Grab Vol 1 of my new book - free!

It's been nearly a week since I released my new book, and for some inexplicable reason, I haven't yet mentioned it on my blog. Oh, that's right, I've been hard at work on Volume 2, which will be out in a few weeks.

I'm writing a book about how to use Moviestorm as a film training tool: as Phil South puts it in the introduction, it's like a pilot learning to fly a plane. Using a real plane all the time is way too expensive (and dangerous), so you train in a simulator. That enables you to log plenty of hours, practice the difficult maneuvers in safety, and become familiar with all the basics. It's the same with filmmaking: it's complicated, time-consuming and expensive, so why not use a simple, easy animation tool to practice with?

Each book in the series consists of a set of 15-20 simple exercises that you work through. You have to film the same thing in several ways, focusing on how to use a specific technique. It's all self-guided, so after each version, you review your work, see what was good and bad about it, and do it again. Of course, I recommend using Moviestorm to do this, because it's quick and easy, and you can do it without needing anyone else's help, but you could equally well do it using any other animation tool or even in live action if you have the time and enough willing friends. Most importantly, the skills you practice are relevant to any film medium, not just to machinima or animation.

So far, reviews and comments have been extremely positive, which is immensely satisfying.

“Spot on. The exercises are set up in a very logical, progressive way.”

James Martin, University of North Texas

“Excellent - great for schools and colleges alike. The tone of the writing is perfect - neither patronising or too authoritative.”

Jezz Wright, Blockhouse TV

“I really liked how you tell the reader to try a shot with and without each technique to be able to actually see the difference they make.”

Dan Horne, film student, Full Sail University

Volume 1 covers camerawork; the upcoming volumes cover staging, editing, lighting, sound, and so on, and will be released monthly. They're initially available free in PDF form via Moviestorm. When all five volumes are complete, I'll compile them into a single full-length book with some additional material and release that commercially for Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers.

I'm doing it this way for four reasons. First, after discussing this with Moviestorm, we figured it would be good to release something early to gauge the reaction, so we decided not to wait until it was complete. The book naturally divides into several sections, so this was an easy way to do it. I'm having a lot of meetings with film teachers and film students at the moment, and it's useful to have the book on hand and available for them to download.

Secondly, I'm taking a leaf out of Roz Morris's book. She recently released her novel My Memories of a Future Life in four weekly parts before the whole thing was available. While this was irritating in some ways - mostly because I wanted to read the whole story - it did enable her to get a lot of publicity, effectively doing five launches instead of one, and keeping the momentum going throughout. I'm hoping the same will work here, but without the "I want to know what happens next" factor.

Then there's the argument about proving the point. If I can generate a lot of interest in the free version, it makes it easier to pitch to a print publisher. Several film schools have said that they see this as potentially a useful textbook, and that's a market I'd love to get into. A few thousand downloads and some useful feedback would be a great way to prove to a specialist publisher that the book would be worth taking on.

And lastly, Moviestorm were happy to pay for the rights to distribute the PDF free as a marketing tool. Sure, it's likely to impact my sales when the completed thing becomes available, but it's money in the bank right now, and I'll have made more from it than many self-published authors, and I can't argue with that. What's more, the version I'll be selling will be expanded, revised, and formatted for a range of devices, so there's still a reason for people to buy it.

Please do go and grab a copy, pass it on to your friends, and let me know what you think.

Download Making Better Movies with Moviestorm, Vol 1

Why I make machinima

Let's be honest. I don't make machinima these days. I'm so tied up in spreadsheets and marketing campaigns for Moviestorm that I don't have the time or the inclination. So I've changed the footer of my blog to reflect something more accurate.

However, what I wrote two years ago is still true. So, to prevent it getting lost, here's my brief machinima manifesto.

In the 20th century, film and television - the audiovisual media - became the dominant means of communication on this planet. However, by the beginning of this century, fewer than 0.1% of people had the ability to write in this medium. It's like being back in Ancient Egypt or the Dark Ages of Europe, where most people had to rely on scribes, and had no ability to express themselves. Machinima, and the Internet, gives a voice to many more people, and allows us to participate on nearly equal terms with those who seek to control our thinking by controlling what we see and hear.

Ring of Time

Nuove Terra's Ring of Time by squirrellygirl is a machinima series that gives me a sense of pride. Not because I had anything to do with it, but because of what it represents.

When Dave and I started Moviestorm, many years ago, we had a saying: "In the 20th century, everyone had a book in them: in the 21st century, everyone's got a movie in them." We had this crazy idea that bands would use Moviestorm to make their own videos, and authors would use Moviestorm to bring their stories to life. Ring of Time is one such.


Shirley Martin wrote the book, and self-published it on Lulu. A 600-page epic, it's the sort of thing that may get picked up by a publisher or not, depending on the vagaries of the business.

In the beginning there were three worlds, until the creation of a fourth magical world. This is the world of Nuove Terra. A world in which all magic and mythical creatures exist. It is into this world that twin children Sam and Sarah Donovan are thrust. On a chilly September evening figures cloaked in blood red robes descend on their suburban home and change their lives forever. Gone are thier parents and with them any sense of comfort and family. In order to find out what happened the children must learn to fit into this strange new world and with that learn to use magic. Together with their new friends, Pat and Melinda, as well as a strange, eccentric wizard, a werewolf who works for the Magical Creature Protection Agency, and a dragon who teaches history the children begin to unravel the hidden past of their parents and the secrets behind the Ring of Time.

She then decided to turn the story into a series using Moviestorm and iClone.

Now, to be fair, there are a lot of rough edges in this. It's competent, but it doesn't have the polish of a professional production. Story-wise, it's easy to dismiss it as a Harry Potter clone, but by the end of the first episode, you can see that it is going in a different direction. It's clearly a labour of love, though. She's been working on this first episode for about six months, and it's been fascinating watching it come together.

However, the quality isn't the point. The important thing is that machinima has given Shirley a way to bring her story to another medium and a new audience. Filming that story as live action would be prohibitively expensive; filming it as machinima is comparatively quick and easy. Just as the word processor and the internet has allowed aspiring authors to bypass the traditional publishing business, machinima and the internet allows them to bypass the entire film and tv production and distribution business.

So that's why I get a happy glow when I watch Ring of Time. In our own small way, Dave and I have helped Shirley do something that probably wouldn't have been possible a decade ago. And, better still, she won't be the only one. I'm sure we'll see more squirrellygirls telling more stories based on their own novels. And I, for one, would far rather spend an evening with stories told by ordinary people who are passionate about their art, whatever their flaws, than with uninspired stories created by corporate mass entertainment machines.

Y'know, I might even buy the book. I don't care if it's not as good as Stephen King or J.K. Rowling or whoever. Hell, it's not a huge outlay, and that book would have more meaning to me than a DVD of another crappy TV series or identikit by-the-numbers novel. And that, it seems to me, is what this is all about. I wouldn't have heard of Ring of Time if it hadn't been for the machinima. And neither, I suspect, would you. But maybe, just maybe, you're intrigued enough now to click on some links, and maybe watch it for yourself. And maybe even take a look at the book. And just possibly, put a few dollars into an author's pocket. That'd be a win.

We're all clones

Look at this picture. It's an ordinary group of people.


Now, show me a comparable shot in a machinima film. You'll find it hard.

Why?

Because they're all different heights and different builds, and they all have unique face shapes. Which is, of course, normal for human beings, but very rare indeed in machinima. Given that it's one of the most requested features in Moviestorm - in fact possibly the most requested feature - you might wonder why we don't just do it. The answer, according to the tech guys, is that it's hard. Well, they always say that, don't they? And as a film-maker, I don't care if it's hard. I just want my characters to look like real people.

Well, it turns out it's a damn sight harder than most of us realise. When EA did the market research for Sims 3, one of the most requested features was "I want to make a character who looks like me." It's a reasonable request, you'd have thought. Surely we don't have to be limited to one standard height for men and one for women? Or to fat people who merely look like they've just had a good meal? We can give people double chins, jowls, or curved spines? After all, you can have all these characters in games.

Well, no, you can't. Not easily. Most game characters are carefully hand-built, and only have a very limited amount of customisation and things they can do. Sims characters and Moviestorm characters come with an immense range of customisable costumes and props, and an almost infinite selection of animations once you start combining them in strange ways, and that's where we reach the limits of real-time animation technology. If you don't mind intersections, or you're going for a cartoony look, you can get away with it, but if you're going for something akin to realism, it goes into the same category as flowing hair and pulling shirts.

Take these examples:

• Make a character's face really fat. Now give him specs. Unless the specs can deform to match the face, then they'll sink into his face. When I'm at the optician, I spend time trying different sizes of frame to get one that fits. I can do this because there are spectacle manufacturers in the real world who are prepared to spend their lives making different sizes of every frame. In the machinima world, we'd have to build lots of different sizes of each frame, and then you'd have to spend time trying them on your characters. That would be time-consuming and expensive, and simply not worth the effort.
• Get a character to sit in a chair and fold his hands across his belly. In real life, we stop bending our knees when our butt hits the seat, and we stop moving our arms when our hands hit our stomachs. Animated characters don't work like that: they apply a defined movement to a skeleton. A tall character and a short character have to bend their knees different amounts to achieve butt-seat contact, which would mean having to calculate that movement in real time individually for each character. Same with the hand movement: we'd have to calculate where the belly actually is, and then calculate exactly how much to move the shoulder, elbow and wrist to achieve perfect placement. Being out by a few degrees will result in the guy floating above the chair with his hands in his entrails, or squidged into it, Casino Royale style, with his hands in a ballet posture.
• Now make two characters kiss. You may remember from your teenage years how long it took to learn not to bash her face with your nose, and to hold her gently without grabbing her or putting your hands where you shouldn't. And meanwhile she's learning to avoid your clumsy movements so it all appears graceful. If you know exactly what height and build both characters are, and can manoeuvre them to exactly the right starting place, you can easily define how much you need to move the limbs to get them to look right. Performing that calculation in real time is seriously tricky.
  

So it's not surprising that we tend to fall back on a small range of standard character sizes and canned animations. It makes it much, much easier to create something that looks good.

But surely all these problems are soluble? It's just maths, after all. A bit of complicated 3D geometry. Shouldn't be that hard.

Well, you probably could solve the geometric problems given time and a good mathematician, and then code them up. Whether you could run them in real time on a desktop PC is a whole different question. That would require some very nifty algorithms, and probably more powerful machines than we have right now.

Somewhere about now, you're probably going to tell me to stop with the excuses. It's just a programming problem. Just get some decent coders and make it work. But check this. EA tried to do this for Sims 3. And despite spending several million bucks on the problem, they couldn't do it. They concluded it was just too hard, and reverted to the old system of fixed heights and modest changes in body shape.

And, frankly, if EA can't do it satisfactorily, I'm inclined to give the Moviestorm dev team a bit of a break. For the time being, we just have to accept this as another limitation of the medium, and live with identikit characters.

You can't grab my shirt!

It's easy to blow up a city in 3D, but it's hard for a character to grab another character's shirt.

Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille

In the January version of Imagine magazine, there's a great article by Saint John Walker of FDMX which touches on one of the biggest issues facing machinima. There are some things that you just can't do well using low-end real-time animation and a home computer, no matter how hard you try. And, frustratingly, some of these are the sort of things that are trivial with a camera and actors.

Going right back to the dawn of film, one of the first Lumiere shorts, L'Arroseur Arrose (Lumiere number 99, often regarded as the first comedy, made way back in 1895), features a gardener watering the garden. A boy enters the shot, steps on the hose and the water stops. As the bemused gardener looks into the hose to see what's wrong, the boy takes his foot off, and the gardener gets a jet of water in his face as the boy sniggers. (Ho, ho ho!) Then the gardener, now annoyed, grabs the young scamp and pulls him around, then squirts the water at him. All very simple, and it was made with the most rudimentary equipment.



Now try doing that in machinima. Getting the facial expressions is hard enough, but we're just about cracking that now. Getting the water to look right is just about do-able in modern game engines, but getting the splashing isn't there yet. But pulling the shirt is just not possible in machinima yet. It's right on the edge of what top-end 3D animation can do. More from Brad Bird:

One character touching another character's hair? "Aaah! No! Isn't there anything else you could do?" I mean, I had to budget shirt-grabs.

And if it's hard for Pixar to do shirt grabs, then, realistically, can you expect machinima to do it well? Nope. You can get a hand pretty near a shirt, but don't expect to see cloth being pulled about. And when you run your hand through someone's hair, expect to see hair poking through the hand and not moving right. Taking clothes on and off is a 3D animator's nightmare. You just don't do it, not unless you have Pixar's budget and a lot of patience.

There are, of course, the three usual film-maker's solutions:

1. Write a story that doesn't need shirt grabs, hair ruffles, or the like.
2. Shoot it off-screen and edit the sequence so that the audience thinks they've seen something they haven't.
3. Shoot something close enough, don't worry about the visual glitches, and assume your audience will forgive you because it's machinima.

This isn't to say that machinima is crap because it can't do something that simple. Machinima is still a very powerful tool which enables to you to make all sorts of movies. And, as it says in the opening quote, some things are unbelievably easy in comparison to any other method of making films. What's important is that you have to accept the limitations of the medium, and learn to work within them. Machinima just can't do some of the things that other media can do, so live with it. If shirt-grabbing and hair-pulling are central to your film, and you absolutely need to show them on screen, looking realistic, then don't expect machinima to work for you. Use a real camera, or learn to animate and do it all by hand in 2D.

The original Lumiere cine camera can still create images that 21st century computers find difficult.

But, as Mike Joyce is so fond of pointing out every time we speak, limitations are what provide artistic challenges.

Actually - there's a challenge. How close can you get to that movie in machinima?

Me. Talking. Again.

Since I've been going mad twittering recently, my blogging has fallen a little by the wayside. I know you all miss my erudite, controversial, and entertaining words of wisdom. Fear not! You can listen to me instead.

• Today's offering is an interview with the creative genius behind Male Restroom Etiquette, Apology, and other works of machinima legend. The truth will out, that's all I'm saying. You may never see the Overcast the same again. That's Sideshow #021
• Earlier in the week, I chatted to Joseph Matheny about machinima over on Alterati. That's seen the light of day at G-Spot #47.
• And last week, I did a webcast for The Movies On Air, which clocks in at somewhere near 90 minutes. That mainly focuses on Moviestorm and where we plan to take it.

I shall now return to being my usual shy and retiring self, communicating via prose.

Méliès the Magician

One of the DVDs that lives by my TV for occasional inspiration is Méliès the Magician, a compilation of very early special effects films by one of the most amazing pioneers of film. I've been pondering a bunch of new machinima projects, and I'm toying with the idea of recreating a load of his films using Moviestorm, just for the fun of playing with special effects and learning how to do them.

Many of his 500+ films are really short (under a minute) and are just there to show off a trick. Méliès was originally a stage magician, and his aim was to bring the same sense of wonder to the screen. He used multiple exposures, split screen, glass painting, stop motion, miniatures, and animation to achieve all sorts of things that had never been seen before, and became standard film techniques ever after. I quite fancy the idea of developing the same range of skills he had, and at the same time paying homage to one of the greatest film makers of all time.

Georges Méliès, 1861 - 1938

From the description on play.com:

Melies` Magic Show: These magnificently restored prints are a dream-like journey into the world of Georges Melies. The 15 films demonstrate the breadth of his command of different genres, including trick film, spectacle, burlesque and fantasy.

Titles included:

1. The Four Troublesome Heads (1898)
2. A Trip To The Moon (1902)
3. The Infernal Cakewalk (1903)
4. The Scheming Gambler's Paradise (1905)
5. The Music Lover (1903)
6. The Infernal Boiling Pot (1903)
7. The Man With The Rubber Head (1901)
8. Playing Cards (1904)
9. Hilarious Poker (1905)
10. The Devilish Tenant (1909)
11. Untameable Whiskers (1904)
12. Imperceptible Transmutations (1904)
13. Bluebeard (1901)
14. Fat And Lean Wrestling Match (1900)
15. The One-Man Band (1900)

The Movie Pyre

Yesterday I deleted all of the Mongoose Movies work in progress, bar Cormorant Close. These were mostly very personal pieces, and I know I'll never have the heart to see them through. I did think of putting the scripts and treatments up for anyone else to finish, but I don't think I actually want to see anyone else complete them either, at least not in their current form. I may revisit some of them some day, but if I do, I'll just pick up the original idea and rewrite them from scratch.

I do intend to finish Cormorant Close some day, partly because it's so close to completion and needs almost nothing from me, and partly out of respect for the other people who worked on it for nothing and who don't deserve to have their hard work trashed. And hey, I promised Zuckerman that I'd put Zuckerman's Diner into my next film, and CC is it.

I was quite surprised to see how much I had created in the last 18 months or so. Here's what was in the pre-production bin.

Mummer's Cliff
A short film in the Cthulhu mythos, based largely on Shadow of the Steeple, but updated and set in a North Somerset coastal village. A man goes to investigate the death of his friend, and discovers the inevitable ancient forces at work. I was never happy with the bit just before the end; it started well, moved along nicely, and I really liked the closing sequence (very cheesy 1970s type Hammer ending, but just what was needed), but couldn't quite get there smoothly enough. I did like the character of the occult researcher though: instead of a library full of dusty old books, all he had was a laptop and a net connection. Everything's online these days, even the Necronomicon! I spent a fair amount of time playing with how to create various VFX in Moviestorm and Premiere, as I wanted one scene to take place in a thunderstorm, and there needed to be a sequence where we saw someone change their face, and another where a statue appears to come to life. Since I did those pieces of test footage about a year ago, other Moviestormers have done the same thing.
Length: 12-15 mins
Status: Script complete, technical and visual FX tests complete, sets & characters designed

Due Diligence
A mid-length thriller in the Michael Crichton (RIP) mould. A young man working for a venture capital firm realises that one of the companies they are investing in is developing ways to transmit bird flu to humans so that they can sell their vaccine. Shelved when I realised how many other people had done the same thing already.
Length: 30-40 mins
Status: Outline complete, script about 25% complete, prose version about 75% complete

Hackers
One-off episode, or possibly a pilot for a high-tech thriller series along the lines of BUGS and Spooks. One of the earliest things we came up with when thinking about Moviestorm a few years ago, I dusted this off and started work on it again not so long ago. A computer security firm is blackmailed by a secret government agency into conducting covert cyberwar against the Russian mafia. But all is not as it seems, and they begin to ask who they are actually working for and why. I enjoyed writing this, but never quite got the characters to be more than stereotypes.
Length: 15-25 mins
Status: outline complete, script about 50% complete

Custodiet
A Philip K Dick-ish near future SF story about a goverment agent who finds his name thrown up by the computers in an anti-terrorist operation. He knows he's innocent, but the system he's always believed in says he's a suspect. It was all based on taking current surveillance technology and current anti-terrorist legislation (here and in the US) and asking what kind of world this would create. The challenge here was making it not too much like Minority Report.
Length: 15-25 mins
Status: outline complete, script about 50% complete

Stalker
An SF short about an old man who's following a beautiful young woman who turns out to be an alien. It ended with a great fight sequence in a nightclub, inspired by Dusk Till Dawn.
Length: 5 mins
Status: Script complete, rough dialogue recorded, pre-vis version shot. Needed to be redone with the latest version of Moviestorm.

Confidential Report
A full-length noir-ish movie inspired by the Orson Welles film of the same name. An ex-con is forced to commit a robbery, and is caught, and is then embroiled in a conspiracy to bring down an international arms dealer. This was a very complex film, with a lot of plot twists and character development, and really pushed my writing to the limit. The current draft of the script was too wordy, and the next stage was to start shooting a rough version and work out how much of the story I could carry with sound and visuals instead of dialogue. I wrote this with a voice-over, which was a lot of fun. I also spent time working on filters in Premiere to give me a suitably grainy, washed-out look rather than the slightly garish colours you get out of Moviestorm. I would have liked to get Ricky Grove as the lead role on this one, and it was very much written with his voice in mind. For the lead female character, I wanted Abigail Rokison, and I had many of the other parts cast in my head from the students I was working with a few months ago.
Length: 70-80 mins
Status: script complete, technical and VFX tests complete

St Francis
A highly successful CEO of a major company tries to explain to his family why he is quitting his well-paid corporate job to go and live a life of solitude and contemplation. This was a commentary on the clash between capitalist values and personal morals, and was written in anticipation of the day the global banking system collapsed. I wrote several versions of this, but never quite got the story to come out right. I tried it as a scene between him and his wife, I tried just telling it as a story of him quitting his job and starting over, I tried it as him as an older man talking to a "disciple", but was never really happy with any of them. It kept on coming out too political in some versions, which wasn't what I intended - it's supposed to be a moral piece about someone who realises what ruthless corporate greed means to the people on the wrong end of it, and has to question whether he is prepared to take responsibility for inflicting that. This is one I probably will revisit at some point.
Length: who knows
Status: bah

A is for Angel
A sentimental modern day fairy tale inspired by The Fisher King, It's A Wonderful Life, and Citizen Kane. A down and out meets a mysterious woman who turns his life around: once he becomes a successful children's author, he spends the rest of his life searching for her, and wondering whether she was real or just a figment of his imagination. The entire thing is shot in flashback on his deathbed. I really rather liked this film, especially the sequence where she shows him a vision of two people dancing on her outstretched palm, which took a fair amount of green-screening to create. I think it has my best scriptwriting to date in it, apart from one thing. I could never decide whether it took place in England or New York, and the dialogue kept slipping between the two locations.
Length: 12-15 mins
Status: script complete, visual FX tests complete

The Muse Bar
This was an idea for a scene in the Fas Ferox world. I imagined a bar in some otherworld where all the Muses gather to share their experiences of the people they inspire, and talking about what a pain it is working with artistic people. It's one of the few bits of comedy I've written, and it never quite came out right when I tried to move it from a prose sketch to a screenplay.
Length: 5 mins or less
Status: never quite got off the drawing board

I'm not sure what I'll do next. I should probably focus on shorter, more achievable pieces. Working full-time on Moviestorm really gets in the way of actually making movies. After a long day in the office, the last thing I want to do most evenings and weekends is to fire up Moviestorm for another few hours. I'd usually rather play my guitar, make a nice meal, read a book, watch a DVD, or relax with some friends. I very much enjoy scriptwriting, and I love doing voice recording sessions, but I find it really hard to convince myself that using Moviestorm isn't work.

However, we now have a shiny new dedicated Moviestorm computer at home for Johnnie and I to play with, and I'm determined to make use of it once he's finished assembling it.

MFF08 - a personal view

It was really good to catch up with so many people last weekend in New York at Machinima '08. I spent many hours on the street outside Eyebeam smoking and chatting, or in Jake's Saloon drinking and chatting, or wherever-it-was-we-ended-up eating and chatting. About machinima, what we've been doing, what we're going to do, what we really want to do, what we think other people should do, and where it's going. And, equally importantly, we chatted far more about life, movies, music, places we've been, things we've eaten, families, politics, and every other topic under the sun.

The common theme throughout all of that, you might notice, is chatting. What we didn't do was sit and watch panels (apart from Phil & Ricky on sound) or watch machinima films. We all know what we have to say on our pet subjects, because we talk about them endlessly on blogs, forums, podcasts, twitter, or Web sites. We've all seen the movies already, because that's what we're into. And if we haven't seen them, we can catch them online any time. Meeting with other machinimators from far and wide is something we can only do at events like this. As far as I'm concerned, that's what festivals are for.

So it was a little disappointing that there was nowhere in Eyebeam to just sit and chat. The few comfy chairs and sofas were in an area with student films showing on a continuous loop (and with sound that kept bleeding through into the area where they had the panels, so you couldn't hear the speakers). And, what was worse, there was no coffee (let alone beer!) so if you wanted a drink you had to go a couple of blocks. As a result, I spent hardly any time at the festival in Eyebeam itself. I'd go off with someone, chat for a bit, head back, bump into someone else I knew somewhere on the street, and we'd head right back to a bar or diner. The party after the awards was OK, but it had only just got going when we had to head out to a nearby bar for the after-party, and then I lost touch with most of the people I wanted to chat to.

There were maybe thirty people I wanted to talk to, and I could have spent an hour with any of them. Sadly, there just wasn't time in a one-day festival.

It's very tempting for anyone organising an event to think that the reason people are coming is to see the things that are laid on, but it just ain't so. The scheduled events are generally excuses to be there, or places to meet, or a way of structuring your day. Events like this are gatherings, a way of getting people into the same place at the same time so they can interact face to face. The time and space needs to be built around those interactions, with the scheduled events providing a backdrop. MFF08 could easily have been a two-day event, even with no extra events, just more space between them.

Still, I did enjoy myself immensely, and I'm glad I made the trip across the Atlantic. I feel I know many of you much better now, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it. And, of course, looking forward to the next one.

Ken Thain of Bioware clutching his well-deserved Mackie and an equally well-deserved beer.

Machinima Expo Finalists

I seem to be in demand judging things at the moment, which is rather flattering. This week, I was asked to judge the finalists for the upcoming Machinima Expo.

Having put together or assisted with several major machinima screenings recently, I'm usually familiar with most of what's put up for consideration in these competitions. As always, though, it was great to discover several new - and extremely good - movies in among the old stalwarts. It reminded me that the world of machinima is way bigger than any of us realises.

In 2004, when I was writing my book on machinima, I reckon I saw most of the films that were out there. And every day, I could watch everything that was released. Now I can't even keep up with each day's new Moviestorm films, let alone all the great movies made in other engines. And that, I think, is a wonderful point to have reached.

There are too many good machinima movies for one man to watch.

That's a sign of a healthy, vibrant, creative medium. In the machinima community, we have the talent, we have the tools, and we have the dedication to produce works of art that don't just appeal to fans of the games the assets were drawn from, but to people who have a genuine interest in film, and also to everyday people who don't give a damn how a film was made, only whether it's entertaining enough to hold their attention. We are slowly but surely becoming an accepted part of the film community, and they respect us for what we are doing.

That's a great feeling, isn't it?

Thanks to Ricky & Phil for asking me to do the job, and thanks to all the finalists for making great movies.

Interfacing Virtual Actors

I'll be on a panel at Machinima FilmFest 2008 on Interfacing Virtual Actors, along with Michael Nitsche (GeorgiaTech University), Ken Perlin (NYU Media Research Lab), and John C. Martin II (Reallusion). Hope to see some of you there!

Man Bites God video comp

Aussie band Man Bites God are "bribing aspiring film makers with a chance to win AU$500 by making a music video featuring a Man Bites God song of your choice." They're keen to see something different:

You don’t need to follow the storyline of the song, we’re interested in kick-arse clips, not narratives. Surreal or logical, bizarre or literal, live-action, machinema or animation - we’re interested in your original and creative approach.

OK, they're only offering $500, but what the hell. What else were you going to do before October 31?

Who? No, I hadn't heard of them either. Thanks to James over at Alterati for this one.

Man Bites God is an upbeat, fun, busker-rock band from Melbourne. Their music is catchy and melodious and their lyrics are funny and clever. Their songs are a mix of pop/punk/rock, with cool harmonies and lush arrangements

(P.S. Do you think we should tell them it's spelt "machinima" these days?

The cinema is a harsh mistress

Taking machinima from the computer to the big screen is an unforgiving experience. Every pixel is magnified enormously, and every visual glitch screams out at you. The encoding artifacts that you can hide on a monitor are suddenly much larger. Every dropped frame or jump in animation looks like a broken film. And whatever the problems with the images, the problems with sound are worse. Once you put the audio through a THX cinema system, you can hear every little thing. The tiny buzzes and clicks that you will never hear through a typical home computer set-up suddenly jump out at you. Every rustle of clothing in the dialogue becomes obvious. And if your sound balance is a tiny bit muddy, you end up with a cinema full of audio sludge. If you’ve ever thought to yourself when doing the final render for the fifth time, “what the hell, they’ll never notice,” just get your film shown in a cinema and see for yourself. They will notice. And you’ll wish you’d fixed it.

On the other hand, it was a very pleasant surprise to see how many of the 50-odd films we showed in the last two days worked really well. Yes, there were some visual issues we couldn’t address, particularly when upscaling some of the older or low-res films to 720p, but those films that started life as high-def were quite amazing. I particularly remember the smile on Jim Thorpe’s face as he sat in on the tech test for Zero Budget, Big Audience and he saw his Marillion video up there. At the end, he turned to me and grinned. “You can see the stars,” he said. And you could. They weren’t just tiny pixels, and possible encoding errors in a tiny window. It transformed the final sequence from pretty good to amazing. If you do ever hope to see your movie on the big screen (and let me assure you, that experience alone is like nothing else for a film-maker), do spend the time to make the highest quality render you can possibly manage. The difference is worth it.

Set-up for first screening in screen 3. That's my laptop with Monad on down there in the midst of that.

Much of the credit for how well everything turned out has to go to three people, Joe, Claire and John, our projectionists. I’d never realised how complicated it is running a projection booth. They really got things looking at their best, and drove the sound system to make the best of the audio I gave them, swapping in different amps, different patches, different filters and different combinations of speakers.

However, their finest moment came when we blew up the analog to digital converter with a rather loud explosion (at the end of No Licence, wouldn’t you know it), and we lost all the sound. I sprinted to the projection booth, and within 30 seconds they’d swapped the blown one out, replugged the entire sound system, and had us back up and running by the start of the next film. Apparently the audience provided their own sound effects and music during the silence – I wish I’d been there to see it! Still, 98% of films screened without a hitch – not bad for a first festival.

Chief projectionist Joe setting up the sound system on screen 2. That huge thing on his left is the 1080p digital projector.

Spending several days in the projection booth has been a fascinating experience. That place is hot*, airless, noisy, and full of exciting toys. They seem to have every kind of projector and sound device known to man. Reels of film are everywhere. (Happiest moment: holding a huge reel which contained a print of the 1933 Frankenstein.) And into the middle of that lot went my little laptop.

The projection room: on my right, screen 2, on the left, screen 1 and its monster 70mm projector, and screen 3 in the far distance.

Connecting the laptop wasn’t straightforward either. Everything was temperamental. After the first screening, we set everything up ready for the second one, then powered down the laptop. 25 minutes before, we fired it up again, and then discovered that the aspect ratio was all wrong, and the digital projector no longer recognised the preset we’d put in place.** So we got it running properly again, tested it again, and everything was OK. Next we got the mics in the cinema working so Saint could do his intro, and then, just in a moment of paranoia, rechecked the video, and to our horror discovered that we had no sound. More panic replumbing of the sound system ensued, more kit swapped in and out, but we had no way to tell Saint we had a problem, and the screening started. And literally as Saint said the words, “OK, roll the films”, John said, “we’re good to go,” Joe brought down the house lights, switched over the projector to the laptop output, I hit the play button, and everything worked perfectly. Nobody knew except us. It’s non-stop seat of your pants stuff, and these guys just coped. Awesomely.

Proper film: Bicycle Thieves showing on Screen 1.

After several days of this, I’m now thoroughly exhausted, but very, very happy. The films looked good, and I'm extremely proud of what we all did. We got good reactions from the audiences, and the screenings and workshops all got 5-star reviews. We got coverage for machinima in the national press, television, and specialist film & animation press, and we've made a lot of new people take notice of machinima and want to get involved. Most importantly, we changed a lot of people's minds. On Friday, nobody knew who we were or what we were doing. By yesterday, we'd earned their respect by showing them that machinima is a serious form of animation, and that machinimators are just as talented, dedicated and creative as any of the other film-makers there. A lot of people became genuinely interested in what we in the machinima community are all about and how we have the potential to change things from grass-roots level, and they want to get involved. That, for me, has made the Cambridge Film Festival a huge personal success.

But I tell you this. I swear I’m never, ever going to do this again.

Until next time.

* It didn't help that one of th air-con units died at the start of the Festival, and shutting the projection room for half a day to fix is simply isn't an option. So we baked.
** To all you Linux/Mac fan-boys, nope, you can't blame it on the fact that I'm running XP. According to Joe, this just happens when you run things off computers, and next time would I please burn everything onto a standard digital format so he can just play it off their kit.