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| Desktop Director's Chair | | By Gareth Branwyn for Screenager Central |
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So, you've played Unreal Tournament and Quake until your hands ache and your eyeballs are glued to your monitor. Now what? Well, if you're like hundreds of bleary-eye and bored gamers from around the world, you turn your gaming world into a movie set and cast yourself as a director. Called "machinima" (as in "machine cinema"), it's just one recent example of how creative people can be in using digital technologies in ways their designers never intended. |
Here's how machinima works. The digital environments and objects found in today's computer games are three-dimensional (3D) graphics that are created and composed, in real-time, by computer software (called a "rendering engine") to create a "virtual world" for the game's characters to inhabit. All of the elements: the rooms, the character models (also 3D art), the music, the sound files, are all scripted together by the game program to create the worlds that you spend freakish amounts of time playing in.
Lots of gamers have had fun swapping out audio files in a game to change the sound effects, or importing custom "props," or using the world-building software that comes with many games to create their own game levels, objects, etc. Machinima is basically taking this game "hacking" to a whole new level where you use all of these same game components (and other helper programs) to create your own mini-movies within the game's virtual environment. Machinima can be as simple as re-scripting (and re-"filming") the existing game characters (adding new dialogue for them to speak) or as complicated as importing entirely new characters and props and adding new dialogue, sound effects, even a new soundtrack.
Using the existing tools that come with most current game programs to create mini digital films can be difficult and the results are often crude looking. So, budding machinima directors are starting to create special programs that allow you to more easily and effectively turn game components into movie-making tools.
To learn about how to create machinima yourself and to find available support software, you'll want to check out the premier Web site dedicated to this desktop art form: The Machinima Website. Here you'll find the latest news, how-to articles, discussion forums, and more. The most accomplished and popular films in the genre can also be downloaded here.
Every flourishing art form needs an academy and an awards show. Machinima is no different. The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences holds an annual film and awards festival and does machinima screenings and workshops at gaming conventions. On their Web site, be sure to view the short animated film under "Machinima Info" for an introduction to the technique.
While many machinima creators are just gamers picking up a virtual camera to shoot stuff with after getting tired of shooting bad guys with a virtual gun, it's not all kid stuff. Hollywood studios have even taken notice, not only for the future possibilities of making real-time animation (as opposed to painstaking and expensive frame-by-frame animation), but also as a way of "blocking out" (or testing) scenes for conventional films. Like a storyboard come to life, a director could shoot and re-shoot a scene in a 3D virtual world from every possible camera angle before the real actors ever poked their heads out of their trailers.
So the next time your parents dog you for spending too much time playing computer games, you can tell them that you're planning on being the next Steven Spielberg and you're just busy scouting out film locations.
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