Game for Movies

BY BILL HUTCHENS

Tacoma News Tribune

Finding themselves without an abundance of spare cash for actors' salaries and expensive recording and editing equipment, some independent filmmakers are turning to a new medium: machinima.

Put simply, they're using video-game technology to make movies.

"Machinima is using puppetry techniques to tell stories in really fantastic (digital) worlds," said Hugh Hancock, artistic director for machinima production house Strange Company.

Hancock and his Edinburgh, Scotland, company have manipulated computer-game technology to create movies that have been praised at film festivals around the world.

It's not Pixar. It's not DreamWorks -- or any other big-budget computer-graphics production company. It's about exploiting existing game characters in existing game worlds to tell stories.

"Game technology lets users tell stories in these really fantastic worlds," Hancock said in a recent phone interview. "For the first time, indie filmmakers can tell incredible stories without the constraints of budget."

Far from the pixilated sprites and flashing lights of games from the 1980s, today's video and computer games are robust and malleable 3-D affairs. Like location scouts before them, machinima producers often scout for games with open-ended play, games that let gamers go anywhere and do anything in enormous worlds.

Armed with sufficient freedom of movement and plentiful in-game vehicles, weapons and characters, a good producer can record just about any scene he or she desires.

It's simply a matter of setting up a scene and playing in-game characters so that they act it out. Voices can be edited in later or recorded along with the action. Often, games with online multiplayer modes are best for scenes with multiple characters -- so long as there are enough "puppeteers."

"Machinima is essentially supermarionation updated for the 21st century," said Hancock, referring to a prevalent form of puppetry. "It has many of the same elements and limitations as puppetry."

Often, PC games are involved since creators can save recorded scenes to hard drives or other digital storage devices. Strange Company has produced 16 movies using PC games such as Quake, Quake 2, Half-Life and NeverWinter Nights.

"Blood Spell," the company's current project, is a fantasy piece produced with the NeverWinter Nights role-playing game.

Strange Company's treatment of "Ozymandias" has had the most critical success, Hancock said. Film reviewer Roger Ebert has compared the short to important anime works.

"It's been shows at film festivals around the world," Hancock said. "I've had professors of literature with absolutely no video game background calling us and telling us how fantastic it is and how they use it for their students."

One of the most prolific machinima projects is the "Red vs. Blue" series, a periodic comedy show acted out within the popular Halo games for Xbox and PC.

That series has become so popular on the Internet that producer Rooster Teeth has issued the first three seasons on DVD. A random check of South Sound game retailers showed that several were out of season 1 and low on stock of seasons 2 and 3.

"Red vs. Blue" story lines have little to do with the game Halo, although producers at Rooster Teeth often nod to the game for the sake of comedy. In the first season, the story revolves around the ghost of a dead space marine who tries desperately to remove a corrupting artificial intelligence program from the high-tech armor of his girlfriend, a killer for hire. Producers tell the story using Halo characters, weapons and vehicles. Since Halo is a first-person shooter, the movie "camera" is often just the perspective of an unseen character.

At first glance, the word "machinima" looks like it might be a smashing together of the words "machine" and "cinema." While that would capture some of the art's essence, the true origin of the term has more to do with the latin "machina" (machine) and "anima" (life) --with a pinch of "anime" (Japanese animation) tossed in. You'll Google with success by typing "machinema" or "machinima."

Classic and neo-classic work has been remade in machinima style. It takes only a quick search on the Internet to view machinimated scenes from Hollywood favorites such as "A Few Good Men." The famous courtroom showdown between Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson is rebuilt using the Half-Life 2 engine and replayed with Barney the security guard and the G-Man from the Half-Life games. In this case, the creators used the original dialogue from the movie.

Machinima is beginning to catch on in big ways around the world. Game maker Electronic Arts recently teamed with the University of Southern California for a student machinima contest that received more than 1,000 films created with the Sims 2 game. And in late June, MTV2 began airing a new season of "Video Mods," a show that has video-game characters starring in music videos.

"I love the punk do-it-yourself attitude of machinima," said Alex Coletti, executive producer of "Video Mods." "Anything that lets the audience create is cool by us. The whole mash-up of games and music that is 'Video Mods' can only get better and cooler when we can let the audience play, too."

The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences is preparing for the 2005 Machinima Film Festival, slated for Nov. 12 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

And some groups are experimenting further with the concept of game performance pieces. Hancock said Rooster Teeth has been toying with the idea of a live performance, perhaps "Waiting for Godot" done within the online massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft.