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 Links to this post
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 Links to this post
Blog - New Paul Robertson Film
Friday, March 28, 2008The article on machinima (found under my writing page) that I wrote was inspired by a sort of argument implied by the film 8-Bit. That documentary discusses all the art inspired by video games: art games, machinima, and chiptune music.
I originally wrote the paper for a class, focusing in that early draft for class on both chiptune music and machinima. See, chiptune music I am far more familiar with and had by that point actually produced. Machinima I was only slightly curious about and had seen a few episodes of Red vs Blue but that's about it.
(By now I've done some experiments in machinima production, although nothing I feel like showing yet)
In any case, I was interested in the curious split between the aesthetics of those two new-media, machinima and chiptune.
Machinima was inspired by and almost always uses newer game technology, 3D game engines.
Chiptune, however, thrives on ancient game hardware, trying to bring back nostalgia of games past.
I wondered why there weren't machinima films being made that took the aesthetic of chiptune in visual form, i.e. films that looked like older 8-bit games.
I cut out the bits on chiptune, though, when I rewrote the paper for publication on gamecareerguide, but by then had found (and mentioned in the article) Sprite Artist/Animator Paul Robertson's film Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006
Although not technically machinima, it has exactly the aesthetic I was thinking of, and was created using some very machinima-like techniques. I'll choose to describe it as psuedo-machinima.
Well, Paul Robertson released a new, similar film a few days ago that I just watched.
It's story is madness, and it hurts the eyes with epilepsy-inducing flashing light effects.
It is, however, another great example of his work. A film that resembles and nods to the aesthetics and conventions of video gaming's past.
Links to it can be found on his blog, which I linked to above.
Or, if you want to search around for it, it is entitled Kings of Power 4 Billion%.
It is not entirely work-safe, much like his previous animation, as a warning.
Very bloody and contains some nudity. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:26 PM 0 Comments Links to this post