Thinking outside the Xbox for films

In the last few years a revolution has been taking place in 3-D animation, led by a coterie of savvy video gamers using little more than their Xboxes or PlayStations and favorite games. It’s called machinima (pronounced ma-SHIN-eh-ma) and it is as much a homespun method of animation as it is a newfangled film genre.

Tapping into the same programming DNA of such blockbuster game franchises as “Quake,” “Unreal Tournament,” or “Halo,” die-hard gamers-cum-upstart filmmakers have been making 3-D animated movies with nothing more than a game console or a PC. Machinima artists take preexisting visual elements of a game (character, set, props), change the way they look, control how they move, record the results and edit them into a narrative.

Machinima has become so sophisticated that the high-toned Film Society of Lincoln Center is showcasing one of the most popular series (the Red vs. Blue “The Blood Gulch Chronicles”) at an event today. “The cool thing [with machinima] is that you can actually see things in real time, be able to see what you are creating developing, see things getting cohesive as a story right in front of your eyes,” said Katherine Anna Kang, a seasoned machinima maker.

The machinima scene started with the 1996 release of “Quake,” the first game to boast a “demo” mode: a function that lets players record and watch their game exploits. Early machinima films were little more than glorified demos -- essentially edited playbacks of games. Homemade and hacker-designed “demo editing programs” emerged shortly after, introducing the cool feature of “recam,” a machinima-specific editing option that gives filmmakers and gamers the power to change camera positions, angles and lighting within a recorded segment.

As technology grew, so too did the ambition of the genre. More and more machinima artists began creating their own props, characters and sets from scratch (using 3-D modeling tools), which are then brought back (or hacked) into a game engine to make them move.

Therein lies the revolutionary potential of the medium: Makers of machinima have the ability to animate and record 3-D motion, character and action in real time without the need to draw every frame by hand (like 2-D animation) or render every scene frame by frame using expensive supercomputers (like computer generated imaging). It also has a one-up on celluloid moviemaking: the ability to “recam” a scene during demo-editing, something inconceivable in standard post-production.

Burnie Burns is one of the converts. An independent filmmaker, he got into machinima about nine months ago “because it was a way for me to stay sharp as a writer and be able to produce my own thing without having to put out a bunch of money. And it just sort of took off from that.

“It’s two guys doing a whole thing. We went from nothing to 90 minutes in 15 weeks. If we didn’t deal with machinima, there’s absolutely no way we could get that done if we were to use traditional animation -- drawing everything, modeling, rendering, all those things.”

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Faster and cheaper

The innovations introduced by machinima combine for a faster and cheaper way to make animation, which can be used for Web broadcasts and even films. Machinima makers are saying it could change the way animation is made for TV or film.

Burns points to one series of movies called “Final Fantasy” as an example. “The games these movies are based on are quickly becoming as slick as a traditionally 3-D movie that takes 2 1/2 years and 300 people to make. A team of 50 people could manipulate a game engine and quickly bang out an animation project that could be shown in a theater. It might not happen now, but it’ll definitely happen sometime in the future.”

Burns’ machinima team, dubbed Red vs. Blue, has 12 members, 10 of whom are voice actors. The outfit’s first machinima series, “The Blood Gulch Chronicles,” has become the little-movie-that-could for the genre. Using Xbox’s popular Halo game engine, “Chronicles” is a classic case of low-hassle machinima making. Burns simply networked 3 Xboxes to his PC to capture and edit the footage. The series he created has been posted on the Internet and the number of hits has climbed steadily since it debuted in April. The filmmaker now estimates that hundreds of thousands of people watch the Web serial every week. The second season debuts today at Lincoln Center.

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On mainstream’s cusp

Since the medium originated from games, it’s not surprising to find that most machinima filmmakers are, first and foremost, hard-core gearheads and gamers. As such, most of the current machinima films are very game-specific, replete with inside jokes and game lingo that are completely impenetrable for the uninitiated.

Still, machinima seems to be on the cusp of mainstream recognition. Last March, the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences was founded in New York to better promote the medium. There have been two Machinima film festivals in New York. A book on the subject, written by Paul Marino, the head of the academy and a member of the pioneering machinima team ILL Clan, is set to hit bookshelves this spring. A machinima film, in the form of a music video for the electronica group Zero 7’s “In the Waiting Line,” has even been in rotation at MTV.

One thing that machinima has still not achieved is profitability. Most machinima filmmakers are hobbyists who show their work over the Web for free. Although some professional machinima teams, namely ILL Clan and Fountainhead Entertainment (which produced the Zero 7 video), are beginning to make machinima for pay, finding those adventurous enough to bankroll a project still proves difficult. “I think in many ways machinima has to be accepted by the traditional filmmaking community and I don’t think they really know what to make of machinima,” says Kang, a founder of Fountainhead Entertainment, a maker of machinima software. “They need to be able to realize the strength of it, that it will save them a lot of money and what they could use it for -- be it a music video, a sitcom or a film.”

To be sure, there is still a huge qualitative gap between machinima and CGI. But machinima makers are hoping that bigger and better game engines and demo-editing software will change that. Capitalizing on the popularity of machinima in the gaming world, gaming companies have been developing their own demo-editing programs. Last year, Epic Games released Unreal Tournament 2003 with Matinee, its own demo-editing software (which essentially combines the power of filmmaking and editing in one package). Fountainhead Entertainment offers Machinimation, a software that piggybacks off the impressive “Quake III” engine.

One pressing issue remains: Given that machinima uses game technology as a base, licensing is a major concern. So far, game companies have taken a hands-off approach: machinima makers are pretty much left alone as long as their projects are not for profit. However, many in the community fear that this attitude will change, and they are calling for the creation of some sort of licensing scheme specifically for machinima.

“There are a number of teams, Clan included, that are looking to use machinima to be a profitable company, and at that point we know we would need to engage with the game company,” says Marino. In the meantime, interest in making machinima films continues to grow. “We get at least five or six e-mails a day from people saying that they are starting their own machinima projects. They’ve taken a look at what we’ve done and want to give it a shot. That’s why I think it’s going to have a huge impact, because you have these 16- to 18-year-old kids who are just picking up and going because now they can do it. They don’t need a silicon graphic machine to do it. They can just take their Xbox and laptop to go to work.”