Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterFields & Frames
Mar 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
With millions of digital camcorders and mega-size screens now being sold to consumers, lots of low-cost NLE software hitting the marketplace, and Google's willingness to help you sell your masterpiece, some posit that we're entering a golden age of creativity, the sort of place where TC Mits (The common man in the street — with a tip o' the hat to George Gamow) will eagerly create and share his vision. ▸ Nah. Never happen, I thought. But then I remembered the growing Machinima scene on the Web. ▪ With the release of Quake in 1996, Id Software decided to support the game's legions of fans by offering up its realtime Quake III 3D graphics engine. Now gamers and others — if they could handle the coding — could employ it to create new scenes or entire new levels for the game. ▸ Tweakers quickly found out, however, that the tool also enabled them to create characters and scenes independent of the game. That's the beginnings of Machinima. ▸ The Quake game engine works a bit like Star Trek's Holodeck, plopping users into a virtual, interactive space, where they compose via scripts, or with the aid of the software's artificial intelligence. ▴ But with the release of Activision's The Movies last year (players are urged to “make it big in Hollywood by building the ultimate movie studio”), the Machinima underground started to grow beyond gamers and code hackers. Since the Activision game contains a dedicated Machinima-building toolset, users don't just strategize over the building of a successful movie studio — they make the movie that's central to the studio's success. ▸ Players access a basic, but competent, previz-like app, dropping 3D characters into pre-built sets, staging scenes by manipulating body movements and facial expressions, and adding sound or subtitles. ▸ The new app was quickly picked up by users who didn't have the time, money, or expertise to make a film, but still wanted to use the format. For example, the 13-minute story The French Democracy, about last year's French riots, quickly gained an audience for its creator, who lives in Paris near the scene of the riots and wanted to make sure others knew the reasons behind the events. ▴ Another innovative approach to new gen filmmaking comes from Michela Ledwidge, a London-based filmmaker and interactive media designer. She recently posted all the elements for Sanctuary, a 10-minute sci-fi movie, online for visitors to remix and edit as they desire. Her Mod Films website contains about nine hours of 35mm-originated production footage, along with sound effects, dialogue, storyboards, concept drawings, and still photos. Site visitors can download her Switch software and use it to mod her original material. ▸ Ledwidge actually has more radical notions beyond just enabling random site visitors the pleasure of rolling their own. As she notes on her site, she sees her efforts as part of a new production paradigm: “The key will be the exploitation of new means of leveraging film assets instead of throwing them away after a film is released. In this way, films can become their own commercial production libraries.”
