Blog - More on Machinima...
Sunday, March 30, 2008Coincidentally, I looked around and found first of all, Paul Robertson had done another film I was unaware of, a cute little music video that is unfortunately rather difficult to link to.
But more interestingly, I found what might be more accurately a true work of 8-bit machinima!
Check out the extremely bizarre Super Mario Movie by Cory Archangel and Paper Rad.
In video format it can be witnessed on youtube, or, perhaps more interestingly, look here for the original source code and a ROM file so the film can be witnessed on the platform it was intended for: an actual original Nintendo or an emulator of one.
Paul Robertson's films only "look" like older video games, but are actually just digitally done animations that happen to get their distinctive look by using a certain machinima-technique: characters are created with a stock set of animations in advance that are called on (In normal machinima, through playing the game, although here I believe he just copies and pastes the relevant frames into the animation time-line at the right places) when necessary. Still, I find that ultimately to be more animation than machinima.
As to whether Super Mario Movie is machinima really depends on what you define as machinima I suppose.
First, I'd like to make a simple statement to explain my arguments: machinima should be viewed more as a production process rather than an end product. Machinima is powerful because of HOW it allows one to make stories, not WHAT it allows one to make.
Traditionally, machinima films are composed of recordings of players as actors using game characters as virtual puppets, and that is not how Super Mario Movie functions. Animations were not called 'live' by a player and recorded, they were created by code. Basically, when watching the film, you are witnessing an animation that was programmed rather than drawn, particularly in the cases where the film consists of nothing more than abstract patterns of color.
In the case where the original game's sprites of Mario were "animated" with the code, this is somewhat similar to the technique used by Paul Robertson to animate his pre-rendered frames, only done so with code.
However, I did argue in my article that machinima can utilize direct coding of elements as a technique, so its fair I suppose to say that a film created with nothing but this technique can still be considered machinima. It is, however, a little bit more of a stretch. Doing a film that way loses a lot of the power of machinima production in the first place, of creating a "live action animation" as I put it.
However, it still admittedly uses game software and assets to create an audio-visual production, which I guess makes it a work of machinima.
Another thing Super Mario Movie has going for it is recalling machinima's heritage as being a part of the software. Many current machinima films are constructed by recording what was played by the player-actors as video footage, and the film is edited together from these video clips and only viewable as such as a video.
This shift in process allowed the market for machinima films to expand: you didn't have to have Quake installed to view a machinima work made as a Quake demo anymore.
Of course, one could record a video of that demo, and release that. That is exactly what was done with Super Mario Movie being also placed on youtube as a video.
I find it interesting though that you can watch this film on an actual NES though, if you take the time to, say, burn their ROM onto an actual cartridge.
It not only subverts interactive software into a non-interactive work, but also then subverts a gaming platform into... something else entirely.
Much like how one can now play DVDs on their new generation gaming consoles, using them as a DVD player, one could use their original NES as a sort of VCR for machinima film cartridges.
I'd like to see more people from the homebrew game development communities for older consoles like the Atari26000 and the NES, etc. considering this idea as a possibility.
Labels: machinima
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:10 PM
1 Comments:
Jeff said...
thanks for the stop by my place! interesting post. the whole chip-mod culture is an interesting one, and i for one whole-heartedly love their exploration of the medium. if we as people are going to move anywhere with our thinking and our art, we need to push the boundaries and limitations of what we're handed. after all, there's nothing new under the sun, so very little of anything we do is original. i think that calls for the before mentioned exploration and experimentation. i'll be stopping by regularly, so see you around.