Anthony Bailey's blog

Credits where credits due

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:16:51 GMT

(A piece about TV credits on Mongoose World caused in turn by this piece from the BBC provoked a rant from me on that subject and particularly how it relates to machinima. It seems to have broken my writer's block, so I've copied/pasted/edited it here.)

Full screen credits on plain old broadcast television might still be reasonable, because how else do you get the information? But that medium is increasingly dead. We shall speak of it no more.

Full screen credits on TV as we increasingly watch it (DVR, DVD, IP) seem anomalous. Pack them into an information burst: if I want to read them, I'll pause and advance through individual frames. If I'm on a smart device, put the credits in metadata I can browse with that device. If the device is Net-enabled, put them on a page I can navigate to from the program. Don't make me sit through this stuff. Brand a little if you must, but if I care about obscure details, I'll seek out the information, and be very happy to read much more than you could cram into the credit footage.

Full screen credits in typical machinima (and other YouTube-length pieces) are a sign the medium is far too indebted to its older media parents, and is too slavishly following their inappropriate conventions. See above: viewer is almost certainly watching on a Net-enabled device. And a minute of credits on a five minute piece is a real tax on my time!

Further, there should be two default downloads/streams for episodic machinima:

There should be the new episode for returning viewers (without credits, of course - we already saw them so many times. You can do a "previously" if the plot so demands.)
And there should be everything from the first up to the new episode in a single download/stream for people coming to the story for the first time.

These are your two markets - cater to them. The second is particularly ill-served by having to watch umpteen short previous episodes in order to catch-up, where tedious credits/theme song prevent me getting into your wonderful art.

(Sorry for the explosion of highly subjective opinion. I don't know why I care so much about it. I remember I tried and failed to convince Hugh to do this kind of thing with Bloodspell.)

'Spell is out

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 23:30:18 GMT

Independent film outfit Strange Company have released their feature-length machinima movie, the "punk fantasy" BloodSpell.

My opinions on the film are necessarily messy. I'm an advocate of the medium (machinima is shooting movies within virtual worlds, often using video games), and a friend of the creators - indeed, I worked on one of the tools used to create the film. So I'm unfairly biased. I'm also not a great person to have on your side, because I don't let such things mellow my criticisms or get me hyped - at best I do faint praise, and damn you.

BloodSpell hits a huge range of highs and lows. Almost every aspect - story, performance, cinematography, art, technology/effects, pacing, dialogue - has parts that are truly great, and parts that are pretty poor. (The exception is the audio: sound and soundtrack are good throughout.) A spread of quality is not unusual in a film, but the range is particularly wide here. There are many genius moments and scenes. There are many embarassing ones.

The film is strong at start and end, weak in the middle. This is partly due to the order of shooting: Strange Company learned heaps about their machinima technologies and about movie-making as they created the piece; originally released in episodic chunks, they returned to completely redo the opening scene when editing together this version. It's also partly due to happenstance - the second scene was already strong, whilst the film serves as an archetypal illustration of the cinema textbook tendency to have the story sag in the middle.

This is by a fair way the best machinima feature film I've seen. The dated technology is necessarily distracting, but didn't spoil my enjoyment. Whilst previous machinima movies have excited me about the future potential of the medium, this one is real, now. It simply works as a decent movie in it's own right - I'd watch it through if it came on TV the right midweek evening, probably whilst bestowing it the odd sarcastic aside because, you know, it's lucky to be on the channel I'm indulging.

It's also probably the best budget independent film of its genre (epic action fantasy drama with nods to comedy and contemporary culture - the one word summary is "Buffy".) This is almost by definition: you simply can't shoot real film (or TV) of this flavor for the few thousand pounds it took to make BloodSpell. (Also this genre of film is not blessed with many success stories. This one can only have helped.)

The film was made by volunteers, is licensed under a BY-NC Creative Commons licence, and you can download or stream it for free. I'd even encourage fans of the genre to do so if it didn't contradict my disclaimer at the start!

Origins of the word "machinima"

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 17:58:52 GMT

Machinima was spelled slightly differently when first-born. The first use of the term, as "machinema", appeared in an e-mail I sent on the 'q2demos' mailing list on 5 Jan 1998. Here is the quote from the mail in question. Conveniently, it happened to go on to explain the need to coin the term.

Anthony:

I think with a new tool-set and a greater awareness of the skills
required to make a good piece of machinema[*] we can expect to see
some truly adventurous stuff being made. Fine and fun as they can be,
slapstick and B-movie action horror are just the start of what *could*
be done with this new medium. If I was a film student with some
technical savvie, I'd be beginning to look at using this stuff as an
alternative to or prototype for an expensive real-world production.

[*]Machinema... yes, sorry, it's a bit of a contrived term... but what
in general *are* we going to call these pieces of cinema that are made
using 3D engines? Not only is "Quake movie" an ugly and confusing
term, it's also fast going to become outdated as other technologies
become relevant. (c: Any ideas?

I chose "machinema" to rhyme with cinema. I used "machine" as a base only because I didn't find an easy pun with "engine" in it. I spelled it with the 'e' because it made it look a bit like cinema. I don't believe it to be the best neologism in the world, and I apologize for that - I didn't know the term was going to get widespread.

The word began to be used fairly regularly on the mailing list and gradually in other related fora, but that was about all. So far as I know, it's first "public" appearance is in a review I wrote for GameSpy Industry's Quake portal site PlanetQuake.com, first published on 02 Apr 1999. (Slightly broken copy of now dead page courtesy of the Internet Archive)

Hugh Hancock of Strange Company wrote up some "machinima" techniques on 10 Jun 1999. We were already in e-mail contact so we discussed the new spelling.

Anthony:

<pedantry>
I'm very happy that you've adopted my silly whimiscal term for cinema
generated by desktop machines, but is there any reason that you have
changed the spelling? The 'e's in both "cinema" and "machine" seem to
suggest the natural spelling for the mangled combination is
"machinema." It's a pun rather than a derivation, so I don't see any
linguistic pressure to follow the path of e.g. "machinist."
</pedantry>

Hugh:

As a linguist I'd prefer to use the "ima", a more common suffix than "ema",
and go with the normal derivation, but to be perfectly honest the main
reason we've changed the spelling is I forgot how you originally spelled it
and "ima" looked more natural! Sorry...

Anthony:

I didn't like "machinima" at first because it seemed to lose the
"cinema" pun, at least at the lexical level. But it's still there
phonically, and now I realise there is a genuine derivation from
"anima" going on as well, so the new spelling actually maybe combines
something plausible and word-play. Anyway, in the interests of
uniformity I'll adopt your spelling.

Hugh tells the machinima etymology story from his side in a far more self-deprecating and entertaining style within the book Machinima for Dummies.

The term crossed the chasm for certain when hub-site machinima.com was launched at the start of 2000.

Blipvert

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:07:58 GMT

I'm wondering why there isn't more machinima on blip.tv. There is some, but this video publishing service seems like such a good fit with the needs of machers I would have expected more.

I became aware of blip through this recent interview with co-founder Mike Hudack by Jon Udell. (Good podcast - says some interesting things in general about web service businesses.)

The company seems to really get what a user-gen content aggregator and publisher needs to do to succeed by pleasing their users. You can read their own overview, but items from the interview that impressed me included

a strong distaste for service lock-in (for example, they will automatically mirror your upload to the Internet Archive if you want),
being very open to working with other distributors and publishers (for example, building a system to share tags and download stats),
staying in the background to let creators control branding (for example, they don't embed their logo),
sensible advertising options (you can use their advertising and share the profits, or do your own, or none),
providing a strong free service with professional upgrade.

The whole thing sounds like the right business model: provide a service which offers sustainable long-term value that supports creators.

The disclaimer: I've not used the service. (Anyone who has care to comment?)

New angles

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 06:57:30 GMT

Fotowoosh is a service to extract 3D models from 2D images, seeking beta users.

This kind of math is not new, but I've not seen it productized and sold before - seems to be a pretty exciting technology development for machinima-makers. Model asset generation is probably the biggest remaining expense in our medium, expecially films that want to be set outside the virtual world the engine they were made in comes with. (Seen at TechCrunch - the article there has a good pictorial summary)

Surveying The Scene

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 17:43:44 GMT

This week-end I was pleasantly distracted into downloading and watching the first season of Welcome To The Scene, an episodic drama/soap about supplying movies to the darknet.

The usual format of an episode simply shows someone's desktop with a small inset shot of the user at the keyboard. The action is mostly textual, taking place in IRC and IM windows, plus an occasional voiceover or telephone call. It is well-produced, pretty entertaining, and makes good use of the dramatic and story-telling possibilities of the format. This nerd enjoyed it.

Being interested in machinima, I couldn't help but notice that what we have here is people playing out a narrative in software not designed for that purpose, screen capturing the live performance, doing a little editing, and putting the result out in episodic format on the Net. Further, here's evidence in extremis that cutting-edge rendering engines and assets are not quite so vital to success in such a medium as is sometimes supposed.

Code Monkey like maschups

Mon, 15 May 2006 01:35:58 GMT

I like code. I like monkeys. I like big dumb bouncy pop rock.

So, when a few weeks back some guy called Jonathan Coulton recorded a big dumb bouncy pop rock song called Code Monkey, it made me smile.

I like the Creative Commons licenses that let people build on the work of others. And I like machinima (shooting film in virtual worlds, often games.)

So when long-time machinima creators the ILL Clan chose to do a video for Code Monkey this made me wonder whether there was some bizarre experiment afoot to mash together everything I liked and see what happened. The video features as the major segment of episode seven of their allegedly gaming news chat show, Tra5hTa1k.

(I like what happened.)

Film-making and software engineering

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 01:34:14 GMT

Film-maker cairmen posted recently comparing their current phase of production to bug-fixing in software, and wondering about analogies between his world and that of software engineering. And the other week after watching DVD extras for The Fifth Element, the lead programmer where I work (Dave Turner) said he thought he saw interesting correspondences between working on a film and on a software project. (In particular, he thought said film showed an unusually strong core vision and emergent realisation compared to some other blockbusters, and when tonight I happened on this related note re agile software development and film, it kicked me into this update.)

I'm always inclined to be a little suspicious of analogies between the two worlds since I always hear them made by those with significant experience in only one of the two. Like most software engineers, Dave may watch films, but he doesn't make them. And although the massive importance of technology in the machinima medium within which cairmen works means that his outfit Strange Company have been involved in writing some software, I believe that he remains some distance from having a good view of what software engineering on a medium scale is like.

Of course, the fact that people on both sides posit the analogy is highly suggestive, so I would be interested to see it explored some.

Definitely in both cases we have a moderately sized team of people working together on a project with an eventually inescapable time/resource budget to produce a creative work that will be judged by a target audience whose exact desires are very hard to quantify in advance. Also it helps to have a core vision, you learn a lot as the project progresses and benefit if you can take advantage of that, and the only possible response to the inevitable over-runs is to try to cut "features" without wrecking the entire proposition.

So, you would expect analogies.

But I do think that the facts of real life mean that the above properties will hold for very many collective human creative endeavours, so maybe software and film are just two that the pair happen to have a vague awareness of. The worlds do also have some pretty major differences: an obvious one is that (jokes about generic sequels aside) you only really release a film once, whereas software goes through many versions - so postproduction maintainence is much more important. And I struggle to imagine useful analogies on a lower level (what is unit-testing for film? Or refactoring? Or software architecture?) although I grant that this could well be because I also lack experience of film.

Time to sync

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 01:29:13 GMT

Machinima group Strange Company are filming a new episodic series, which has its own LiveJournal here: bloodspell.

(I'm overdue to do an introduction to machinima here. For the time being, this Shockwave demo is a good explanation, and "shooting film in a virtual reality" is a good soundbite.)

I've been interested in machinima for years. However, the machinima efforts of the group I was previously part of have pretty much fizzled out, and my job keeps me too busy these days to commit as much time to it as I'd like. (Those two facts were not unrelated.) As a result, it has been a long time since I did anything directly useful for a specific machinima project. I mostly pontificate from the sidelines and talk about what might be done rather than doing it - in particular, rather than coding missing pieces of technology. (Although I did manage one piece within living memory.)

A very welcome opportunity has now arisen, and I'm happy to be doing something for BloodSpell that is self-contained and reasonably sized, but pretty worthwhile and also potentially useful to other machinima production groups too: code to graft some lip-sync abilities on top of their filming environment, using the neat trick of GL intermediation.

In fact I'm enthusiastic enough about the work I decided I would try to blog about the technical aspects of it over on the project blog. To that end I've kicked things off with a (non-technical) introduction to the context and the plan.

Diary -- dairy -- ... -- bells -- bills

Sun, 26 Oct 2003 15:49:52 GMT

(A lot of the detail below needs some context and understanding as to what machinima is: briefly, making films in a virtual 3D environment, working in ways that are much closer to conventional cinema than traditional computer graphics and animation. I should write a proper gentle introduction in this blog at some point, but right now I'm pushed for time and energy, and just want to brain-dump.)

So, the film festival I went to help with is over.

It really didn't need much help. The people directly behind it gave it an extraordinary push, and this year the event had quite some momentum too. We had around seven hundred people at the American Museum of the Moving Image, many of them creative and filmy types already working in areas adjacent to that of machinima. These are exactly the people who should fall in love with the new medium and there's every sign that seductions continue on a daily basis.

There was also a good turn-out from the tool-makers. A year ago, professional production environments for machinima (imagine a virtual film studio) were only a gleam in the collective eye. Now they are popping up all over. It costs to design and develop these specialist tools, and so they are tending to manifest as quite expensive software: a few thousand dollars, say. But one exciting thing is that advanced machinima tools are also appearing in the games that are available on the shelf in high-street stores. There is enough demand for virtual film-making from the general public that adding this extra value to a product in the huge and competitive computer games market amortizes the costs of the development.

Machinima so far has been most successful when the necessary parts (a sufficiently high-end computer platform, a customizable world engine) happen to have become commoditized in other markets. If production environments go the same way it can only be a good thing.

Another very exciting thing was watching stuff performed live. See a review I wrote for some more on this.

Finally, me. I enjoyed the festival a great deal. I got to observe and to chat to some interesting people, and to meet face-to-face with many who I've known only on-line. It's been fun. Now I'm coming home to sleep.

Diary -- dairy -- ... -- dully -- bully

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 21:03:59 GMT

Tomorrow morning I'm off to New York to help with the 2nd Machinima Film Festival at MoMI. I'm looking forward to it, although I'm uncertain as exactly what to expect. Meanwhile the pace at work has been picking up and so I've been very busy trying to get documents into a good state before taking about a week off for this trip. I managed this enough that I'll get some sleep tonight, but only because I've put off reading fourteen exciting patents until the plane ride tomorrow. Fun.

I did find time over the week-end to see two films that were extremely beautiful visually, albeit with unsurprisingly straightforward storylines underneath. They are also pretty different in most other ways: Spirited Away and Kill Bill: Volume 1. I highly recommend both.

Games as art, as art.Storytelling is cool, but as a former...

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:48:02 +0100

Games as art, as art.

Storytelling is cool, but as a former speedrun producer I have a slow-burning interest in the non-fiction fringes of machinima, particularly those that focus on the games themselves.

A fascinating example I (finally) noticed last week is a series of Half-Life 2 “critiques” by GooseGoose Productions. Like their creator Mark Gillespie, I’m sufficiently in awe of this series of games that I would have happily indulged simple fan-boy “wasn’t this bit cool!” reminiscence - but this is only one factor in his (necessarily spoiler-laden, by the way) pieces on episodes “zero”, one and two.

Gillespie makes the obvious argument for games as significant cultural artifacts and quality narrative inventions, but also promotes what I believe to be an equally correct but less widely accepted position on games as visual art per se, revelling in Valve’s architectural and design aesthetics. His creative background helps: I loved when, as an oil painter, he’d get all excited about any one particular texture! In a more conventional machinima mode, he also occasionally interjects some of his own work as imaginative hypotheticals, Garry’s Mod style.

(tag: machinima)

http://epsodic.com/

Thu, 08 May 2008 20:08:00 +0100

http://epsodic.com/: Epsodic is a bizarre service (allegedly in private beta) that seems unaware of and unknown by machinima. From their blurb: “Here at EPSODIC, we have developed a new, sociable way to share your favorite game play moments with anyone, not just fellow gamers! Instead of relying on screen capturing or recording your game, our patents pending platform recreates your game play into a short-form, cinematic clip with a coherent story.” It seems to upscale your original gameplay into a fancier rendering (like replaying a Quake .dem in a beautified engine.) And make suitable cutting/editing choices. Question is: does it only work with NetHack, or what? (tag: machinima) [Update: epsodic, not episodic as previously linked!]