IT IS a Tuesday evening in Mesquite, Texas. Four young men are crowded into a darkened room, each clutching a computer game console hooked up to monitors. The consoles are linked so that the gamers can play against each other in the same virtual world. Inside this world, the gamers control robots moving through an arid landscape under cloudless blue skies. Each gamer sees this world through the eyes of the character he controls.
The scene could be a regular gaming party but inside the game nobody is playing. Instead of charging around the virtual world blowing each other鈥檚 virtual brains out, the robots stand around biding their time, like unemployed actors on a film set. Back in the real world, the chief gamer leans over to a tape recorder and presses play.
A pre-recorded conversation booms out over a set of loudspeakers. This is a film script and it is the signal the robots and their human controllers have been waiting for. Suddenly the robots leap into carefully choreographed action as the gamers start moving them to act out the script. At the end of the scene, the chief gamer calls 鈥渃ut鈥� and replays the scene on a PC which has just recorded the action.
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In fact these people are not gamers at all but actors in an unusual drama. The chief, Burnie Burns, is director and cameraman rolled into one, and he is completing a scene for a weekly internet show that is taking the online world by storm. Burns鈥� creation is called Red versus Blue after the colours of the robots in the virtual world. It is a satirical soap opera that follows the plight of a group of robots trapped fighting a war they do not understand. It is the first mass-market animated series to be filmed entirely in the virtual world of a computer game, in this case Microsoft鈥檚 Halo.
And it is just one of a growing number of fast-paced action movies created in this way and posted on the internet. This new underground film movement even has its own name 鈥� machinima, by fusing the words 鈥渕achine鈥�, 鈥渁nimation鈥� and 鈥渃inema鈥�. And if the following that Red versus Blue has garnered is anything to go by, machinima is going to be big.
Machinima was born in the late 90s when hardcore gamers became bored merely playing computer games. They began to use the games in ways the games companies had never intended: loading cars with huge numbers of grenades and watching them explode, or racing through the game鈥檚 levels at breakneck speed. Often they recorded their antics and posted them online to impress or amuse other gamers.
It was not long before film-makers such as Burns realised the potential to go further. Before finding Halo, he was searching for a cheap, accessible alternative to traditional animation. 鈥淲e had written some scripts and we were thinking: 鈥榃hat鈥檚 the best way to put 5 to 10 minutes鈥� worth online?'鈥� he says. The answer turned out to be machinima.
Today鈥檚 games make ideal virtual film sets. They typically have their own laws of physics built in, so that when a bullet is fired, the computer calculates its trajectory, taking into account the force of gravity and how fast it was fired. The set of code that controls these forces describes equations of physics for the game and is known as 鈥渢he game engine鈥�. It allows for a much richer gaming experience than ordinary animation.
Physics engines allow film-makers to hijack computer games for their own ends. Machinimists record robotic actors playing out scenes in video games, add sound, edit the footage, and play it back as a movie. Because the filming happens in real time and exploits sophisticated virtual worlds, it all costs a fraction of traditional computer-generated animation. Red versus Blue is even generating revenue, albeit only through the sale of T-shirts.
Burns makes no effort to disguise the fact that Red versus Blue is set inside a computer game world, but other machinimists do. When gamers began to record their games, hackers were busy working out how to change the way games looked. The code for games such as Quake and Doom is open source, meaning that it is freely available online and anyone can look at or modify it. Hackers started posting little pieces of computer code online that people can use to change characters or landscapes. Game makers were quick to realise that these modifications, 鈥渕ods鈥�, were making their games more popular and continued to release their source codes online.
Machinimists take advantage of this open culture. A film company called the Ill Clan in New York City has started designing new three-dimensional environments to replace those offered by video games. The Ill Clan鈥檚 films take place in landscapes that look nothing like the original game worlds. For example, the game Quake II is set in a dark and cavernous world. But although the Ill Clan鈥檚 flagship movie Hardly Workin鈥� is based on the game, it is set in a brightly coloured roadside diner. It stars two overweight lumberjacks and an Italian chef with a spiky moustache. 鈥淭he only thing we preserved from the original was the physics,鈥� CEO Paul Marino says. 鈥淪ometimes this means we accidentally shoot each other.鈥�
Machinimists have many advantages over ordinary animators. In a game, the 鈥渇ootage鈥� you record is the coordinates showing where the characters moved in the 3D virtual space rather than the scene as it might appear through a lens. That means there is no camera angle associated with the scene. A director can replay a scene after it has been recorded and experiment with different camera angles without bringing back gamers to repeat the scene. He does this using a mod to bring a new character into a scene as it is being replayed. The new angle is the landscape and action seen through the eyes of the character.
The Quake physics engine allows gravity to be switched off when a player reaches a certain level in the game. Machinimists exploit this to allow a cameraman to float within the scene, giving a huge range of camera angles.
But the game engine can also place limits on the process of filming, which can interfere with the plot. The characters in Quake all hold weapons, a consequence of code buried deep inside the game that is hard to change. In Hardly Workin鈥� the Ill Clan got round this by giving each of the characters axes and making them lumberjacks. 鈥淏y the time we did our second movie, the game engine let us remove the weapons. But we kept the lumberjack theme because it was funny,鈥� says Frank Dellario, the Ill Clan鈥檚 cameraman.
The Ill Clan also put mirrors into the new 3D landscapes but soon discovered that the game engine was not programmed to produce reflections. So whenever a character walked past a mirror, the team had to move an identical character on the other side of the mirror as if it were a reflection. But even this was far from ideal because the characters were all programmed to hold axes in their right hands, and so the reflections could never be made to look like true mirror images.
Initially these kinds of limitations prevented machinima from being more widely used. But that is rapidly changing. The latest games can produce reflections, and shadows have also evolved. In early games shadows were dark circular puddles that followed characters around without changing shape, but they have now become sophisticated silhouettes that mimic their character鈥檚 motions. Despite these advances, the machinimists agree that there are still serious limitations that prevent their films from matching the quality audiences expect from traditional 3D animation.
Lighting effects are probably the most difficult to do well. Game engines simply cannot reproduce the reflection and refraction of light when it bounces off water or passes through glass. These are much harder for video games than for ordinary computer animators because the effects must be rendered in real time as the game is played. Although the same type of software is used to produce computer-generated animation movies such as Toy Story and Finding Nemo, the computer can take minutes, hours or even days to do the calculations that produce these motions. Each frame must be painstakingly crafted, strung together and then recorded.
The Mackies
Machinimists enjoy no such luxury, but the games engines are getting better. 鈥淕ames used to be blurry 鈥� they weren鈥檛 ready for prime-time TV,鈥� says Bill Rehbock of Nvidia, the principal maker of the cards that optimise PCs for game play. 鈥淏ut now the hardware has evolved to the point that a feature created by the machinima community could be shown on a Saturday morning TV show,鈥� he says.
Rehbock says Nvidia will soon start marketing its game cards to movie-makers. The company is so enthusiastic about the new genre that it is sponsoring the annual Machinima Film Festival, machinima鈥檚 version of the Oscars nicknamed the 鈥淢ackies鈥�, which began last year.
The award for best film went to Jake Hughes, an animator employed by the game maker Crystal Dynamics in Menlo Park, California, for his dark sci-fi thriller Anachronox. Hughes does not even employ actors. Instead he and a programmer have created a tool that enables the whole film to be created by one person on a PC. The tool allows the machinimist to draw lines in the virtual space of the game engine to map out where he wants the characters to move. The line is associated with a particular point in time and a particular character. The game engine renders motion along the line in real time, as if controlled by a mouse or a joystick.
Hughes stumbled upon machinima by accident. His job is to make cut scenes for games 鈥� snippets of animated cinema that are spliced into the game play between the levels to help tell the story behind the game. Players are rewarded with these scenes when they have completed a level. Most game companies use traditional animation methods to do this, so cut scenes are often of a much higher quality than the images rendered during game play. 鈥淏ut we don鈥檛 want to take a player out of the game and show a movie where the characters look different,鈥� Hughes says. 鈥淪o we just do it in the game engine. We have this beautiful game engine so why not use it?鈥� Last year, with no knowledge of machinima, Hughes thought it would be interesting to string together all the cut scenes he had made and intersperse them with recordings of himself playing the game. The result was Anachronox and a prize for best film at the Mackies.
These various techniques are all very well if you are an avid gamer, or if you are satisfied like Burns to remain within the confines of the engine. But what if you are an animator who wants to exploit the real-time, low-cost advantages that machinima offers to make new worlds and new characters, but have no knowledge of computer games or programming? Enter Katherine Anna Kang, a machinimist at the production company Fountainhead Studios in Mesquite, who has created 鈥渇riendly鈥� machinima tools called Machinimation.
鈥淭o create machinima, you don鈥檛 need anything but a game,鈥� says Kang, who happens to be married to John Carmack, the CEO of id Software, which made Doom and Quake. 鈥淚t is all there, you just capture your footage. But to be able to do complicated, unique stories, you need to be able to program. And that is why we created our Machinimation tools. They will be a good way for film-makers to enter the field.鈥�
She believes they might be used by the big studios to create rough sketches of potential animations. After making a low-cost trial run, they can decide whether or not to go ahead with a shot, which might take hours to render.
Machinimation will go on sale later this year. But a demo version has been handed out to all members of the Academy of Machinima, Arts and Sciences. The tools enable the user to add additional characters at will, manipulate lights, sounds, colours and textures. The user can create a 鈥渓ight bulb鈥�, colour it as he wishes and place it at any angle. The light bulb is invisible when game play is rendered but the light falls on anything that crosses its path. The most recent project created with the Machinimation tools is the music video In the Waiting Line. It was aired frequently on MTV, and became the first hit music video to be made entirely using a game engine.
The tools have yet to be perfected, the Ill Clan says, although they have already made a movie using the demo version. The user is limited to the power and constraints of the game engine. So for example with Quake III, characters are limited to the standard motions of walking, running, jumping and crouching. Kang says this will improve when the game engines do. Quake III uses 鈥渇rame-base鈥� rather than 鈥渟keletal鈥� animation for its characters, meaning the characters鈥� motions have all been pre-programmed in. In skeletal animation almost all the motion is rendered in real time as the game is played, giving machinimists greater control. 鈥淲hen id Software releases Doom III, we hope to create a version of our tools for machinima making use of that engine. It will be an incredible step towards flexibility and realism,鈥� says Kang. The characters in Doom III will be skeletal.
So with all these new developments pushing machinima to an ever higher quality, are the big studios worried that one day they will lose business to machinimists? 鈥淚 can see a use for real-time playback in some cases. But I think the point many miss is what one gives up. Not just a pretty picture, but the power, the emotion, the richness, warmth and believability of the film,鈥� says Mark Behm, an animator at Blue Sky Studios in White Plains, New York. 鈥淎s far as being a threat, I don鈥檛 see one at this time. Pixar, and many others, probably could make films at half the cost, but aren鈥檛 willing to give up what they would lose if they did.鈥�
Tom Sito, president emeritus of the Hollywood Animation Guild and an animator who worked on Aladdin, Shrek and The Little Mermaid, agrees: 鈥淲hen will people understand it is not all about cost? When will the science community understand that real-time performance-based animation will never replace traditional methods?鈥�
But the machinimists are not daunted. As the hardware improves, the quality of machinima will follow, Kang says. She believes that machinima could reach the current capabilities of Pixar so long as the hardware advancements continue at their current pace. Gabe Newell from the game company Valve Software agrees: 鈥淢achinima is primitive, but unlike movies it is on a technology curve. Next year machinima will be twice as rich and the year after traditional movies will look pretty grainy. It鈥檚 one of those things that goes: it sucks鈥t sucks鈥t鈥檚 OK鈥t鈥檚 pretty good鈥ow鈥t鈥檚 better鈥h my God, TV looks too ugly to compete.鈥�
But machinima may not even have to wait that long. A good animated film isn鈥檛 just in the appearance. After all, the crude animation quality of Red versus Blue hasn鈥檛 held it back. 鈥淟ook at The Simpsons or South Park,鈥� says Marino, 鈥渋t鈥檚 all about the humour, not the quality of the animation.鈥� Sometimes a cruder animation style can even add to the charm of the show.
