Machinimachinimachinima! Arg!

Holy crap look at all that spam on the previous post.

It's been a while since I've last updated this. Ever since I started work at Shiny, machinima in general has been difficult to get back into. Not just machinima, but any other work-related hobby. The so called "brain drain" mentioned by some in the Mprem community is definitely rearing its ugly head.

Every day consists of driving an hour and half, sitting at a computer for 9 hours to create what is essentially machinima, then driving another hour and half back home. So what's the last thing I want to do when I finally come home? That's right... machinima.

On that note, I thought I'd explain a little bit about my job, since it might interest some people (and have been asked on many occasions).

Firstly, they've finally announced which game we're working on:

The Golden Compass.

It's based on a giant film franchise coming out Christmas this year (by giant I mean Lord of the Rings giant... supposedly), which is based on a trilogy of books called His Dark Materials. Apparently it's very popular in the UK (called The Northern Lights over there), but not in the US as much.

Some more information about the game here, here, and here.

So, first we get a bunch of storyboards for a level in the game. At that point the animations and models are mostly unfinished, so we make a quick, rough version of the scene, with temporary models, and temporary animations. We use a tool which allows us to script and chain any existing animation together in a countless number of ways. I believe its mostly used for gameplay, but it works for our needs just as well.

Then we continue to work on the scene as the assets are completed (models, animations, storyboard changes, etc.) or we move onto the next scene while we wait. Most of the time we have multiple ones going on at the same time (currently we have about 15 or so...).

For the first few months, me and a coworker split up the various cinematic scenes in the game, and we each had our "own" cinematic that we began and completed separately. While this was kind of cool because we could call a certain cinematic our own, it wasn't very efficient. As all machinimators know, making even one scene in a machinima film is a combination of many different skills. And most know, that the more skills you try to tackle on yourself, the less the overall result will be.

About a month ago this changed as we hired a third person on our team, a programmer. And so our roles changed a bit, a bit more like an assembly line.
My coworker focuses on blocking the scene into the level (via triggers and keyframes), the new hire focuses on animation scripting, and i focus on what I feel I do best: all of the camerawork.

If I have an 9 hour day, I can now work on a camera for 9 hours, instead of say, 3 hours on cameras, 3 on animation scripting, and 3 on blocking. Technically speaking, the camerawork will be 3 times better than if I attempt the whole scene myself. The animation scripting and blocking will also be 3 times better.

So in the end by doing specialized work in our best talent, we end up with a highly polished scene. And I've always been saying this and this is the clearest example I could possibly make. TEAMWORK > SOLO!!!!