The second post on this blog (Jan 2008) was called Machinima: Filmmaking Of The Future. For me, it still feels like something from the future even though the process in this video is less elaborate than the one outlined in that earlier post. I love that I’m able to work with most anyone, in real-time, in an amazing world where you can create just about anything you want – even goofy robots that love to curse. Read More
I proposed two how to demonstrations:
Machinima Kung Fu – Sure machinima looks easy – record a game, drop it into iMovie and do some voices – but there’s actually a little more to it than that. This session will cover all the tech of making machinima – from hardware and software to in-game strategies to post production issues.
Custom Video Players For Your Show – You’ve got a unique video show, why not have a player that matches? This session will take you through detailed examples using two popular Flash video players. We’ll show you how to create custom skins and get them set up on your site.
Please vote for your favorites on the SXSW 09 Interactive Panel Picker.
A few days ago at work I was asked to put together a single webpage where we could show 3 videos. Since the videos were not for public distribution we wanted to add a notice about confidentiality and possibly watermark the videos in some way. This was a perfect opportunity for me to extend what I’d learned about using the Jeroen Wijering media player. I’d always wanted to figure out the playlist features and this seemed like the perfect use for them. The videos already existed but there wasn’t a confidentiality notice or a watermark. Using a playlist let me run an image for few seconds first with the notice and then use a transparent .png over top as watermark as the 3 videos played in succession.
Now the whole reason why I’m writing about this is because the playlist can be XSPF playlist or an RSS feed. Our blogs already pump out all kinds of RSS feeds and David Meade is already working on a plugin to do XSPF (he’s got a demo on his site right now). When he was showing me what he’d built I asked if it was possible to provide ways for the viewer to generate a playlist on the fly. He said once he’s got it working as plugin that it would be possible. Imagine someone looking at your archives and saying, “let me see everything from New York in 2006 in chronological order” or “give me everything tagged ‘art’ and play it randomly.”
As a learning exercise, I put together this playlist of some of my machinima pieces. All of the videos are encoded with H.264 and look pretty nice in fullscreen. The page source and XSPF playlist are fully commented so it should be easy to recreate.
Some links:
Jeroen Wijering media player
Playlist documentation
Flashvars documentation
Update your Flash player – you need version 9,0,115,0
Passage to Zhong Fu was originally made for the 48 Hour Film Project in Second Life but since I work for Millions of Us, one of the sponsors of the event, our team wasn’t eligible to compete. That said, making this film, for me, was never about any kind of competition. Rather it was all about having a focused opportunity to create something with a set of artistic constraints not under your control. That’s the competition – one against yourself – that I’m always interested in pursuing.
Another reason for doing this was that it was an opportunity to put our little machinima team to work on something of it’s own creation. I’ve been working with Poid and ducky on a bunch of projects for work and we’ve been having a great time. After Poid worked with Dizzy on DynaFleur she suggested we ask him to join us on this. I can’t tell you what a fantastic idea that was – just listen to the soundtrack on this, you’ll be blown away.
If your unfamiliar with the 48 Hr Film Project, how it works is that all teams are given 3 random items that they must include; a prop, a character and a line of dialog. Addtionally, each team is randomly assigned a genre that they must work with. For this, all teams had to have a flamingo as a prop, the character Tony Martin – teacher and the line of dialog, “That’s the way that it goes.” As for genre, we were tasked to make a “road movie.” One of the most satisfying things about this project is that I think we made good use of all of the restrictions. They had us come up with a film that we wouldn’t have made otherwise and yet it feels completely our own.
So what I’m posting here is a little different than the one we turned in after 48 hours. This is probably the 50-something hour version. We added back in the scene with the cage which we originally had to cut to meet the time requirements. Doing that meant that Dizzy had to compose some new music as that scene really joins the two before it and the one after as a single musical section. Poid and I also shot a new ending scene. The original had Poid walking down a city street but that came from the initial idea which sort of evolved as we shot and edited the piece. I like this ending much better because it brings us back to where the film starts, having changed – which, I think, is the theme and was the inspiration for adding the I Ching quote at the beginning.
If you’re into Second Life, please join us for the screening this Sunday, February 3, 2008 from noon – 2 p.m. SLT (PST). Screening SLURL.
Poid put together a whole site for the film —> here.
Also, check out her photo set on Flickr.
[Note: This video is a real out-take from the making of SAND, the machinima series from "What Is Scion City?" I'm showing this video to you because I think it shows part of the difference between traditional animation and machinima. This event happened spontaneously, in real-time. The audio occurred on Skype and wasn't recorded but I can tell you there was a lot laughing involved. No matter the fiction of the story and the virtualness of the set and avatars - this was a real event, experienced in real-time by real people.]
I think I was about 11 years old the first time I though about making a film. I was inspired by reading, in Starlog magazine, about how special effects were done. The problem though was that it cost millions of dollars to do that kind of stuff. I remember thinking that animation was the way to go because you’d be able to create anything you could draw. So I spent a lot of time imagining and drawing. I used to make comic books and spaceship models and movie posters but an actual film was still beyond my grasp back in 5th grade.
Now, 30 years later, I’m living that dream. Thanks to machinima and Second Life we can fairly quickly create most anything we can imagine and film it in real time. It’s a lot like real world filmmaking but much faster. Forget about waiting for the sun to be in the right position, now you can just stick it where you want it. Need to get that giant set piece out of your way for a moment? Or need to duplicate a set? No problem. These things are trivial in a virtual environment. For my latest project, What Is Scion City?, we had a whole digital backlot created – the virtual desert that covers the Scion City of the future. Additionally we had all of the underground sets floating a few hundred meters above the desert. And because our backlot is part of a persistent, shared, virtual world accessible from anywhere, it allowed us to work with great people no matter where they were located.
The directors of What Is Scion City worked from three different continents – Douglas and I here in North America, Trace Sanderson in Europe and PG Provenzano in Australia. Finding a good time to meet was a little difficult but when we did, Second Life and Skype made it all work. Most of everything I shot was done with the help of Poid Mahovlich in the U.K. and duckyfresh Wantanabe somewhere in the Eastern time zone. We spent hours on Skype and in Second Life – forming a little team. It was great to have people to work with who were truly interested in what was being done as opposed to just the people that happen to be available in that location.
Another thing about our process that was interesting for me was the way we able to trade digital assets back and forth over the internet with ease. We used a P2P app called SpinXpress, made by a company that I used to work for, to create a private network between the directors. So none of our work had to entrusted to a third party or posted somewhere on the Internet until we were ready. As the pieces were coming together we shared rough cuts with each other and then when they were done the other directors sent me their HD files directly over our private network. And because I could have things download automatically and continuously reconnect if there was network congestion I was able to get things from Australia without problems even though I was rarely sitting at my computer when PG was.
For me the most exciting thing about all of this is really how enabling all of these pieces of technology are. I’m already amazed at what we can do and this is just the beginning. I can’t wait to work on the next thing where we apply all the lessons we learned working on this. It’s a quickly compounding iterative process.
Photo set by Poid Mahovlich
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