Machinima

' popular machinima series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles]]

Machinima ( or ) is the use of real-time graphics rendering engines (a game engine), mostly three-dimensional (3-D), to generate computer animation. The term also refers to works that incorporate this animation technique. Some machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are fan laborers and often use graphics engines from video games, a practice that arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 video game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) video games, such as id Software's Doom and Quake. Originally, these recordings documented speedruns—attempts to complete a level as quickly as possible—and multiplayer matches. The addition of storylines to these films created "Quake movies". The more general term machinima, a misspelled portmanteau of machine cinema, arose when the concept spread beyond the Quake series to other games and software. After this generalization, machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements.

Machinima has advantages and disadvantages when compared to other styles of filmmaking. Its relative simplicity over traditional frame-based animation limits control and range of expression. Its real-time nature favors speed, cost saving, and flexibility over the higher quality of pre-rendered computer animation. Virtual acting is less expensive, dangerous, and physically restricted than live action. Machinima can be filmed by relying on in-game artificial intelligence (AI) or by controlling characters and cameras through digital puppetry. Scenes can be precisely scripted, and can be manipulated during post-production using video editing techniques. Editing, custom software, and creative cinematography may address technical limitations. Game companies have provided software for and have encouraged machinima, but the widespread use of digital assets from copyrighted games has resulted in complex, unresolved legal issues.

Machinima productions can remain close to their gaming roots and feature stunts or other portrayals of gameplay. Popular genres include dance videos, comedy, and drama. Alternatively, some filmmakers attempt to stretch the boundaries of the rendering engines or to mask the original 3-D context. The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima, recognizes exemplary productions through Mackie awards given at its annual Machinima Film Festival. Some general film festivals accept machinima, and game companies, such as Epic Games, Blizzard Entertainment and Jagex, have sponsored contests involving it.

History

Precedent

1980s software crackers added custom introductory credits sequences (intros) to programs whose copy protection they had removed. Increasing computing power allowed for more complex intros, and the demoscene formed when focus shifted to the intros instead of the cracks. The goal became to create the best 3-D demos in real-time with the least amount of software code. Disk storage was too slow for this; graphics had to be calculated on the fly and without a pre-existing game engine. Released the following year, id Software's Doom included the ability to record gameplay as sequences of events that the game engine could later replay in real-time. Because events and not video frames were saved, the resulting game demo files were small and easily shared among players. Another important feature of Doom was that it allowed players to create their own modifications, maps, and software for the game, thus expanding the concept of game authorship.

Dooms 1996 successor, Quake, offered new opportunities for both gameplay and customization, while retaining the ability to record demos. Multiplayer games became popular, almost a sport; demos of matches between teams of players (clans) were recorded and studied. Paul Marino, executive director of the AMAS, stated that deathmatches, a type of multiplayer game, became more "cinematic".

Quake movies

, an early machinima production]] On October 26, 1996, a well-known gaming clan, the Rangers, surprised the Quake community with Diary of a Camper, the first widely known machinima film. This short, 100-second demo file contained the action and gore of many others, but in the context of a brief story, The Ranger demo emphasized this transformation by retaining specific gameplay references in its story.

Diary of a Camper inspired many other Quake movies, as these films were then called. the latter became "known as Adobe Premiere for Quake demo files". Among the notable films were Clan Phantasm's Devil's Covenant, and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield, which introduced simulated lip synchronization and featured customized digital assets.

Released in December 1997, id Software's Quake II improved support for user-created 3-D models. However, without compatible editing software, filmmakers continued to create works based on the original Quake; these included the ILL Clan's Apartment Huntin' and the Quake done Quick group's Scourge Done Slick. Quake II demo editors became available in 1998; in particular, Keygrip 2.0 introduced "recamming", the ability to adjust camera locations after recording.

The December 1999 release of id's Quake III Arena posed a problem to the Quake movie community. The game's demo file included information needed for computer networking; however, to prevent cheating, id warned of legal action for dissemination of the file format. New productions appeared less frequently, and, according to Marino, the community needed to "reinvent itself" to offset this development. The new name surprised the community; a misspelled contraction of machine cinema (machinema), the term machinima was intended to dissociate in-game filming from a specific engine. However, demo files required a copy of the game to view. Within a few years, machinima films were almost exclusively distributed in common video file formats. Roger Ebert discussed it in a June 2000 article and praised Strange Company's machinima setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias". At Showtime Network's 2001 Alternative Media Festival, the ILL Clan's 2000 machinima film Hardly Workin' won the Best Experimental and Best in SHO awards. Steven Spielberg used Unreal Tournament to test special effects while working on his 2001 film Eventually, interest spread to game developers. In July 2001, Epic Games announced that its upcoming game Unreal Tournament 2003 would include Matinee, a machinima production software utility. As involvement increased, filmmakers released fewer new productions to focus on quality. a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima. At QuakeCon in August, the new organization held the first Machinima Film Festival, which received mainstream media coverage. , by Jake Hughes and Tom Hall, won three awards, including Best Picture. As graphics technology improved, machinima filmmakers used other video games and consumer-grade video editing software. Using Bungie's 2001 game , Rooster Teeth Productions created a popular comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles. The series' second season premiered at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2004.

Mainstream appearances

"]] Machinima has appeared on television, starting with G4's series Portal. In the BBC series Time Commanders, players re-enacted historic battles using Creative Assembly's real-time game . MTV2's Video Mods re-creates music videos using characters from video games such as The Sims 2, BloodRayne, and Tribes. Blizzard Entertainment helped to set part of "Make Love, Not Warcraft", an Emmy Award–winning 2006 episode of the comedy series South Park, in its massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. By purchasing broadcast rights to Douglas Gayeton's machinima documentary Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator in September 2007, HBO became the first television network to buy a work created completely in a virtual world. In December 2008, machinima.com signed fifteen experienced television comedy writers—including Patric Verrone, Bill Oakley, and Mike Rowe—to produce episodes for the site.

Commercial use of machinima has increased. Rooster Teeth sells DVDs of their Red vs. Blue series and, under sponsorship from Electronic Arts, helped to promote The Sims 2 by using the game to make a machinima series, The Strangerhood. Later, Electronic Arts commissioned Rooster Teeth to promote their Madden NFL 07 video game.

Game developers have continued to increase support for machinima. Products such as Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies, Linden Research's virtual world Second Life, and Bungie's 2007 first-person shooter Halo 3 encourage the creation of user content by including machinima software tools. took four days to create The French Democracy, a short political film about the 2005 civil unrest in France.

Production

Comparison to film techniques

The AMAS defines machinima as "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment". In other 3-D animation methods, creators can control every frame and nuance of their characters but, in turn, must consider issues such as key frames and in-betweening. Machinima creators leave many rendering details to their host environments, but may thus inherit those environments' limitations. Because game animations focus on dramatic rather than casual actions, the range of character emotions is often limited. However, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that a small range of emotions is often sufficient, as in successful Japanese anime television series.

Another difference is that machinima is created in real time, but other animation is pre-rendered. Real-time engines need to trade quality for speed and use simpler algorithms and models. similarly, Paul Marino connects machinima to the increasing computing power predicted by Moore's Law. Filmmakers are often encouraged to follow traditional cinematic conventions, such as avoiding wide fields of view, the overuse of slow motion, and errors in visual continuity. Unlike live action, machinima involves less expensive, digital special effects and sets, possibly with a science-fiction or historical theme. Machinima filming differed from traditional cinematography in that character expression was limited, but camera movements were more flexible and improvised. Nitsche compared this experiment to an unpredictable Dogme 95 production. Machinima is a digital medium based on 3-D computer games, but most works have a linear narrative structure. Some, such as Red vs. Blue and The Strangerhood, follow narrative conventions of television situational comedy. In creating their improvisational comedy series On the Campaign Trail with Larry & Lenny Lumberjack and talk show Tra5hTa1k with ILL Will, the ILL Clan blended real and virtual performance by creating the works on-stage and interacting with a live audience. Previously, such virtual cinematic performances with live audience interaction were confined to research labs equipped with powerful computers.

Machinima can be less expensive than other forms of filmmaking. Strange Company produced its feature-length machinima film BloodSpell for less than £10,000. Before using machinima, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum of Rooster Teeth Productions spent US$9,000 to produce a live-action independent film; in contrast, the four Xbox game consoles used to make Red vs. Blue in 2005 cost $600. The low cost caused a product manager for Electronic Arts to compare machinima to the low-budget independent film The Blair Witch Project, without the need for cameras and actors. Berkeley weighs increased participation and a blurred line between producer and consumer against concerns that game copyrights limit commercialization and growth of machinima.

Character and camera control

Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd list four main methods of creating machinima. From simple to advanced, these are: relying on the game's AI to control most actions, digital puppetry, recamming, and precise scripting of actions. For example, when Rooster Teeth produced The Strangerhood using The Sims 2, a game that encourages the use of its AI, the group had to create multiple instances of each character to accommodate different moods. The director can use built-in camera controls, if available. However, some games, such as the Halo series, allow filming only through puppetry. According to Marino, other disadvantages are the possibility of disruption when filming in an open multi-user environment and the temptation for puppeteers to play the game in earnest, littering the set with blood and dead bodies. However, Chris Burke intentionally hosts This Spartan Life in these unpredictable conditions, which are fundamental to the show. In recamming, which builds on puppetry, actions are first recorded to a game engine's demo file format, not directly as video frames. Without re-enacting scenes, artists can then manipulate the demo files to add cameras, tweak timing and lighting, and change the surroundings. This technique is limited to the few engines and software tools that support it.

A technique common in cut scenes of video games, scripting consists of giving precise directions to the game engine. A filmmaker can work alone this way, as J. Thaddeus "Mindcrime" Skubis did in creating the nearly four-hour The Seal of Nehahra (2000), the longest work of machinima at the time. However, perfecting scripts can be time-consuming. In this respect, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd compare scripting to stop-motion animation. Matinee, a machinima software tool included with Unreal Tournament 2004, popularized scripting in machinima. Quake movie editing software later appeared, but the use of conventional non-linear video editing software is now common. For example, Phil South inserted single, completely white frames into his work No Licence to enhance the visual impact of explosions.

Machinima creators have used different methods to handle limited character expression. In the Halo video game series, helmets completely cover the characters' faces. To prevent confusion, Rooster Teeth's characters move slightly when speaking, a convention shared with anime. Some machinima creators use custom software. For example, Strange Company uses Take Over GL Face Skins to add more facial expressions to their characters filmed in BioWare's 2002 computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights. In some cases, some game companies may provide such software; examples include Epic Games' Impersonator for Unreal Tournament 2004 and Valve Corporation's FacePoser for Half-Life 2. It may be possible to point the camera elsewhere or employ other creative cinematography or acting.

Legal issues

New machinima filmmakers often want to use game-provided digital assets, but doing so raises legal issues. As derivative works, their films could violate copyright or be controlled by the assets' copyright holder, an arrangement that can be complicated by separate publishing and licensing rights. The software license agreement for The Movies stipulates that Activision, the game's publisher, owns "any and all content within... Game Movies that was either supplied with the Program or otherwise made available... by Activision or its licensors..." Some game companies provide software to modify their own games, and machinima makers often cite fair use as a defense, but the issue has never been tested in court. A potential problem with this defense is that many works, such as Red vs. Blue, focus more on satire, which is not protected by fair use, rather than on parody. Berkeley adds that, even if machinima artists use their own assets, their works could be ruled derivative if filmed in a proprietary engine. The risk inherent in a fair-use defense would cause most machinima artists simply to yield to a cease-and-desist order. The AMAS has attempted to negotiate solutions with video game companies, arguing that an open-source or reasonably priced alternative would emerge from an unfavorable situation.

Generally, companies want to retain creative control over their intellectual properties and are wary of fan-created works, like fan fiction. In 2003, Linden Lab was praised for changing license terms to allow users to retain ownership of works created in its virtual world Second Life. Rooster Teeth initially tried to release Red vs. Blue unnoticed by Halos owners because they feared that any communication would force them to end the project. However, Microsoft, Bungie's parent company at the time, contacted the group shortly after episode 2,

A case in which developer control was asserted involved Blizzard Entertainment's action against Tristan Pope's Not Just Another Love Story. Blizzard's community managers encouraged users to post game movies and screenshots, but viewers complained that Pope's suggestion of sexual actions through creative camera and character positioning was pornographic. Citing the user license agreement, Blizzard closed discussion threads about the film and prohibited links to it. Discussion ensued about boundaries between MMORPG player and developer control.

Microsoft and Blizzard

In August 2007, Microsoft issued its Game Content Usage Rules, a license intended to address the legal status of machinima based on its games, including the Halo series. Microsoft intended the rules to be "flexible", and, because it was unilateral, the licensee was legally unable to reduce rights. However, machinima artists, such as Edgeworks Entertainment, protested the prohibitions on extending Microsoft's fictional universes (a common component of fan fiction) and on selling anything from sites hosting derivative works. Compounding the reaction was the license's statement, "If you do any of these things, you can expect to hear from Microsoft's lawyers who will tell you that you have to stop distributing your items right away."

Surprised by the negative feedback, The license prohibits reverse engineering and material that is pornographic or otherwise "objectionable". This prevents legal problems if a fan and Microsoft independently conceive similar plots. It differs from Microsoft's declaration in that it addresses machinima specifically instead of general game-derived content, allows use of game audio if Blizzard can legally license it, requires derivative material to meet the Entertainment Software Rating Board's Teen content rating guideline, defines noncommercial use differently, and does not address extensions of fictional universes.

Hayes states that, although licensees' benefits are limited, the licenses reduce reliance on fair use regarding machinima. In turn, this recognition may reduce film festivals' concerns about copyright clearance; in an earlier analogous situation, festivals were concerned about documentary films until best practices for them were developed. According to Hayes, Microsoft and Blizzard helped themselves through their licenses because fan creations provide free publicity and are unlikely to harm sales. If the companies had instead sued for copyright infringement, defendants could have claimed estoppel or implied license because machinima had been unaddressed for a long time. Thus, these licenses secured their issuers' legal rights. Because of the involved legal complexity, they may prefer to under-enforce copyrights.

Common genres

Nitsche and Lowood describe two methods of approaching machinima: starting from a video game and seeking a medium for expression or for documenting gameplay ("inside-out"), and starting outside a game and using it merely as animation tool ("outside-in"). Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd similarly distinguish between works that retain noticeable connections to games, and those closer to traditional animation. Belonging to the former category, gameplay and stunt machinima began in 1997 with Quake done Quick. Stunt machinima remains popular. Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that stunt videos offer a new way to look at the game, and compare Battlefield 1942 machinima creators to the Harlem Globetrotters. Built-in features for video editing and post-recording camera positioning in Halo 3 were expected to facilitate gameplay-based machinima. MMORPGs and other virtual worlds have been captured in documentary films, such as Miss Galaxies 2004, a beauty pageant that took place in the virtual world of Star Wars Galaxies. Footage was distributed in the cover disc of the August 2004 issue of PC Gamer. and sketch comedy reminiscent of the television show Saturday Night Live, the New-York-based ILL Clan further developed the genre in machinima through works including Apartment Huntin' and Hardly Workin'. Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles chronicles a futile civil war over five seasons and 100 episodes. Marino wrote that although the series' humor was rooted in video games, strong writing and characters caused the series to "transcend the typical gamer".

Machinima has been used in music videos, of which the first documented example is Ken Thain's 2002 "Rebel vs. Thug", made in collaboration with Chuck D. The following year, Tommy Pallotta directed "In the Waiting Line" for the British group Zero 7. He told Computer Graphics World, "It probably would have been quicker to do the film in a 3D animated program. But now, we can reuse the assets in an improvisational way." In television, MTV features video game characters on its show Video Mods.

Others use machinima in drama; these works may or may not retain signs of their video game provenance. Unreal Tournament is often used for science fiction and Battlefield 1942 for war, but some artists subvert their chosen game's setting or completely detach their work from it. In 1999, Strange Company used Quake II in Eschaton: Nightfall, a horror film based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft. A later example is Damien Valentine's series Consanguinity, made using BioWare's 2002 computer game Neverwinter Nights and based on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One example, Fountainhead's Anna, is a short film that focuses on the cycle of life and is reminiscent of Fantasia. Alex Chan's take on the 2005 civil unrest in France, The French Democracy, attained mainstream attention and inspired other machinima commentaries on American and British society. Horwatt deemed Thuyen Nguyen's 2006 An Unfair War, a criticism of the Iraq war, similar in its attempt "to speak for those who cannot". Joshua Garrison mimicked Chan's "political pseudo-documentary style" in his Virginia Tech Massacre, a controversial Halo 3–based re-enactment and explanation of the eponymous real-life events. More recently, War of Internet Addiction addressed internet censorship in China using World of Warcraft.

Competitions

at the 2008 Machinima Film Festival with the Mackie award for Best Technical Achievement]] After the QML's Quake Movie Oscars, dedicated machinima awards did not reappear until the AMAS created the Mackies for its first Machinima Film Festival in 2002. The annual festival has become an important one for machinima creators. Ho Chee Yue, a founder of the marketing company AKQA, helped to organize the first festival for the Asia chapter of the AMAS in 2006. In 2007, the AMAS supported the first machinima festival held in Europe. In addition to these smaller ceremonies, Hugh Hancock of Strange Company worked to add an award for machinima to the more general Bitfilm Festival in 2003. Other general festivals that allow machinima include the Sundance Film Festival and the Florida Film Festival.

Machinima has been showcased in contests sponsored by game companies. Epic Games' popular Make Something Unreal contest included machinima that impressed event organizer Jeff Morris because of "the quality of entries that really push the technology, that accomplish things that Epic never envisioned". In December 2005, Blizzard Entertainment and Xfire, a gaming-focused instant messaging service, jointly sponsored a World of Warcraft machinima contest.

Notes

References

—Also as:

Further reading

External links

Directory at Machinima Premiere

Warcraft Movies, a resource for World of Warcraft machinima

Machinima, a resource for all machinima works

Blue Entertainment, a resource for battlefield 2 machinima

The Sir Community, an old archive of battlefield 2 machinima

Flight Sim Machinima, links to flight-sim machinima

Category:3D computer graphics Category:Animation techniques Category:Computer animation Category:Emergent gameplay Category:Film and video technology Category:Media based on video games