Machinima
Machinima is an animation technique using real-time screen capturing in computer graphics engines, video games and virtual worlds to create a cinematic production. The word "Machinima" is a portmanteau of the words machine and cinema. According to Guinness World Records, machinima is an art of making animated narrative films from computer graphics, most commonly used by video games.
Machinima-based artists, sometimes called Machinimists or Machinimators, are often fan laborers, by virtue of their re-use of copyrighted materials. Machinima offers to provide an archive of gaming performance and access to the look and feel of software and hardware that may already have become obsolete or even unavailable. For game studies, "Machinima's gestures grant access to gaming's historical conditions of possibility and how machinima offers links to a comparative horizon that informs, changes, and fully participates in videogame culture."
The practice of using graphics engines from video games arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 video game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter video games, such as id Software's Doom and Quake. Originally, these recordings documented speed runs—attempts to complete a level as quickly as possible—and multiplayer matches. The addition of storylines to these films created "Quake movies". The more general term machinima, a blend of machine and cinema, arose when the concept spread beyond the Quake series to other games and software. After this generalization, machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements.
Machinima has advantages and disadvantages when compared to other styles of filmmaking. Its relative simplicity over traditional frame-based animation limits control and range of expression. Its real-time nature favors speed, cost saving, and flexibility over the higher quality of pre-rendered computer animation. Virtual acting is less expensive, dangerous, and physically restricted than live action. Machinima can be filmed by relying on in-game artificial intelligence or by controlling characters and cameras through digital puppetry. Scenes can be precisely scripted, and can be manipulated during post-production using video editing techniques. Editing, custom software, and creative cinematography may address technical limitations. Game companies have provided software for and have encouraged machinima, but the widespread use of digital assets from copyrighted games has resulted in complex, unresolved legal issues.
Machinima productions can remain close to their gaming roots and feature stunts or other portrayals of gameplay. Popular genres include dance videos, comedy, and drama. Alternatively, some filmmakers attempt to stretch the boundaries of the rendering engines or to mask the original 3-D context. The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima, recognizes exemplary productions through Mackie awards given at its annual Machinima Film Festival. Some general film festivals accept machinima, and game companies, such as Epic Games, Valve, Blizzard Entertainment and Jagex, have sponsored contests involving it.
History
Precedent
1980s software crackers added custom introductory credits sequences to programs whose copy protection they had removed. Increasing computing power allowed for more complex intros, and the demoscene formed when focus shifted to the intros instead of the cracks. The goal became to create the best 3-D demos in real-time with the least amount of software code. Disk storage was too slow for this, so graphics had to be calculated on the fly and without a pre-existing game engine.In Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 computer game Stunt Island, users could stage, record, and play back stunts. As Nitsche stated, the game's goal was "not... a high score but a spectacle." Released the following year, id Software's Doom included the ability to record gameplay as sequences of events that the game engine could later replay in real-time. Because events and not video frames were saved, the resulting game demo files were small and easily shared among players. A culture of recording gameplay developed, as Henry Lowood of Stanford University said, "a context for spectatorship.... The result was nothing less than a metamorphosis of the player into a performer." Another important feature of Doom was that it allowed players to create their own modifications, maps, and software for the game, thus expanding the concept of game authorship. In machinima, there is a dual register of gestures: the trained motions of the player determine the in-game images of expressive motion.
In parallel of the video game approach, in the media art field, Maurice Benayoun's Virtual Reality artwork The Tunnel under the Atlantic, often compared to video games, introduced a virtual film director, fully autonomous intelligent agent, to shoot and edit in real time a full video from the digging performance in the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary art in Montreal. The full movie, Inside the Tunnel under the Atlantic, 21h long, was followed in 1997 by Inside the Paris New-Delhi Tunnel. Only short excerpts were presented to the public. The complex behavior of the Tunnel's virtual director makes it a significant precursor of later application to video games based machinimas.
Dooms 1996 successor, Quake, offered new opportunities for both gameplay and customization, while retaining the ability to record demos. Multiplayer video games became popular, and demos of matches between teams of players were recorded and studied. Paul Marino, executive director of the AMAS, stated that deathmatches, a type of multiplayer game, became more "cinematic". At this point, however, they still documented gameplay without a narrative.
''Quake'' movies
On October 26, 1996, a well-known gaming clan, the Rangers, surprised the Quake community with Diary of a Camper, the first widely known machinima film. This short, 100-second demo file contained the action and gore of many others, but in the context of a brief story, rather than the usual deathmatch. An example of transformative or emergent gameplay, this shift from competition to theater required both expertise in and subversion of the game's mechanics. The Ranger demo emphasized this transformation by retaining specific gameplay references in its story.Diary of a Camper inspired many other "Quake movies," as these films were then called. A community of game modifiers, artists, expert players, and film fans began to form around them. The works were distributed and reviewed on websites such as The Cineplex, Psyk's Popcorn Jungle, and the Quake Movie Library. Production was supported by dedicated demo-processing software, such as Uwe Girlich's Little Movie Processing Center and David "crt" Wright's non-linear editor Keygrip, which later became known as "Adobe Premiere for Quake demo files". Among the notable films were Clan Phantasm's Devil's Covenant, the first feature-length Quake movie; Avatar and Wendigo's Blahbalicious, which the QML awarded seven Quake Movie Oscars; and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield, which introduced simulated lip synchronization and featured customized digital assets.
Released in December 1997, id Software's Quake II improved support for user-created 3-D models. However, without compatible editing software, filmmakers continued to create works based on the original Quake. These included the ILL Clan's Apartment Huntin' and the Quake done Quick group's Scourge Done Slick. Quake II demo editors became available in 1998. In particular, Keygrip 2.0 introduced "recamming", the ability to adjust camera locations after recording. Paul Marino called the addition of this feature "a defining moment for achinima". With Quake II filming now feasible, Strange Company's 1999 production Eschaton: Nightfall was the first work to feature entirely custom-made character models.
Borg War, a 90-minute animated Star Trek fan film, was produced using Elite Force 2 and Starfleet Command 3, repurposing the games' voiceover clips to create a new plot. Borg War was nominated for two "Mackie" awards by the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences. An August 2007 screening at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas was the first time that CBS/Paramount had approved the screening of a non-parody fan film at a licensed convention.
Generalization
In January 2000, Hugh Hancock, the founder of Strange Company, launched a new website, machinima.com. Coined by Anthony Bailey in a May 1998 email to Hancock, the term is a misspelled portmanteau of machine cinema which was intended to dissociate in-game filming from a specific engine. The new site featured tutorials, interviews, articles, and the exclusive release of Tritin Films' Quad God. The first film made with Quake III Arena, Quad God was also the first to be distributed as recorded video frames, not game-specific instructions. This change was initially controversial among machinima producers who preferred the smaller size of demo files. However, demo files required a copy of the game to view. The more accessible traditional video format broadened Quad Gods viewership, and the work was distributed on CDs bundled with magazines. Thus, id's decision to protect Quake IIIs code inadvertently caused machinima creators to use more general solutions and thus widen their audience. Within a few years, machinima films were almost exclusively distributed in common video file formats.Machinima began to receive mainstream notice. Roger Ebert discussed it in a June 2000 article and praised Strange Company's machinima setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias". At Showtime Network's 2001 Alternative Media Festival, the ILL Clan's 2000 machinima film Hardly Workin' won the Best Experimental and Best in SHO awards. Steven Spielberg used Unreal Tournament to test special effects while working on his 2001 film Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Eventually, interest spread to game developers. In July 2001, Epic Games announced that its upcoming game Unreal Tournament 2003 would include Matinee, a machinima production software utility. As involvement increased, filmmakers released fewer new productions to focus on quality.
At the March 2002 Game Developers Conference, five machinima makers—Anthony Bailey, Hugh Hancock, Katherine Anna Kang, Paul Marino, and Matthew Ross—founded the AMAS, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima. At QuakeCon in August, the new organization held the first Machinima Film Festival, which received mainstream media coverage. Anachronox: The Movie, by Jake Hughes and Tom Hall, won three awards, including Best Picture. The next year, "In the Waiting Line", produced by Ghost Robot, directed by Tommy Pallotta and animated by Randy Cole, utilizing Fountainhead Entertainment's Machinimation tools, it became the first machinima music video to air on MTV. As graphics technology improved, machinima filmmakers used other video games and consumer-grade video editing software. Using Bungie's 2001 game Halo: Combat Evolved, Rooster Teeth Productions created a popular comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles. The series' second season premiered at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2004.