Paul Marino's random insights into Machinima and its related subjects.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Working, working, working
This week's blog entry is more status than news. I'm revising the blog's design and overhauling the backend - which is an uncomfortable switch from Blogger to Wordpress. There are pros/cons to such a shift, but I think Wordpress is a much more flexible system - a number of my fave sites use (Free Pixel, Overman's blog, The Animation Podcast, etc.) and provides a lot of support by way of community development and discussion. It wasn't an easy decision and took a fair amount of testing to make the final call. The one pretty large task is backing up the previous years Blogger posts and whipping them up into something that WordPress could then digest and display. Thankfully, it can be done-but does require some coaxing.
So tech decisions, along with the hitting the design reset button a few times, had slowed the effort quite a bit. However, things are now moving forward and I hope to have the blog relaunch sometime in May, along with some guest bloggers putting in a appearance or two.
Some cool news on the Machinima front. Epic Games has announced their latest Make Something Unreal Contest - an Unreal Tournament 3-fueled follow-up to their 2005 contest of the same (that one was based in Unreal 2 tech). This latest contest, offering $1 million US in cash/prizes, and sponsored by Intel, also includes a Machinima category (in phases 2-4).
The 2005 MSU competition gave us great Machinima works such as Tom Palmer'sbot, Folklore Studio'sScrap & Friedrich Kirschner'sThe Journey.
I highly encourage anyone working in Machinima (or thinking about working in Machinima) to enter. The competition might be tough no doubt, but a fruitful experience as well. More info is available at www.makesomethingunreal.com
I'm probably one of many who fell in love with the game Portal - it has an insane combination of crazy puzzles, wicked game design, and incredibly cute characters. There are a lot of great machinima pieces out there on the turrets, the companion cube, etc., but the one I included above is strangely reminiscent of the brilliant Red vs. Blue dialog.
Score another one for Garry's Mod and for the machinima creators, the Leet World! Sadly, I have yet to be able to load their site.
WeGame launched just a short while ago, with a tag line of being a "YouTube for gamers". With the recent advances of machinima into areas increasingly closer to mainstream media, I immediately had two questions. Feel free to chime in:
1) For serious machinima, does it make sense to key into an audience of gamers-only? and 2) Are you tempted to switch?
To put things into perspective, you do get some perks with WeGame. The site actually distributes their own recording software, for free. Furthermore, they have streamlined the process of uploading clips - as you shoot videos, they are immediately available in a little dashboard. You can then upload to the WeGame site. The agile software encodes the video for you and uploads it.
Another bonus: I have not seen the usual compression artifacts that you typically see with YouTube.
I'd love to hear other people's experiences with WeGame. The final quality of my test video made me very happy. I'm curious to try uploading some QuickTime or Windows Media machinima and see how it measures up.
This weekend marks the start of an exciting film event in Second Life. The famous 48-Hour Film project that tours the world is reaching a virtual world. On Friday, January 11th, contestants will be given a character, prop, and line of dialog as base for their machinima. Then, the teams have 48 hours to turn around a complete production.
"The competition kicks off Friday, January 11th, at 4:00 p.m. Second Life Time (7:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time) with a representative from each team meeting in Second Life to receive a genre, a character, a prop, and a line of dialog to be worked into their film.
Teams have until Sunday, January 13th, at 4:30 p.m. Second Life Time (7:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time) to submit a completed entry.
There should be some cool short movies coming out of this contest, hopefully they will also be posted on youtube so we can all watch (outside of Second Life).
Telltale brings the holiday special (and innovation) to Machinima
One machinima production that I've often wanted to write about, but became equally-oft sidetracked is Telltale's wonderful Sam and Max series. Yesterday (December 19th), they released their Sam and Max holiday special, Sam and Max Nearly Save Christmas, which I found to be a great hoot as usual. The episode, built from the Sam and Max Ice Station Santa game, weighs in at a bit over 20 minutes (an interesting length, given a typical TV half-hour show is 22 minutes long).
Spoiler Alert! This machinima includes various reveals tied into the Ice Station Santa game.
Telltale deserves some major props for this series. They are one of the few developers, if not the only, who are creating high-quality Machinima episodes in tandem with their game episodes - both of which assist each other in generating overall visibility. I had the pleasure of meeting with Telltale CEO Dan Connors at this year's GDC and he gave me some insights into Sam and Max's production. There are two teams developing content - a game dev team putting together the gameplay episodes, plus their machinima team, which produces their work using all the in-game assets/animations with their own custom Machinima tool. The entire Sam & Max series, is extremely polished--with clever writing, rewarding gameplay and a great visual aesthetic.
The Sam and Max franchise was long overdue for some love and Telltale has really stepped up in that regard. Not only have they revitalized a great property, but they're also paving the way into new territory - one I hope more game developers consider. These grand steps aside, I'm seflishly looking forward to even more Sam and Max machinima in the coming year.
An interesting blip over on ShackNews: it sounds like Valve will be releasing some new machinima-focused/friendly SDK tools that were used in creating their "Meet The ____" series of shorts around Team Fortress 2. The post by a Valve employee (signed Robin - I'll assume it's designer Robin Walker) makes mention of the tools, though its timeframe is a bit indefinite (sigh). He doesn't get into specifics around what tools these will be, but I imagine they're most likely pipeline/middleware stuff that allows transparent production between Maya/XSI and Source.
The ILL Clan, makers of Tra5hTa1k and some recently renowned machinima in collaboration with the Electric Sheep Company (including CSI:NY), will be speaking to a Second Life audience on December 14th at 9 AM Pacific time. Some of the speakers include Frank Dellario, Matt Dominianni, Paul Jannicola and Kerria Seabrooke. For your convenience, click here to teleport to the event location.
For those of you who don't use SL very much, I highly recommend testing your voice capabilities early on to make sure you can both hear and talk using your headset. Occasionally, it takes some time to troubleshoot and you may miss out on participating in the conversation. There is a nice video tutorial on setting up your audio by the Eduserv Foundation or you can check out the voice feature wiki.
Just a quick post about a new entry into one of my fave blogs, Free Pixel. Prof. Michael Nitsche speaks about sex and Machinima - how the subject matter is extremely polarized with either nary a mention, or the full-on explicit.
One of the virtues I often share about Machinima is how easy it is to reach. Because of this accessibility, it gives people - often not filmmakers by trade or practice - a platform for expression.
This Halo 3-based machinima, posted by Skatedawg27, retells the horrible events of this past April, taking place at Virginia Tech.
Definitively a successor to Alex Chan's The French Democracy from a couple of years back. And brings with it the same unanswered questions about Machinima as form of creative expression: Are the lines between the reflective and subversiveness too blurred? Can we watch a video made in Halo 3 and really feel the impact of the subject matter?
A couple of blogs have surfaced over the last 24 hours with theirviews on this video and it seems to have resonated for both. For me, it puts picture to the events but strangely, I'm not personally moved by the machinima (even with manipulative music in place) - though the video footage of Cho himself is still profoundly impactful and I find the video as a whole hard to watch. However, I found The French Democracy to be a much more powerful piece, simply because it was Alex Chan's POV and it was created soon after the actual event (which also brings up the question of how time impacts reception).
Granted the student probably wasn't looking to create a subjective work and wanted to let the objectivity be the storyteller - so points for that. Ultimately, I find it rather interesting short and can understand how some would find a message if they were looking for one.
There's a healthy discussion happening over at Hawtymcbloggy.com about the video. Whatever your take, kudos to the filmmaker and his Criminal Justice class piece for giving us all something to consider.
I was excited to find the above machinima from LiveEVILstudios as I was looking around for new stuff on YouTube.
Granted, if you're not a hardcore Daft Punk fan, sitting through 7 minutes might be a bit much to ask, but I thought it was an interesting approach. For once, we're not talking about characters, screenplay, or the challenge of infusing characters with expression. The graphics have adapted to the music and took on abstract forms - rhythm and light play become the elements that keep the viewer entranced. The end effect is quite artistic and, more importantly, it matches the Daft Punk style very well.
Looking to a future where machinima is more accessible (maybe through applications such as Moviestorm), there's a lot of potential for independent music performers to produce high-quality videos that reflect their vision, while staying within a reasonable budget.
I look forward to the Machinima that will come from this update - with an eye towards Lit Fuse Films and once they get their hands on it. Ciao!
Update: Looks like the SDK is running a bit on the unstable side. I've tried testing out the TF2 models under FacePoser, which after one successful launch, will then crash consistently any time thereafter. There's a rumor that an update will be released tomorrow (11/8), but we'll have to stay tuned to the Source SDK Forums for any news from Mike Durand at Valve.
Just about a year ago, I met with a great group of prolific academic and video practitioners at USC. We convened to discuss a project - an event celebrating DIY video, exploring the blurred lines between "amateur" and "professional" - or as some have said, "personal" and "commercial" creative expression. That first weekend in December of 2006 was extremely rewarding - not only because I was just resurfacing from the 2006 Machinima Fest for the first time, but because of the people putting this together had come from all walks of life--some very related, some a bit more obscure. However, what made this meeting successful was not only its inclusion of high-profile theorists and critics, but that the event organizers recognized the need to include selected individuals from each video community. From my POV, this alone set the tone for an extremely fruitful event - outsiders and insiders coming together to showcase worlds that none could have tapped into on their own.
This coming February 8-10th, USC's School of Cinematic Arts will host the culmination of this organizational and curatorial work: 24/7: A DIY Video Summit - a weekend snapshot of avant-garde video. The people involved in the organization are some incredibly prolific folks and it was an honor to have just sat across the table from them:
Conference Organizers
Steve Anderson - Conference Chair
Mimi Ito - Conference Chair
Wally Baer
Anne Bray
Howard Rheingold
Adrienne Russell
Aram Sinnreich
Jennifer Urban
Speakers
Yochai Benkler
John Seely Brown
David Buckingham
Francesca Coppa
Marc Davis
Juan Devis
Eric Garland
Mike Hudak
Angela Wilson Gyetvan
Joichi Ito
Henry Jenkins
Alexandra Juhasz
Lawrence Lessig
Fred von Lohmann
Nicholas Reville
Michael Wesch
Curators
Mindy Faber - youth media
Ryanne Hodson - vlogging
Paul Marino - Machinima
Jonathan McIntosh - political remix
Tim Park - anime music videos
Eric Saks - arts/independent video
Laura Shapiro - vidding
Jon Stout - documentary
As per the bullet point above, I was invited to represent Machinima, which is quite the honor. I'm still pulling together the program, and hope I can do the medium some justice in the 80 minutes I have (feel free to suggest any pieces in the comments).
So why is this news only surfacing now? Well, there's been lots of planning happening over the past 12 months and the event program has finally been nailed down - but most importantly, registration is open. Registration closes on January 9th, and spaces are limited so get crackin' if you'd like to attend.
Ok, that's enough text for one day. I'll be poking at the blog over the weekend - mainly with my thoughts to Rodica's CSI posting yesterday, but possibly with a few other thoughts as well.
Bloodspell, the feature movie production from Strange Company is an epic culmination for one of the most fascinating and groundbreaking machinima series. The main accomplishment? Pure, unfettered entertainment that reaches the audience through powerful storytelling and compelling cinematography.
Hugh Hancock, writer and director, was present in Second Life this Sunday (event produced by machiniplex.com ), to receive feedback and be overwhelmed by excited fans. Countless secrets of the trade were shared with humor, including setting up cinematic dolly shots ("we were using calculus, it was scary!"), the incredible play of color & contrast achieved in post processing("thau shalt not shoot people wearing brown on a brown set"), and badger-based lighting technique ("the best thing we learnt about lighting is 'hey, let's have some!'").
As a deeper statement for things yet to come, the message of Bloodspell is clear. Simply take a look at the Creative Commons tag and the introductory cracks at the traditional, pre-movie legalese we're used to seeing, my favorite:
"Piracy is a crime....so don't steal any boats."
Beyond the technical talk and jokes, the most remarkable feat of the movie was its ability to make me forget that I was looking at a game environment. The only thing that broke my immersion were the character skins, but that can be attributed to being spoiled by the advances I have seen in Second Life. To give you a feel, you can check out a few samples on the Uncanny Valley page, any work by artist Darkdharma Daguerre, or Robbie Dingo's machinima blog.
Following in the footsteps of Make Love, Not Warcraft, two more machinima pieces are in the running for an Emmy this year, one created in Second Life and the other one in There.com.
Showtime's L Word in Second Life for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for Best Use Of Commercial Advertising on Stand-Alone Broadband Devices (Personal Computers). You can watch the promo here.
and
MTV's Virtual Laguna Beach for Outstanding Achievement in Advanced Media Technology for Creation of Non-Traditional Programs or Platforms. The promo for this initiative is here.
Toyota springs Machinima ad on unsuspecting World of Warcraft
How popular is World of Warcraft? Ask Toyota. They've recently released a spot that takes place in WoW, where a Toyota Tacoma leads the party into battle against the fire-breathing dragon. The spot itself is a bit of a rip off the Leeroy Jenkins vid, but its still somewhat humorous.
First the GTA/Coke ad and now this. Good call by Toyota, even if its a new skin over an old idea. Give it a look while it spreads like wildfire...
For those of you who have been hiding under an extremely large rock, and even then, that rock would need to be within a really deep cave that had collapsed a number of years ago, Halo 3 will be released next week to the salivating masses (count me as one).
Not only with the Legendary Edition featuring Machinima stars such as Rooster Teeth and Chris Burke, but Halo 3 itself will be a Machinimator's playpen - specifically with the new Save Films feature that records all the action within a game of Halo 3. But rather than I blather on and on about how cool it is (and I could!), Bungie does us a solid by preparing yet another great vidoc (oh, these made-up film terms) that showcases Save Films proper. Additionally, the short shows us Forge, Bungie's game-editing mode that rips a page from the Garry's Mod playbook and makes it a playable feature on top. Talk about cool! Talk about innovative! Talk about excitement and the overuse of punctuation!!!
Ok, enough smarmy chatter. Over to you, Bungie...
If you still haven't had your fill of Halo-based Machinima yet, then sit back after Sept. 25th and let it wash over you like the humidity on a NYC summer day.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, Thinking Machinima is getting an overhaul, but even more importantly, some help on the blogging end. Starting this week, Rodica Buzescu will be contributing to the site giving TM readers a bit more intelluctual fodder to chew on.
Rodica's background in Machinima spans a wide range of clients and projects. She's helped developed Machinima (and live action) shorts for Harvard's first open access course as well as collaborating with Machinima impresario, Pierce Portocarrero on several pieces for Coke (where I first was introduced to Rodica - checkthemouthere). Additionally, she worked with Michael Verdi on a Machinima piece for Intel. She's also a keen follower of the art form as both a medium and as a production approach.
Please join me in welcoming her into the fold. Her first posting here will be a review of Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram's Machinima for Dummies (just got mine in mail!) Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for her thoughts on the various Machinima subject matters that have been surfacing. Rodica's take on Machinima is extremely well-rounded, looking at it from practitioner, democratizing medium and educational viewpoints. I'm really looking forward to reading her insights and think TM readers will welcome the additional vision around Machinima. Welcome, Rodica!
In other news, I'm still banging on the site redesign...slowly but surely....
Valve continues to mash FPS with highly polished and stylized animation in this latest short, introducing The Soldier character class from Team Fortress 2. Displaying even more attention to detail than the Heavy Weapons guy (look for the that secondary motion that gives everything its life-life feel), Valve continues to build excitement towards the release of this free game (well, packaged in the Orange Box collection).
Machinima Europe Festival 07 & Machinma Festival 08
For those keeping track, some news to share on the festival front.
The 2007 Machinima Festival (North America) will be pushed into mid-2008, as we're still pulling together funding and partners for the event. A festival requires both proper financial and human resources (partially to do with my own time - more on this later), and rather than to hold a lackluster event, we've determined holding the festival in 2008 will give us more time to properly ramp up the fest. This said, we're working quite a bit in the background to lock in the 2008 date and venue. Stay tuned to here and the AMAS site for future info once it's solid (soon!).
With this in mind, I want to push having people submit their works to the Machinima Europe Festival 07! This event, which is the European equivalent of the festival we have in North America, will be a weekend long Machinima-focused event, complete with its own competition. Any Machinima work previously created can be submitted (regardless of which Machinima festivals you might have submitted to previously - including the AMAS ones in the States). In addition, the entry of your work is free! The submission deadline is Sept. 1st, so get crackin' and submit your Machinima work to this year's only Machinima event!
Destroy TV reaches far and wide - one frame at a time (updated)
(Updated 6/23/07 to include Annie Ok's contribution to project) For those of you keeping tabs on the Machinima frontier, pay close attention to Jerry Paffendorf and Christian Westbrook, if you aren't already. The duo are explorers into the virtual playground of Second Life - and they've become extremely adept at finding the world's edges and figure out ways to stretch them further.
Their latest endeavour is Destroy TV - a multiuser avatar in SL that catalogs its existence to Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Recently Jerry and Christian collaborated with curator/artist Annie Ok to bring Destroy TV to the public, with an interactive installation of DTV run over the course of 10 days at the Fuse Gallery here in NYC and Art Center in SL. During this time Annie/Destroy explored large parts of Second Life, and was even married during the week-plus event (to Walker Spaight of 3pointD no less!). Annie describes it as one of the most intense and immersive experiences she's ever had - living as Destroy in SL for 10 days straight.
The fascinating part of the installation for me was the time-lapse of the virtual life, now released in its Director's Cut edition (in multiple gigs of MPEGs). Lifelogging, as Jerry describes it, is a unique look at the click-to-click moments of a virtual entity. With a stream of nearly 100,000 screen caps compiled together, the film becomes the Machinima equivalent of Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi. Yet one more way Machinima embraces old practices using new technology.
Destroy TV's life begun under the sink of Jerry and Christian's apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where they placed the DTV Macbook and cam software so that it was out of harm's way (save any leaky pipes). With a start there, I look forward to seeing what other projects spring forth from their kitchen.
Update: For giggles, I mashed some DTV footage (and sped up quite a bit) with a sampling of Phillip Glass' "The Grid."
This has been cooking in the background since the start of this year, but now we're finally able to shout it out to the world - the first European Machinima Festival is taking place October 12-14th, 2007 in Leicester, England, at De Montfort University!
We're all really excited to have an event based in Europe - to help promote Machinima within this section of the world, but also to act as a common ground for European artists and fans.
There will be more to announce shortly about the fest, so stay tuned!
Just came across this blurb over on the Second Life News Network. NBC's new Second Life-powered endeavour Virtual NBC, has hired Pierce Portocarrero for a new Machinima series, involving a family who frequently connect to SL.
For those not familiar with Pierce's award-winning work, check out his site at Oddwadd.com as well as his recently released piece around the film "300." It's really great to see NBC hire someone of his caliber, and I look forward to the series once it released. Huzzah!
Valve released this short late Monday for the upcoming Team Fortress 2, showcasing the Heavy Weapons class in the game. The game's art direction is part FPS, part-Pixar and as a fan of the original TFC, I have to say I'm super excited by this game. Valve's posting speaks of a new facial animation system that allows the game to surpass even filmic-quality results and will be/is (?) available as part of Source. No word yet though if this embellishes the existing FacePoser app currently included with the Source SDK, but its definitely something to keep an eye on.
Also, word from on high says to expect a few more of these TF2 vignettes in the near future.
In the middle of my extremely spotty net connection, I've been cruising through the new site by Microsoft around Visual Studio - DefyAllChallenges.com
Clearly aimed at the tech-savvy crowd of current and future VS users, Microsoft takes a page from the RvB playbook and created a number of Machinima works using what looks like their own game content (I havent identified which games the clips are from, but rest assured they own it).
The site itself is retro-2002 in its design, with animated widgets serving as the interface (which I actually like quite a bit), showing both the Machinima works, but also the more pertinent content, videos (with live honest-to-goodness people) speaking about Visual Studio. Also included in the site is a small Flash-based editor, allowing visitors of the site to create their own Machinima works and vote on others.
While there are a number of people out there who are probably appalled at Machinima being used for such blatant marketing efforts, I don't have a problem with it. To me, its all a part of it having cultural and commercial significance as a medium. If Hugh and Anthony are reading this entry, I'd love to hear their take as well - didja ever think you'd see MS using Machinima?
