Machinima

creating machinima is not as easy as it sounds. machinima is the name given to using a video game engine to replicate scenes from films or create new stories. it uses the pre-determined movements of a character, whether it be hand motions, mouth and body movement, or both, to make it appear as if the character itself is speaking. one of the first and most notable machinimas to acheive success in this field was red vs. blue, which told the stories of the player-controlled characters in the game halo.

nowadays basic machinima is everywhere, and a large part of it comes from the massively multiplayer online game world of warcraft. this is the game engine our group decided to use for its scene, which we took from the movie clerks. it’s the scene where dante and randall are discussing which of the star wars movies is better, the empire strikes back or return of the jedi. the original scene is here. we chose world of warcraft because it would be easy to get started, it had a wide variety of emotes (little expressions each character makes when you press a button) and it would make for an overall easy project.

even with the 10-day free trial of wow, getting started was no picnic. the way the trial works is blizzard lets you download the entire game to your computer for free, so that when you become addicted you don’t have to download anything else after you give them your credit card number. right off the bat world of warcraft has a file size over three gigs, and downloading that takes hours. once it was finally done and i started the game, i immediately had to download the latest patches and updates. this was another hurdle because i was using the wireless on campus and got kicked off the internet about halfway through. when i restarted that night, when we were actually going to work on the project, it took at least another hour to finish downloading the rest of the updates. when that was all done and i was able to finally get into the game, we first designed a character who was a tauren, which looks like an upright bull. unfortunately, he started off in a distant part of the world from where we were shooting, so i redesigned him as an undead to have him closer to where he needed to be.

actual shooting went off without a hitch, we were given directions and simply followed them. where we had trouble was with editing. we were using windows movie maker, which comes standard on windows machines and is therefore a piece of crap. the program crashed the computer we were using at least three times while we were editing. also, due to some weird property about windows media player, it’s impossible to get a simple screenshot for storyboarding purposes. instead of capturing a screenshot, it captures the video where it is at that point in time. if the video is still playing, it shows it as playing, even when the picture is in paint or photoshop. closing windows media player results in the picture being a black screen. fortunately, we discovered that in movie maker we could take a real screenshot of the preview player, which shows how the film looks so far. from that i was able to do the storyboarding, which was easy enough, but obviously, getting there wasn’t.

all in all i think it came out pretty nicely, and we never experienced an incredibly major setback, just some small snags along the way. i had fun, which i suppose is the most important part of all… oh, and the final product is right here.