised their hands. Looks like I may need to shelve the "What is Machinima?" presentation in the near future. (c: Anyway, while its hard to encapsulate the entire world of Machinima in 10-15 minutes, I managed to do so. I think it went off reasonably well and received lots of great feedback in the post conference reception. One really cool highlight of the discussion: Two of my panel colleagues were Blake Lewin of Turner Broadcasting and Chris Klaus of Klaus Entertainment. Both Blake and Chris had Machinima slides in their presentation, showing Machinima's potential in future entertainment. It's great to see our work is finally paying off.

In addition to all of the cool presentations, we also received a tour of Georiga Tech's facilities, getting to play with their current projects. Their augmented reality work, Four Angry Men (based on the stage play, Twelve Angry Men), was a blast to experience and they also introduced us to their mobile robotics lab - another really cool part of the institution. It was a great place to visit and definitely look forward to GT making this an annual event.

Finally, last but not least - 2005 Machinima Film Festival News

While we're still working on the official announcement, this year's festival is gaining ground. The official date is still being nailed down, but it looks like the festival will take place in New York in November 2005. We feel this will give enough ramp-up time for people to submit their works and attend the festival as well as for us to get all of the festival details lined up. We expect to make the official announcement for the festival in April.

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While there's more to post - particularly some great responses to "Still Seeing Breen" - I have to get ready for a quick trip to Ohio to visit my brother. I will undoubtedly have some idle time while I'm there, so I hope to post more once I have connectivity again.

Machinima Wiki and finally, a music video...

Cruising through my usual links of Machinima-related sites, I noticed our friends over at Machinima Deustchland have started the much needed Machinima Wiki. While its still a baby Wiki (insert your fave baby Wiki name here), the beginning information is a bit thin, but as all Wikis have, this shows great promise. I applaud Machinima Deustchland for taking this initiative and look forward to contributing to this addition of the Machinima Infollective. Props, congrats and good glances in your direction, Machinima Deustchland!

HL2 Machinima Video - "I'm Still Seeing Breen"

In other news, I finally completed the HL2 music video I had been working on - well, "completed" is a hard word to say - you always want to tweak this or that. In any case, its completed for now, as I need to focus on more important endeavours (like the upcoming GDC). I really enjoyed stretching my Machinima legs on this project and it made me more familiar with the HL2 tools - FacePoser, DemoUI and a wee bit of the new Hammer - which are all pretty cool.

Some background on the video: After I completed Half-Life 2, I thought it was one of the more exceptional games I had played. Around each corner, there was yet another experience that would forever be burned into my gray matter. Afterwards, I found myself playing through some of the more exciting levels again and thought to put together a music video around it. I had been itching to put FacePoser to work, and it became obvious that a music video would be a good place to give it a try. I tested putting HL2 visuals to a song by Breaking Benjamin called "So Cold", which had been in my head for a few weeks. The holidays arrived and it put the project on hold for a bit. Afterwards, I stumbled upon Hooked on Booze's vid of a similar nature, which gave me additional inspiration to complete my project (thanks, Shawn!).

I then restarted working on it just prior to the Sundance Machinima panel - thinking it would be a good example of what's possible in HL2 and where Machinima is headed. With this, I managed to show a small WIP clip at the panel. Then my father passed away, and it was placed on the backburner once again, until this week.

Warning: this machinima music video contains spoiler footage of Half Life 2.

• Video removed - new version to come

All in all, it felt good to work on a Machinima project again. I know its not the best Machinima one could hope to create, but I enjoyed the creative rush. It also reminds me that one needs to make sure you keep your passion close at hand.

Ok, that's a long enough post - I have some news about our being at the GDC this week - which I'll probably post on Monday. Until then, this damn balcony is closed.