Blog - Machinima was Open-Source Film-making...
Saturday, April 12, 2008Well I'm back from GDX. It was a great event.
It also gave me plenty of things to think about, which means something to write about here. ;)
The first thing I have written down from my notebook there that leaps out at me as interesting and blog-worthy is a note I wrote down from a roundtable on machinima I attended.
As the two presenters of the roundtable gave a bit of background history of machinima to those attending, they of course mentioned how machinima started as game demos, and told of the process of recamming by editing demo files.
Someone asked if people who received the edited demo files could themselves edit the files and change the machinima-film to suit their own purposes.
I hadn't thought of that, but machinima was the first open-source film-making medium.
Interesting, especially in the light of having only recently blogged about Super Mario Movie which even posts its source code for anyone to look at, or use.
Machinima is already powerful in that it helps bring the art of film-making a little bit more to the masses, but I never fully took that line of thought through what that could mean in context of other internet phenomena like open-source. Machinima makes film-making in the first place easy, so it makes sense that that power is extended back to the fans of a machinima work to manipulate the film on their own.
The case of the open-source code of Super Mario Movie is even more interesting than I had first thought, as I realized I was interested in looking at the code to see how he programmed in some of unusual effects he achieved, making the code the sort of machinima equivalent of a DVD-commentary track. It provides a way to peek into the mind of the filmmaker on how the work was made.
Unfortunately, most machinima film-making has moved away from game demos, largely because games themselves no longer even have a feature for that. As I mentioned in my article, the shift from demo files to recorded video was perhaps for the best, as it allowed machinima to grow: you no longer had to have Quake to play a "Quake Movie", etc.
I didn't realize though exactly what the loss of demos meant for machinima, however.
I hope somehow the tradition of open-source film-making is kept alive, through machinima or what have you.
This could again be achieved by more people in the homebrew communities for early game consoles follow the example of Super Mario Movie and develop machinima works for early consoles, so long as they too release their source code.
Labels: machinima
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 3:20 PM
0 Comments: