This is the original script for the machinima documentary. Writing it was one of the easiest parts of the process: once we had our rough draft of the scenes we would film, I got it all out in one sitting. As you can see, it didn’t change much between the first draft and the finished product. A few lines went on too long and were cut, and one section was too far removed from the structure of the rest of the video to comfortably include it, but on the whole it worked pretty well. I’m not enormously proud of it – I’m not planning to start a career in film scriptwriting just yet – but I think it would be quite good if delivered by a suitable, experienced voice actor.

(more…)

The Board of Transient Spaces presents:

> At Machinima.com

> At GameVideos

This public service message was brought to you by Fraser Allison and Harry Milonas.

If you would like to know more, please consult the documentary contract.

We had our belated showing of the documentary rough cut today. There are a few points of feedback from the esteemed audience, which we’ve added to our post-production tasks list.

To Do:

From rough cut feedback

> Tone down the music in places.

> Vary the music. Try some more “ominous” music in parts. (We’ll give this a go, but keep in mind the tone and constancy of the music is intended to contrast with the violent subject matter of the video game.)

> Review the introduction. It may not be clear that the documentary is primarily about online video games, as opposed to online communities in general. (I’m not convinced this is a significant problem, because there are several cues in the introduction, for those who don’t already know that “griefing” is a game term: the voice-over says “computerised internet video game”; there is a game console above the television; there is a game controller on the bed, which the boy reaches for at one point; and the images themselves are created with a game engine. If these seem too subtle, we may add a more overt cue by Photoshopping a still frame of game footage onto the television screen.)

Already on the list

> Fix the image corruption caused by the Ken Burns effect (if possible).

> Add sound effects (after a test to make sure they add to the film, rather than detract from it).

> Add images of teacher, mailman, policeman and garbage collector.

> Improve the title cards to be more consistent with the 1960s theme.

> Apply an old-film effect to the voice-over.

> Apply an old-film video filter.

> Add credits.

> Upload to Machinima.com and GameTrailers.com.

[Image by Rakka under a Creative Commons license.]

We filmed the TV.

It looks like we filmed the TV.

Here’s a sample.

The six most heartbreaking words in the machinima creator’s language: “You could try filming your TV.”

How did it come to this? How were we reduced to the very bottom layer of the video-capture dungheap: pointing a camcorder at a TV screen? This project will have picture quality the equal of any 25c pirated DVD movie shot from the back row of a cinema.

Over the past month, Harry, I and all four of the techs made a valiant effort to solve the problem of capturing machinima from a game console to a computer. We tried many different cables, two televisions, two computers, hundreds of settings changes and dozens of console-deck-TV combinations. Finally, though, we ran out of other options. (Well, nearly all. Lachlan grimly offered to excavate an arcane video magic box with a German-sounding name out of storage and setting it up for the new computers – a process that was implied would take hours – but the harrowed look on the face of David B. clearly said this was a last resort. With no guarantee it would work, I decided to save them the pain.)

David and Lachlan have assured me that since we’ll be playing the video on an LCD flat screen and taking care with our framing and lighting, the recorded image quality should not be too bad. Unlike the far too common I-filmed-my-TV look for amateur machinima, as seen in the video above.

[Video created by iTzxSkillv2 under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from Halo 3, © Microsoft Corporation.]

Halo 3 can only be played in PAL 60Hz format. The DV deck can only receive video in PAL 50Hz format. Attempting to capture the former with the latter results in a video that looks like the picture above.

The techs don’t know how to fix this, though they’ve promised to have a look. But if we can’t capture the video today, I don’t have enough free time to try again until Thursday, the day before the rough cut is due.

[Image by the author.]

We have solved or found workarounds for all our technical issues – so far – and got a good chunk of our production done today. Most of the “acting” for our videos is done, but not the “filming”. We noted that there’s no equivalent to this stage in live action film-making, where acting and filming are considered inseparable interlocking parts of the same process: without filming the acting isn’t recorded, and without acting the filming is empty. In machinima, the acting can be performed and saved prior to its recording; in fact, in Halo 3, it nearly has to be.

A drawback to this is that it strings out the process, but an advantage is that you only have to worry about one thing at a time. You might need a few takes to get the acting right and a few takes to get the recording right, separately, but you don’t have to re-perform a well-acted scene because the camera operator stuffed up. It also allows you to find the best angle after the action is set in stone, so there’s no guesswork, and to shoot the same scene multiple times from different angles or with different effects.

I’m enjoying this. I’d like to make another machinima once the semester is over, without having to solve all the obscure technical puzzles from scratch.

I’m watching a video series, DigitalPh33r’s Guide to Making Halo 3 Machinima. So far it’s an excellent, no-bullshit guide with plenty of funny interludes to keep it interesting. I’ll take notes of some key points while I watch.

Part One

> Halo 3, with its Theatre mode, is the only console game with enough flexibility to make a decent machinima. On PC, Half-Life 2 is the best, but you have to learn how to use the developer’s scripting tools. (If only I’d watched this video a month ago, we could have saved so much time…)

> If the machinima looks too much like regular gameplay, it’s boring to watch. To make a good machinima, you have to forget the principles of gameplay and think about the principles of cinema. (The dull video of griefers bombing a funeral in World of Warcraft is proof of that.)

> Microsoft’s Game Content Usage Rules:

Microsoft grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use and display Game Content and to create derivative works based upon Game Content, strictly for noncommercial and personal use. We can revoke this limited use license at any time and for any reason.

If you share your Items with your friends or post them on your web site, then we’d also like you to include the following notice about the Game Content. You can put it in a README file, or on the web page from where it’s downloaded, or anywhere else that makes sense so long as anyone who sees your Item will also find this notice.

[The title of your Item] was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from GAMENAME, © Microsoft Corporation.

> He covers audio copyright issues, but points out that thousands of videos and flash animations have been published on the web using unlicensed music and nobody seems to mind as long as it’s not for profit. (Harry and I will be using a mix of audio from Halo 3 itself, covered under Microsoft’s allowed usage rules, and audio in the public domain, as part of our Public Service Announcement theme.)
(more…)

Harry and I are in dangerous territory with our machinima documentary. Jenny is reminding us we should be in post-production, but we’re only up to production.

First, we ran into a series of technological brick walls in capturing our footage. We underestimated the challenge and overestimated our competency as machinima creators; we were like actors who thought we knew how to shoot a film because we’d “worked in movies”. We finally think we have a workable process now, at the end of week nine. Touch wood.

Second, in the week that we had planned to get the majority of our shooting done, I caught a bad case of flu and couldn’t get myself together enough to write a script, let alone shoot a collaborative video series.

We’re hard at work, but there’s little time left. It might be time to think about asking for an extension… Certainly the scope of our ambition has narrowed a bit.

In the Escapist issue on griefing that Harry and I mentioned the other day, there’s an article that poses a counterpoint to the traditional style of aggravated griefing: War and Peace by James McGrath. McGrath writes about griefers who don’t go in for the team-killing, kill-stealing and spawn-camping that is the bread and butter of traditional griefers, but instead go into online war games and stage peace protests.

Some of these peaceful acts of griefing involve simply preventing people from killing each other. In an online shooter match, for example, throwing flashbang grenades between two combatants to blind them, or spending the entire match hiding in an obscure spot and telling all your opponents that you’ve decided to become a pacifist.

Other protests are overtly political, harking back to real anti-war protests: getting a large group of players to stand in the shape of a heart, for example, in a low-lying area where they can be seen from above, or putting anti-war images (“sprays”) up on the walls of the combat zone.

WIRED magazine also has an article about peaceful griefing from way back in 2002: Make Love, Not War Games.

[Image copyleft Anne-Marie Schleiner.]

How should we conclude our documentary series? Does it need an overt conclusion, as in Passive Aggressive Email Boxing?

I’m inclined to think we don’t need a formal conclusion. The subject matter speaks for itself, and wouldn’t be well served by a Jerry Springer-style Final Thought. It would be a little farcical to try to give a neatly packaged wrap-up of griefers: besides the difficulty of summarising such a widespread and diverse “community”, there’s the fact that griefers are inherently anarchic and contrary by nature, not appreciative of attempts to categorise and explain them. Plus they’d laugh at us.

However, we will need a finishing note for each episode. Thirty Minutes To Move is a good example: closure is subtly provided by the family walking out of the house and getting in the car.

UPDATE: Of course! Our videos will be bracketed by Public Service Announcement-style clips. So the introduction and conclusion are taken care of. I can’t believe I didn’t think about it like this.

[Image by CURSIVEBUILDINGS under a Creative Commons license.]

Here’s bridging capital for you: I responded to a question about machinima on a game website, mentioned I’m co-producing a machinima with Garry’s Mod, and got a reply from the site’s video producer suggesting some alternative software tools, FacePoser and Hammer, and offering to answer any questions about machinima.

It may be too late in the piece for us to start learning new software programs (especially ones described as having “a much steeper learning curve wrought with crashes and frustration”), but reading up on them has still been intriguing. They’re designed specifically for cinema-style character interactions, instead of image posing and contraption construction as is Garry’s Mod.

[Image by ekai under a Creative Commons license.]

In testing shots for the machinima documentary, we found some of our planned shots a little unwieldy. In particular, we were going to frame many shots with a narrator standing in the foreground speaking directly to the camera and multiple characters interacting in the background. This is just too hard to frame, especially with the speaker taking up precious screen real estate and the difficulty for the “actors” to judge what’s visible to the camera and what’s not.

We also had some qualms at the beginning of the project that delinquency is an old-fashioned theory; Travis Hirschi’s landmark book Causes of delinquency was first published in 1969.

We’ve decided to play up the old-fashioned aspect by giving the video an old-footage effect, as in the video above (from the videogame Fallout 2). We’ll remove the on-screen narrator and use an unseen voice-over in an old-fashioned voice style – not so dissimilar to the Social Capital for Businesspeople video Jenny played in the lecture. This should also allow us to use more simplistic, static camera angles in keeping with the old movie style, which are far easier to produce in our machinima software than anything more dynamic or contemporary.

This Homestar Runner video uses a similar old-fashioned movie for comic effect.

One of the reasons machinima is an inherently funny genre is that the images used come pre-loaded with expectations and associations from their games. The Gman Squad works because it’s taking the taciturn, menacing, unperturbable figure of Half-Life’s G-man and turning him into a pack of screaming buffoons. Portal: A Day in the Life of a Turret works because it takes the cute-but-menacing automated turrets and turns them into foul-mouthed bickering nerds (with a cameo by the beloved Companion Cube – here a smack-talking jock asshole).

Freeman’s Mind is a series that simply plays through the game Half-Life, but adding an audio narration for the protagonist, Gordon Freeman. Freeman is a famous example of the silent protagonist, by implication a cool and level-headed character; the series plays off that by narrating his thoughts as a geeky and annoying stream-of-consciousness, making him seem dorky and easily startled. On seeing a robot worker stomp past in the background: “Oh cool! A robot! … Man, look at that thing! … Man, robots rule! Pneumatics rule! … That’s awesome.”

For the griefers documentary series, each episode will have a topic that relates to the theory of delinquency (or closely related ideas in criminology). Possible topics include:

> General definition of delinquency: “A delinquent is one who fails to do that which is required by law or by duty when such failure is minor in nature” (from Wikipedia).
Our question: What is griefing? An introduction.

> Rational choice theory: people choose to commit crimes when they consider the risks and rewards and judge it to be a rational decision.
Our question: Is griefing a rational activity?

> Strain theory: delinquency is a form of rebellion by people who have difficulty achieving socially respected goals by legitimate means.
Our question: Are griefers just crap at games?

> Subcultural theory: people who have difficulty achieving socially respected goals form their own subcultures which value different things.
Our question: Is griefing a communal thing?

> Differential association: delinquents learn their behaviour from delinquent peers.
Our question: Do griefers try to recruit innocent n00bs into their griefer gangs?

> Labelling theory: people behave in a delinquent fashion because they’ve been labelled as trouble makers.
Our question: Are the people we call “griefers” really just misunderstood innocents, naively acting out a role that’s been assigned to them, who would become lovely and docile if they were only treated as responsible adults? (This could be hilarious.)

> Delinquency as a result of masculinity: men are driven to be delinquents by their genetics or social expectations.
Our question: How many griefers are female? (Alternatively: R THEIR NE GIRLZ ON TEH HALO????)

Much inspiration from this post was drawn from Wikipedia.