MACHINIMA 1993 - IN THE BEGINNING...

Patrick Damian
Simanticus Studios

So, just WHAT in the world is this stuff called, Machinima? It certainly wasn't a term we used in 1992 to describe making movies or TV shows using computer games. I think it's great that non-professional film makers can now create their own films using computer games and other real-time 3D software for their sets and environments. All of us have some story to tell, and machinima provides the tools for ANYONE to be their own epic movie maker.

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Is this a realm that should not be touched by the professional's film producer's hands? Does machinima belong only to amateur film makers? Guess what, machinima, as it is called has been AND IS used quite a bit by professional film makers already, as quick and dirty 3D animated story boarding for major motion pictures like Independence Day. You're just not going to see their works on YouTube, Google or any other machinima site. Once used they are thrown into the trash or the production archives never to be seen again.

Now, with film editing software included free with every computer, amateur film makers think they have created something new and different. They even gave it a new and catchy name, machinima, but as I said, machinima is not new to film and television production houses. Many producers have used VGI (video game imagery) for scene sketches and story boarding, even preliminary set, lighting and environment design!

The very first "machinima" (which by the way, means CAR in Russian) was produced back in 1993 with Disney's Stunt Island game as the core engine. It was a television show called The Zone, which was later re-produced in Canada, without the video game imagery to become a show called, REBOOT. However, the original ZONE was created using video game imagery instead of CGI (computer generated imagery), but the only problem was the low resolution of the video games themselves, and the idea was short lived before metamorphosing into a totally different show, with the same theme - less the video games themselves.

When we produced The Zone, there was no such thing as free software like Microsoft Movie Maker, or the higher end, relatively low-priced digital editors such as Sony Vegas and others. We had a system of three massive reel-to-reel tape machines, called 1/4 inch, high-speed, broadcast quality video tape recorders that took up an entire wall, and a hardware/software interface called Video Machine from Germany. A set up that costs close to $100,000, and that was relatively cheap!

We recorded the video straight out of a new technology called computer-video-port-out to the video tape recorders, and then editing the video using the Video Machine controller software which ran the video tape machines - it took forever. Can you imagine having to rewind a massive quarter inch, reel-to-reel video tape to an edit point, just to add a transition effect - then fast forward to where you were before? Arrrgh! The memories :-) With all of this "state-of-the-art" equipment, we couldn't produce a quality TV show like we can now, using VGI (video game imagery).

We didn't have the luxury of all the technical geniuses called modders, we dealt directly with the game developers to mod their games to be usable in the show. Disney was one of our primary modders of their game, Stunt Island. We had an issue we needed addressed and we'd make a phone call to the actual programming staff and the next day they'd Fedex the mods to us (no downloading on a non-existent Internet). Try getting THAT kind of response from these game behemoths of today. You can't even get decent customer service, much less a pipeline to the actual developers. They've become even worse than Disney could ever imagine.

Novalogic, Bethesda, Origin's Chris Roberts (Wing Commander) and the Ultima team worked hand in hand with us, and as a side effect, a few motion picture deals were inked from game titles.

That kind of dream team mod squad is impossible for the average machinima movie maker, so my hat's off to all the modders out there that have to nearly reverse-engineer a game to mod it for movie making. You are the unsung hero's and the ones that make it all possible for many games that are just machinima unfriendly.

Some companies like Valve and Electronic Arts, to name a couple, are very wise to the benefits of machinima, both pro and amateur machinima, and work WITH modders and machinima makers by including movie making cheats in their game. The latest developer, Bethesda, didn't want to include cheats, but succumbed to the modding and machinima movie making audience. I guess they took note of EA's and Valve's tremendous following and they went OVERBOARD in publishing a Moby Dick sized movie making cheat list for their ground breaking game, Oblivion.

The phase that Machinima is going through right now is EXACTLY like the Internet before it became the Internet. Before the Internet became so tres' chic and mainstream, it was a group very similar to the machinima community of today. A small handful of people pushing the bleeding edge of what was then called BBS's. Remember WILDCAT and VIRTUAL BBS? :-) My favorite, with those high resolution ANSI-GRAPHICS (LOL)! We even had a tool call ANSI-GRAPHIC CREATOR (LOL), but it was the bomb in those days! Then came Netscape and Microsoft and the first GUI BBS, called...THE INTERNET, which wiped out and made dinosaurs out of the founders of the technology. We never thought it would happen, but we either had to change with the trend or be phased out of a technology that WE helped create.

I don't want to see the same thing happen to the hard working people involved in Machinima, but sadly, I've recently read through a thread (that's an old BBS term) on a site where they were ripping me to shreds for even daring to tell them to up their standards, because the machinima industry is changing. Why do I care if they up their standards? That's my problem, I DO care, because I have seen this trend before - in the great BBS-INTERNET WAR of the 90's.

This was total DEJA VU to me, as this is exactly how the BBS community reacted to the advent of the Internet, as well as how the DOS people railed against WINDOWS. Man is a strange creature. He continually repeats the same mistakes as those whom they follow.

Now machinima has reached it's first stage of it's next evolution. Corporations are beginning to see the value of video game imagery to represent and sell their products. From the Army giving out free games (that's scary, does the movie, Last Navigator come to mind LOL), to more recently Schick's actual foray into their own Machinima commercials using the HalfLife engine, a series of online commercials too risque for TV. Machinima is not ABOUT to blossom, it is blossoming now, right before our very eyes, and those machinima community members who are willing and not resistant, will be those people that Fortune 500 Corporations seek out to be their machinima gurus. Others will remain as hobbyist, which is as it should be.

Because of inexpensive video recording technology, there will always be a hobbyists, machinima community, but there IS money to be made in machinima productions now.

THE BIG ISSUE
SHOULD PRO'S COMPETE IN THE HOBBYISTS FESTIVALS!

I honestly do not think that professional machinima producers should participate on a peer level with the hobbyist community at machinima festivals. In my humble opinion, that would be totally unfair (or - maybe not :-). I believe that professional machinima producers, who have much deeper pockets, should compete on a peer level. That's just my opinion, but maybe the hobbyist want to have their works compete with the pro's, just to see who wins! This is all up for debate, but I don't think it would be fair for pro's to compete, on a peer level, in the hobbyists arena.

To be continued...

{mos_smf_discuss:General Discussion}