Probably the last person to announce their result, I was very pleased to find out when I returned home on the weekend, that BEAST had won best drama in the Online Machinima Film Festival held in Second Life. It was only in the running for that one award, so I feel very lucky indeed. This is also the first festival (albeit virtual) that a Binary Picture Show film has recieved an award in and that has been a big boost to us. Thanks to everyone who contributed to our win.
In addition to that, BEAST has also been nominated for the Machinima award in this years Bitfilm festival! The real honour here is that there has been a GREAT selection of films for that category, so while it makes it much tougher for us to win it's really great for BEAST just to be standing along side the others. Any BPS fans please give us that helping hand and rate the film if you can, it's an audience decided award.
Thirdly as some of you might have read elsewhere, 3D Wolrd Magazine issue 104 had a six (or so) page feature on Machinima, and BEAST was a big part. It's most definately our best appearance in a magazine to date we're really proud of it!
I miss the simple times when everything was easier.
When Machinima first started, things were simpler because the games were simpler. Modding was easier and the audience generally understood that a lot of imagination was required from them for the film to make any kind of sense. If a gun looked more like a baguette, or if a tree looked more like a brown trident with green safety tips, it didn't matter. You got a pass. Granted, the technical side of Machinima was shaky ground and for almost all of us there was a big learning curve in that respect, but creatively we got away with murder.
Custom animations were so rare even after a while, that bobbing characters' bodies backwards and forwards was an acceptable substitute for emoting. If the camera was on a character while you heard a voice, your imagination did the lip sync.
The reason I'm taking you back in time is because of my own feelings of distance from the naive 18 year old boy I was when Machinima began changing me. Back then the sky truly was the limit. There was no such thing as "start small" dammit, if I could imagine the film I could create it - such is Machinima's power - all hail the new king!! To me there was no difference between what we were doing and what the guys at Pixar were doing (yeah, I know). What they did was CGI, and as far as I was concerned we had the same. I didn't take into account any of the many things we ignored as game players. Foot sliding, frame skipping, bad quality sound, cuboid heads, awkward poses (really, removing the gun from the character's hand and leaving him in that weird pose made him look even weirder) were all absorbed by our blind spot, and since only players of the games would watch the stuff, the majority of us were ignorant to this whole galaxy of omissions and short cuts.
Computer games went from 1 man projects to multi million dollar ventures, and since it's birth Machinima too has moved on in great leaps. Not only technically, but creatively. In order for the larger world to accept out creations we had to construct our films using a more universal (often cinematic) language, not just the visual colloquialisms of Quake, Half-life, or Unreal tournament (or any of the many other games engines for that matter).
As a result we now have a much better ability to tell those stories. BEAST, for example, could simply not have been told in Quake 1 or 2 with the original conventions of Machinima (so much so that it just wouldnt be the same film). What really frightens me now is the idea that this increased ability to visually present ideas might be vastly greater than my ability to actually TELL a richer and more complex story. When I wrote short shorts, it was so simple. I would have an aim, come up with a scenario, and present the ideas and thoughts that proceeded, all in one scene. That's the hook. Simple ideas, one (or at least only few) scenes. There were no grand arcs to consider, no deliberations over scene order, much less worry about pace and lasting cohesion, the list goes on.
Last night I finished writing the story for Digital Memory, the Science Fiction film we will hopefully begin producing soon. I looked at the page and thought "Man, this is gonna be one hard film to make". I suddenly felt much like I did all those years ago, just after realising for the first time that simply having an idea and lots of enthusiasm just isn't enough. It was when an old friend and I wanted to make our first Machinima film, which unsurprisingly turned into a feature length story. Young dumb and full of cum, we somehow thought we could magically get through production of all the scenes and still have time in our young lives to get girlfriends. "All hail the new king" right? WRONG!!!
Along with imaginative ideas we need tenacity, self confidence, a work ethic, time (lots of it), money (a better computer can let you have the number of characters you need!), and a nice little bag of skills. I hate how the lovely song this siren sings often makes me forget some of the hard learned lessons from my (simpler) early days. Or is it that I CAN'T forget the short comings I had back then, and they live on strong and vibrant in the form of my current insecurities?
Back in the simpler times these kind of thoughts couldn't slow me down because they didn't exist. And I can't even be angry about it. The ambition to make the next film better than the last is how we improve.
By comparison, formulating new plans for the technical execution of this film has been much easier than creating the story. I could choose to make a different, simpler film, or I can choose to stay with the harder story that constantly swims in my mind and refuses to be left untold. Let's hope it all works out.
Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 11:40 AM | 0 Comments
As promised, these notes, though written after the films production, will try to explain some of the creative decisions behind Beast. I’ve already made a couple of posts regarding it’s significance in terms of facial animation in Machinima, so I’ll leave out the technical stuff.
As many already know, Beast was made in an attempt to make the audience engage strongly with a Machinima film. I would say it’s designed to evoke an emotional response more so than most Machinima films so was very difficult to make. Many Machinima artists are familiar with making comedy or action whereas is this is something much less practiced for many of us. First of all the idea behind the film is something many people feel strongly about as revenge is a well visited theme in cinema. Some of you may have watched the film and found that it reminded you very much of certain others and in fact it’s heavily inspired by Park Chan-wook’s 'Vengeance Trilogy': Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. It may also have reminded you of other films like Reservoir Dogs and maybe Se7en, the list could probably go on and on.
While the film is nothing revolutionary in terms of storytelling it was a massive challenge not only because of the limitations often experienced in Machinima, but also because it was meant to exist as a short story and as such needed to be kept concise, potentially compressing a feature length story into a five minute film. This means the film’s objectives had to be laid out clearly and while I didn’t want the audience to understand what was happening immediately, I had to make sure the film wasn’t too confusing at any point.
The script was divided into four sections I called the introduction, the banter, the reveal, and the revenge and it was in these sections the very short growth of the characters was to take place. The opening of the scene is something that is very easy to recognize as borrowed from some of the inspirations that I mentioned above. The beauty of having Skiff tide up is that it placed the man in a position of complete power and control. This automatically makes the viewer start to ask questions, which are further compounded by the man asking a question that must doubtlessly be running through Skiff’s mind. Not “Where am I?” but “Who is this man?” and “Why am I here?”. With the introduction over there was only the ‘banter’ section left for the audience to glean what kind of people these characters where before the film changed. I think this is where the bonds with, or dislike of the characters is best made. Some might think this is something that really happens in the ‘reveal’, but in reality the reveal doesn’t give you much choice as far as emotions go. It set the Man up as the victim and Skiff as the bad guy –period. In the banter there was more room to maneuver and the characters have a chance to judge each other in addition to us deciding who was good or bad at this point. Of course the reveal is where the heartstrings are ultimately pulled yet where the ambiguity many people have expressed feeling also seems to come in. The Man’s story is obviously a sad one, but it’s afterwards that we seem to see a change in Skiff’s character, and the abrupt move on to the revenge section snatches his ability to show any remorse or verbally express any possible feelings of regret. That’s great if you’re on the man’s side, but for those in the audience who anticipated an option for forgiveness or defiance - that is snatched away. At the film’s release event, at The Machiniplex someone even brought up the possibility that this wasn’t the man who committed the crime and that it may have been a case of mistaken identity. While I think that’s a stretch, it’s none the less one possibility that the viewer might be left exploring due to the sudden change of pace. This isn’t how things were planned originally. My first idea was to make the man gradually decend into a rage during the reveal, but I felt that the energy during the revenge wouldn’t have the same high. The last aim was to hint at a feeling of emptiness in the man after Skiff had been killed. This is what I thought would ultimately make the story a tragedy: the fact that although the man had now succeeded in his long-term aim, he was at a dead end rather than relieved or satisfied. This in turn could raise further questions for the viewer. What now? Where will he go? Can he rebuild his life? Does he deserve to? This is why in the end, despite the films burrowed premise, and somewhat familiar scene of the “guy tied to a chair” it was difficult to craft.
If anyone would like to find out even more, Ricky Grove has written quite a bit about the film, over at the Machiniplex blog.
Thursday, September 20, 2007 at 7:23 AM | 0 Comments
Well, Beast is finally out and from the response it received at its premiere all its aims where met. For those who haven't yet seen it, here's the youtube upload.
The time spent working on the story was worth it, and it has indeed turned out to be an emotional film. As such the facial animation played a key role and as someone who's watched it without, it makes a big difference. Of course the time spent trying to get it done in time for the Europe Machinima fest wasn't worth it, as it didn't get nominated but I'm hoping this flic is of a level that will see a Binary Picture Show film doing alright at other festivals. Thanks a lot to the guys at Machiniplex.com for organising the release event, and you can see a high quality stream of it over there, or at Stage6. Stay tuned cause I should soon be posting some notes on the film's production for those interested in how the creation process went.
