Convince me

Someone convince me why I should continue with machinima. This isn't another "why machinima sucks" rant, but just a slight doubt I've been having lately.

As my skills improve in filmmaking, naturally my ambitions and goals increase with it. The kind of movies and the level of quality I wanted to achieve back in 2004 compared to today, is like night and day. Back then, simple machinima was good enough as long as it was captured well, edited cleverly, and was overall watchable.

From after the release of the first OTSS to right now, what I wanted for OTSS 2 kept growing day by day. At first I knew I had to step the quality up, which meant addressing the main issues with OTSS: emotionless and expressionless faces, looping stock animations, stiff "gamey" motions and graphics, and more importantly, the plot.

All that technical work would go to waste if the plot didn't live up to expectations. In my opinion a great film has all the elements in high quality, including (but not only) the story. Rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, etc., I won't get into it. I'm sure a lot of you have heard enough about OTSS 2 rewriting over the last few years.

With all that work and dedication into writing a short film, a film to be created in a game engine, not to be sold and not legally owned, seems somewhat ludicrous. Add to that, all of the custom assets that need to be created: character models, animations, textures, maps, props, weapons, and quality as good as or better than the original game the machinima film is made in.

It all seems way too daunting for the limits of machinima. Visually, I want to achieve a higher quality than the cinematics found in Gears of War. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that it won't be possible without a lot of money.

At that point you're taking away the main positive aspect of machinima: money. Time-saving is simply not a factor in custom content films. And when you're spending that much time and effort, why not spend a little more time to render out a full-blown CGI picture instead? If we were on a contract deadline, things would be different, but this is a personal project, one that could be potentially sold after it was completed.

But with machinima that isn't even possible, sometimes it is but still in limited form.

And the most disturbing thing that I've come to realize is this: video game engines become outdated. Fast. When one is obsessed with quality and technology such as myself, one must always strive to keep up with the times and choose the latest game engine on the market.

And everytime a new, stunning game engine is revealed that will "change the way machinima is made", this means you have to take the time to learn this new engine, the way its coded, its scripting language, the way its map editor works, the way lipsyncing works, the way the cameras work, what kind of workarounds or hacks there are, and so on.

In CG every new technology is an evolution of an existing tool, such as Maya or Max. Once you've learned how to use it, you don't need to re-learn it every few years!

So where exactly does time-saving come in, compared to a full CG render, if you're spending all that time learning different game engines?

I'm doubtful because over the course of many years, I would much rather spend that time mastering one tool, than trying to learn many.

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!!!!