Official Machinima Topic

Hello everyone and welcome to KMC's machinima thread.

Here you can post any machinima video and or website link you have for everyone to enjoy.

I will start the topic with information about machinima.

Machinima (pronounced [mə.ˈʃi¢°.nə.mə] or [mə.ˈʃɪ.nə.mə]), a portmanteau of machine cinema or machine animation, is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre defined by those techniques. As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using real-time, interactive (game) 3D engines, as opposed to high-end and complex 3D animation software used by professionals. Engines from first-person shooter and role-playing simulation video games are typically used. Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms. As a film genre, the term refers to movies created by the techniques described above.

Usually, machinima productions are produced using the tools (demo recording, camera angle, level editor, script editor, etc.) and resources (backgrounds, levels, characters, skins, etc.) available in a game.

Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation. It can also produce more professional appearing production than is possible with traditional at-home techniques of live video tape, or stop action using live actors, hand drawn animation or toy props.

As machinima begins to break out of the underground community of gamers and becomes more widely recognized by mainstream audiences, tools are being developed to allow for faster and easier creation of machinima productions. A number of upcoming machinima products are expected to provide machinimators with original assets, as well as advanced features such as a timeline, gesture and sound creation, and precise camera tools.

Although most often used to produce recordings that are later edited as in conventional film, machinima techniques have also occasionally been used for theatre. A New York improvisational comedy group called the ILL Clan voice and puppet their characters before a virtual camera to produce machinima displayed on a screen to a live audience.

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The most famous machinima ever is the popular web series Red vs. Blue. This web series uses the Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 engines to tell the story of 2 armies fighting an unorthodox war in Blood Gulch--one of the game's multiplayer maps.

Here is Red vs. Blue episode 1 titled "Why are we here?"

YouTube video

Red vs. Blue : The Blood Gulch Chronicles, often abbreviated as RvB, is a machinima comic science fiction video series created by Rooster Teeth Productions and distributed primarily through the Internet and DVD. The series chronicles the story of two opposing teams of soldiers fighting a civil war in the middle of a desolate box canyon (Blood Gulch), in a parody of first-person shooter (FPS) games, military life, and science fiction films. Initially intended to be a short series of six to eight episodes, the project quickly and unexpectedly achieved significant popularity following its April 1, 2003, Internet premiere. Rooster Teeth therefore decided to extend the series, totaling five seasons and 100 episodes.

Red vs. Blue emerged from Burnie Burns' voice-over-enhanced gameplay videos of Bungie Studios' FPS video game Halo: Combat Evolved. The series is primarily produced using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from a game to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio. Footage is mostly from the multiplayer modes of Halo: Combat Evolved and its sequel, Halo 2, on the Microsoft Xbox video game console.

For more information on Red vs. Blue click the following link http://www.redvsblue.com

Machinima history

The earliest roots of machinima can be found in the demoscene, a computer subculture that became established in the 1980s. The demoscene demos are non-interactive software programs containing graphics, music and visual effects animated in real time. The technological basis for demos is similar to computer and video games, and early demos could even use elements, such as music and sprites, that were directly copied from games. Unlike machinima, however, demos are nearly always stand-alone programs that are preferably created from scratch.

In 1992, the game Stunt Island allowed users to create movies by placing props and cameras, orchestrating flying stunts, and splicing takes together. Communities emerged on CompuServe and the Internet, where users of the software were able to trade props and movies with each other.

This relatively new artform has attracted some interest in the media in gaming magazines, such as Computer and Video Games and PC Gamer, as a "sign of things to come".[citation needed] But the number of machinima artists is rather small, as of 2005, and they have not achieved widespread success. As the quality of game engines, tools and 3D hardware improves, however, the popularity of the new medium continues to grow.

Doom, released in 1993, included support for recording and playback of gameplay demos. This resulted in the eventual creation of Doom speedruns, where players recorded rapid traversals of Doom levels. Machinima per se arrived with the advent of true 3D game worlds and controllable cameras, from late 1993 to 1996. The 1993 Star Wars game X-Wing featured a limited recording feature with a controllable camera system, but the camera was controllable only during playback of recordings, not during gameplay itself. While Quake is commonly credited as being the first to introduce these, that honor technically belongs to MechWarrior 2, which was published a year ahead of it and possessed most of the same capabilities.

Quake may not have been the first game to utilize demo capability, however, Quake is correctly credited for the wider range of resources available to creators. This allowed for "movies" with custom-built sets, special effects, graphics, sound (including real voices) and music. The movies that were made with Quake could last over an hour, with The Seal of Nehahra being 4 hours long. While many of these features are not original to Quake, it was the powerful, vast freedom and easy modification of Quake C code that allowed these movies to be brought to life. Essentially, it was Quake that introduced a more sophisticated form of machinima which is still used today. The first movies appeared in 1996, and the term was coined at the start of 1998. At this time, the term "Quake Movies" was used in most situations. Around about mid 2000, this Quake community died out somewhat, due to the movement of players to newer games.

Things picked up in the following two years or so, however. With the improvements in 3D game engine technology many developers added in-game cut scenes to their games. This led to improvements in animation capabilities and soon most game engines had the functionality (although often available to the developers only) necessary to produce machinima.

Quake II, Unreal and Battlefield 1942 are examples of video games which are currently used to create machinima. Use of the original Unreal Tournament was possible through the third-party tool Unreal Movie Studio (UMS) by UnFramed Productions, and later Real-Time Movie Studio (RTMS) by Mod team reactor 4. Understanding the future potential of machinima, Epic Games, the developers of Unreal Tournament 2003, included a tool called "Matinee" with the game, and sponsored a contest for US$50,000 to create a machinima film with the video game. The Unreal engine was used by director George Lucas for pre-visualisation of the later Star Wars movies and by some other directors.

The video game The Sims, which had a "photo album" feature, was used by players to stage elaborate "comic book" stories. For example, over several months in 2003, Nicole Service, a Sims player known online as "nsknight" staged a highly-rated photo album telling the story of three sisters whose mother is murdered. (Wired News) Other players have staged stories of abusive relationships, drug addiction, and interracial adoptions. The Sims 2 has a built-in movie making feature.

A scene from the DDay Sound Archive movie, created using The Movies editor. This scene is rendered at the "online" resolution for streaming from the company website.The Movies is a game developed by Lionhead Studios that puts the player in the role of a movie director and allow them to create short feature films using the game engine. A similar technique is used on the MTV television show Video Mods that shows music videos, rendered using characters from popular video games and Demos, including The Sims 2, BloodRayne and Dawn. However, the creators of the show only re-use the models, which are manually animated using 3D-animation software, not the game engines.

Besides the first-person shooter (FPS) and simulation genres mentioned above, other genres of games, most notably the sports games (like EA Sports' FIFA, NFL, and NHL series), already had the features and tools required (such as instant replay, customizable camera angle, recording, playback, save, and load) to make machinima for a long time, though it appeared that no one had attempted to make machinima using those games.

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Red vs. Blue episode 2 "Red gets a delivery"
YouTube video

Portal
Portal (TV series) was the first television experience to machinima. It aired on G4 for two seasons largely playing on comedy. It took many MMORPGs, with exceptions like the Sims Online and Second Life. It also had the main host in live action.

Quake machinima

A scene from Diary of a CamperIt was with Quake that machinima truly took off, and it was for this game that the first true machinima film was made. Released in 1996 by United Ranger Films, an off-shoot of a then well known Quake clan named The Rangers, Diary of a Camper was the first true piece of machinima. A short silent film, lasting less than two minutes, it told the story of The Rangers rooting out an embedded player (the camper) within DM6, a popular Quake deathmatch map. At this point in time, the term "machinima" had not been coined, and these films were being touted as "Quake Movies". The piece became very popular within the Quake community, and soon spawned other Quake Movies, such as Wendigo and Avatar's Blahbalicious and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield.

One of the more famous Quake machinima groups is Quake done Quick, or QdQ. QdQ produced several speedruns for Quake, and reworked them into movies, using special tools to show speedrun in third person. Their most famous movie by far is Quake done Quicker, and the group itself believes that their movie Scourge done Slick (which requires the Scourge of Armagon expansion pack) is their best work thus far. For a full list of productions, see the Quake done Quick article. As of 2006, the group is still active, making rare speedrun releases.

The ILL Clan is known for their series of shorts featuring Larry and Lenny Lumberjack. Their first movie (and one of the earliest notable machinima pieces) was Apartment Huntin', and was created using Quake. Their award-winning short, Hardly Workin, was created using Quake 2. They have also made three to four live performances in front of audiences in recent years.

Also one of the most notable Quake machinimas is The Seal of Nehahra, which details the story of the original game and expands considerably on the backstory. With a run time of 3:53:34, it's also one of the longest machinima feature movies.

Borg War is a feature-length movie created using the variant of the Quake 3 engine used in the game Elite Force 2.

Borg WarYouTube video

Halo machinima
The most popular and well known Halo machinima is Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, a comedic machinima series filmed within the Halo series of Xbox games. Created by Rooster Teeth Productions, and premiering online on April 1, 2003, the show has so far released four seasons on DVD with another DVD on the way, the series ended in 2007 with 100 episodes and the possibility of Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles 2. The series has also further inspired a fan tribute series called Sponsors vs Freeloaders, based in the forums of the Red vs. Blue website.

Another popular Halo machinima group are Fire Team Charlie productions, who started production on Fire Team Charlie in Mid-2003. Fire Team Charlie productions has made a name by delving into the code of Halo and modifying it to increase their movie making possibilities. It ended in 2006 with 19 episodes.

The Codex, Episode 1 debuted on 9 February 2005. Unlike any previous Halo machinima series, The Codex is a drama, and is set within the universe of the Halo games. While previous Halo machinima series focus almost exclusively on comedy, The Codex has a definite story, and has often been described as a movie divided into episodes, rather than a series proper. It is also one of the few series to be set within the confines of the Halo universe, dealing with situations described in the games and happening concurrently with other well-known events.

This Spartan Life also differs from other Halo machinima in that it is a talk show, similar in concept to The Late Show with David Letterman. Every episode of the show is divided into parts that are uploaded on the show's site in a sequential fashion. Every episode features an opening monologue, interviews with guests as well as two fixed features, the Solid Gold Elite Dancers, a group of Covenant Elite dancers, and Body Count, a debate segment featuring players killing each other as they debate their points. Some of the comedy in the show itself is derived from the fact that often, players not involved in the show's making are unaware that the show is being filmed at all, and thus fire upon show contestants as they try to act out their parts.

Halo Music VideosYouTube video

Rome: Total War machinima
While Rome: Total War's engine has been used relatively widely commercially, there has been much less player-made machinima. The first, and most notable use of Rome was a show made specifically for the History Channel called Decisive Battles, which used the engine's ability to show vast numbers of characters to reconstruct some of the most historically significant battles in history. The game turned out to be an excellent way of visually representing the fight for a mass audience, something traditionally difficult to do. In the UK, the game was also used for the show Time Commanders, which aired on the BBC. This was a kind of game show, in which contestants playing Rome were pitted against an enemy AI in a simulation of an ancient battle, in an attempt to see if the player could reverse history.

The most significant player-made example to date is Nicholas Werner's Potentior, a forty-minute long reconstruction of the Battle of Alesia. Despite its relatively recent release date, it has already sparked controversy on the Internet Archive's Potentior page.

Rome Wars Music VideoYouTube video

The Sims 2 machinima
The Sims machinima started with the photo album concept in the first Sims game. With the photo album a person could create full stories using all the game's resources. The Sims 2, which came out in the Fall of 2004, included a built in movie making utility for players to film what their Sims do. After the release of The Sims 2, Maxis, The Sims games creators, held contests hosted on their website for the best movie makers. The most notable examples of The Sims 2 machinima are listed below.

Rooster Teeth Productions, the authors of Red vs. Blue, have also created a serial production, The Strangerhood, using The Sims 2. The initial installment of the series introduced eight occupants of a neighborhood, who wake up one morning with no memory of who they are, where they are, or how they arrived. The characters have diverse, quirky, and intense personalities. Owing to the limitations of the simulation engine it was necessary to create a number of clones of each character, each with a different expression (happy, sad, angry, etc.). The unused versions are herded into an out-of-viewpoint room and exchanged as necessary to obtain the various facial expressions.

The Strangerhood episode 1YouTube video

Company of Heroes machinima
Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes, a 3D real time strategy game for the PC, with some built in machinima capability, was released in September 2006. Relic produced an eleven minute in game machinima piece to publicise the game, which subsequently won the award for Best Virtual Performance: Custom Animation at the 2006 Machinima Film Festival.

Lyon
YouTube video

Red vs. Blue episode 3 "The Rookies" YouTube video

World of Warcraft machinima

A scene from one of the machinima portions of the South Park episode titled Make Love, Not Warcraft.Blizzard Entertainment's popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft has also spawned many machinima productions. Notable amongst the plethora of fan-created machinima are films such as Illegal Danish: Super Snacks!, Tales of the Past I & 2, Not Just Another Love Story, Zinwrath: The Movie, Return and The Internet is for Porn. Perhaps most famous is the Leeroy Jenkins film, featuring a character of the same name causing the downfall of his party. Parodies of Warcraft machinima, and films that poke fun at aspects of the game well known amongst avid players, are also wildly popular on Blizzard forums and web sites. For example, Further Proof That Shamans are Overpowered mocks the bombast and clichés of another Warcraft machinima. The Most Horrific Act of Ninja Looting Ever, shows the frustration of players who are robbed by a Thief looter in a humorous light. Xfire, a company that has created a popular internet communications and file sharing tool, has sponsored several contests which have provided incentive for many producers to use the WoW engine. The South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" uses World of Warcraft machinima for some in-game sequences and was made with the full support of Blizzard.

illegal Danish: Super SnacksYouTube video

Half-Life series machinima
While there have not been many machinima made with Valve Software's first game (Half-Life), there were a few that achieved popularity over the internet. Those include Militia II and ClanWars.

But the power and versatility of the Source engine coupled with Valve Hammer Editor and Faceposer have made Half-Life 2 very useful for quality machinima. A notable example is A Few Good G-Men, a machinima produced from the famous courtroom scene from the Rob Reiner film A Few Good Men. One of the most notable features of the Source engine is Faceposer's ability to take any voices in sound form and have an ingame character automatically lipsynch to the words. Faceposer is also used for various choreography functions, such as having ingame characters move to certain positions or play a certain animation. Another fairly known example is Still Seeing Breen, by Paul Marino, set to music by Breaking Benjamin.

YouTube video

F.E.A.R. machinima
Not many machinima productions made with the F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault Recon game engine have gained widespread popularity to date. The best known one is a mini-series called P.A.N.I.C.S., produced by Rooster Teeth Productions (creator of the Red vs. Blue series). P.A.N.I.C.S. spoofs both the F.E.A.R. game that it's filmed inside of, as well as supernatural thriller/comedy movies like Ghostbusters.

TIMEYouTube video

illegal danish: super snackYouTube video

I accidentally placed the RvB video instead, so here is the correct video.

Shadowrun machinima
1-800-Magic is a 2007 machinima miniseries from Rooster Teeth Productions, the creators of Red vs. Blue. Using the machinima process of adding new sound and dialog to video game footage, the series is made using Shadowrun, a game for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Windows Vista platforms.

1-800-MAGIC Episode 1YouTube video

Second Life machinima
A number of machinima have been created using the game engine of Second Life, which supports in-world editing of character appearance, object creation and skinning, and the recording of events. See Second Life Community: Media.

Virtual Life: Second LifeYouTube video

Sam & Max machinima
During the release of Sam & Max Season One, developer Telltale Games also released fifteen short machinima cartoons in between episodes. The shorts range from one to two minutes in length and typically feature Sam and Max interacting with locations and characters from the most recent episode, though the shorts are not part of Season One's storyline. Telltale Games also created several machinima shorts for the 2007 Independent Games Festival in which Sam and Max greet the attendees and make cracks about game design.

Sam & Max short #1YouTube video

Gears of War machinima
Soon after the release of Gears of War, many people wanted to make machinima based in the game. However, most attempts at movie making in the game have been amateur attempts, seeing as the game engine doesn't allow a first-person camera angle.

There are some good examples of popular machinima using Gears of War. One such example is COG: Chronicles of Gridlock. The series revolves around six soldiers who spend their days stationed on Gridlock, the most popular map on Gears. COG is released on YouTube constantly and was made by Hobo Box Studios. At first, it seems just like any other amateur machinima. But users have praised it for its unique comedy and simple filming methods.

One of the more popular examples is Geared, a series made by Darkspire Films. The storyline revolves around four soldiers who are assigned to do various missions, a la Gears of War's single-player storyline. However, Geared's comedic approach to its storyline separates it far from the serious storyline found in the campaign. So far, Geared is the only machinima series that has its own domain: http://www.darkspirefilms.com

Chronicles of GridlockYouTube video

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Red vs. Blue Episode 4 "Head noob in charge" YouTube video

Did you type all that? 13jockey

This thread totally gives me an erection.

Good work, btw.

we have a machinima filming crew, we have filmed over 20 movies and have a great web site. Our production is called Hungry Trooper Productions[tm] our web site is [www].hungrytrooper.mfbiz[dot][com] come check us out.

Originally posted by BlaxicanHydra
This thread totally gives me an erection.

Good work, btw.

Glad you liked it. I thought people didn't even pay attention to it.

Thanks.

Originally posted by pizzaman265
we have a machinima filming crew, we have filmed over 20 movies and have a great web site. Our production is called Hungry Trooper Productions[tm] our web site is [www].hungrytrooper.mfbiz[dot][com] come check us out.

Cool. I will check it out.

Some machinimas that my freinds and I made:

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