Film Your First Machinima Movie

Film your own virtual worlds.

You don’t have to sell your body to science to make a good film. Yes, Rob Rodriguez did it to make El Mariachi (try not to think too hard about that), but you don’t have to.

Live filming—the part of machinima creation where you make the film, in real time—is the engine behind the purring power of machinima. By taking computer graphics away from the painstaking, slow work of conventional computer animation and into the world of real time—the same world inhabited by Real Film and puppetry—machinima creates a totally new way of making film in a computer. It sacrifices the absolute control and incredible detail of conventional animation for the flexibility and speed needed to tell a long story without giving your life to it.

In a lot of ways, the closest equivalent of what you’re doing when you make live machinima is puppetry, the same kind used by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop or Gerry Anderson. As this implies, yes, every machinima character to date has, in fact, been a complete Muppet.

Put All Your Dominos in a Row

(I’ve never quite understood why project planners had such an obsession with pizza, but anyway . . . )

How do you start this mysterious process? The Strange Company procedure is quite simple:

Put a bunch of computers together in one location.
Network them.
Load up the game we’re using, whether Half-Life, Quake 2, NWN, or whatever, and have everyone join the game as a player.
Persuade people to stop shooting each other.
Assign one or more people the job of cameraman and attach their computers to recording equipment.
Persuade people to stop shooting each other. This can take some time.
Divide up the rest of our team as characters are needed in the scene.
Lights, camera, action. Our cameraman moves to a position in which her viewpoint frames each shot as we want it, while the actors move the characters around, make them speak, and do other actorish things. Meanwhile, the recording computers record the shot onto video ( [Hack #67] ).
Wrap.

Sounds like the setup for a LAN party? You’re right. Live machinima filming is really, really simple; essentially, you’re filming a LAN party.

The Practice of Acting

Machinima’s often fairly hard to understand when described in the abstract, so here’s a concrete example. Here’s a script version of a typical Strange Company machinima recording session:

INTERIOR, DAY--The Strange Company Mansion

A small room filled to bursting with computers in various stages of rebuilding. Hugh--
our handsome, talented, charismatic hero--is fiddling about finalizing a set in 
Neverwinter Nights.

The door opens, and Steve--a Penny Arcade-obsessed Geordie and our assistant for today--
enters.

                        Hugh
Hey. Right, we're shooting Scene 17 today.  Jump on the second PC and load up 
the Dungeon Master client, then connect to my server.

                        Steve
W00t! I am a l33t ha><0r dung30nm4ster d00d!

                        Hugh
Stop that.
Right, give me a moment to make my character invisible, then I'll move the camera 
until I've got our opening shot set up.

Much fiddling and swearing ensues.

                        Hugh
Ok, done. Now, I need you to spawn in as Frodo and start over in that arch (points) 
just out of shot.

Steve sarcastically SALUTES--a gesture lost on Hugh, who can't see him from where 
he's sitting--and clicks to move his unfortunate hobbit victim.

                        Hugh
Right. Now, what I need you to do in this shot is to walk out to here (points on 
screen), then play the "shocked" animation and say, "Oh, no, a pervy hobbit fancier."

                        Steve
Right. I'll bind the animation to the left mouse and the voice chat to the right 
mouse, then.

                         Hugh
Lucky that online voice chat works well. Okay, ready?  I'm starting the recording now.

Hugh walks across the room, clicks to start Adobe Premiere recording the action, then 
dives back to his seat like there's a velociraptor of hard disk usage behind him.

                          Hugh

Action!

Steve clicks. In the game, his character moves across the screen to a perfectly framed 
location, then plays an animation.

                         Frodo
Oh, no! A pervy hobbit fancier!
Hugh hits the "stop" button on Premiere.

                         Steve
w00t! We are 733t ha><0rs!

                         Hugh
Stop that.

They move on to the next shot.

Get That Demon Off My Set!

That’s the basics of machinima filming. Armed with that knowledge, you should be able to make your own little movies straightaway. However, here are a few tips that will help you as your movies grow more involved:

Don’t film over the Internet if you can possibly avoid it.
On a film set, communication is absolutely vital; there are so many things going on, and so many of them are complicated, fragile, and liable to go wrong, that you need to communicate as clearly and precisely as possible. Filming over the Net really doesn’t facilitate this.

If you have to, you can shoot large crowd scenes on the Internet, but for anything involving complex actions or characterization, position your actors so that you can slap them if something goes wrong, at least in a caring way.

Consider your filming setup.
There are many ways to shoot films, handed down to us in history from the Filming Masters Above. The best way to work is to design your shot list (you have a shot list, right?) with as many creative people as you can, concentrating on maximum coverage of your scene from minimum time.

Consider the relative advantages of shooting shot-by-shot with shooting an entire scene for coverage. In the first case, you’ll shoot very small, controlled sections, but you’ll also have very little leeway to change the film in the editing room. If you shoot the entire scene four or five times from various shots, you’ll have a lot more flexibility, but there’s more room for things to go wrong. Even if they do, though, you can probably still use some of the footage.

If you possibly can, have two cameramen working at once. When your actors finally, shockingly, do everything right, doubling your camera coverage will save you time.

Be creative with controls.
The obvious way to control your characters is the standard mouse-and-keyboard WASD setup, with additional keys bound for emotes and lip-syncing. This isn’t necessarily the best way to work. If your game engine will bear it, investigate alternative controls.

Mice, for example, suck eggs when it comes to controlling camera pan or head movement. You can better control your cameras with joysticks, or bind one key to pan and another to change the speed of the pan up or down ( [Hack #66] ). The ILL Clan in New York invested in $20 Nostromo glove sets for controlling their characters’ emotes, giving them up to 90 different available emotions without moving their left hands. Strange Company has had multiple people controlling a single character, with some controlling head movement and others controlling body and face.

Play around. This is a very new art form, and no one’s discovered the best way to do things yet.

Practice, practice cliché.
You won’t do everything, or even most things, right the first time. It will take time for your actors to adapt to controlling characters, time for you to acclimate to directing in a virtual world, and time for your cameramen to realize that, when they’re filming, they can forgo hitting the dodge-left button to avoid invisible rockets.

Before you embark on any major filming, rally your group and spend as much time as possible practicing. You’ll be very glad of it later.

Design your maps with shooting in mind.
Remember, you have all the resources of a computer game at your disposal, designed by up to 100 people over two or more years. Don’t ignore all the cool stuff the game developers have given you.

For example, if you’re shooting in Half-Life, and you need to perform a complex track-and-pan maneuver like the one at the start of The Player, don’t do it by hand! You’ll kill yourself before you succeed. In the movies, the pros use a track setup, essentially a short train track on which they mount their camera on a tripod. What did you see right at the start of Half-Life? Yep, it’s a complex track setup you can easily duplicate in Worldcraft and use as a platform for your camera person!

A common problem DV movies have is a lack of space. Often you hear directors lamenting that they can’t move a wall for one particular shot. You can. Design two versions of your set and forget to include a wall in one of them.

Remember, you’re shooting film in a virtual reality. Make sure to design reality to your best advantage.

Next Step, Garage Kubrick

You’re now well on your way to machinima Spielberg-dom.

For more information on this subject, Machinima.com, as always, has a wealth of information. The “Making Machinima” series at that site covers the same ground as this hack, but in a little more detail. Check out Part 2, which covers filming, at http://www.machinima.com/displayarticle2.php?article=318. The “Technical Info” section has a wealth of knowledge on all sorts of things that relate to filming, find it at http://www.machinima.com/articleselected.php?value=category&id=3.

Previous Chapter

Choose a Machinima Engine

Next Chapter

Improve Your Camera Control

Table of Contents for Gaming Hacks

Film Your First Machinima Movie

Put All Your Dominos in a Row

The Practice of Acting

Get That Demon Off My Set!

Next Step, Garage Kubrick

Table of Contents for
Gaming Hacks