Weekend in Review Part 2: Machinima Festival

Yes, I realize I'm now a week behind.

Machinima festival was really cool and very fun. I went last year, and they outdid themselves this year.

SL Very Visible

I was really happy to see a lot more Second Life interest. Some examples:

• Linden Lab was there, again. But this year, the average person had heard of SL, and I didn't have to go into long-winded explanations of what a virtual world was. Additionally, Linden Lab had more staff on hand.
  
• Second Life films earned 5 nominations for awards, and one winner (congrats Eric from Linden Lab for Silver Bells and Golden Spurs!)
• The comedian for the night (who was about 5x as funny as last year's, great job!) mentioned Second Life a number of times in his routines, and even did enough research to have (censored) pictures of f***ing furries. (If you don't know, don't ask!)
• Electric Sheep streamed the event into SL, which became de facto the official virtual presence of the Festival. Good job, sheepers!

So, all that was very encouraging.

A Couple Discouraging Patterns

There clearly were a host of great winners at this year's Mackies. I was really impressed with the quality of editing and writing that has gone into this year's winners. We're certainly a far cry from Dance, Voldo, Dance.

At the same time, I was also really disappointed at a couple patterns some the awards seemed to take. These two are the desire for realism and the reliance on war as a subject.

Machinima is virtual puppeteering. It's making the best of something not really designed to make movies. Most are made in video games and it's fairly obvious it's not real. According to Machinima.org, Machinima is "filmmaking with a real-time 3-D Virtual environment." Well, if the virtual environment becomes nearly identical to real, and so much of it is done in prep-work and post-editing, what's really different than traditional filmmaking?

The winners this year seemed to reflect that *realism* is the key to winning. Now, I'm certain to have people disagree, but it seems to me that just because something looks real doesn't make it good machinima. Some of this stuff is so heavily choreographed and automated that it is much closer to "traditional" movie CGI than it is machinima.

I'm all for post-production, sure, but I think that if we're going to reward machinima for being super-automated and looking real, heck, we should just make them compete with regular movies and shorts. What's the difference between some of the winners of this year's machinima fest and say, Pixar's latest film? Not much anymore.

A Sign Of Impending Doom for Machinima?

And here's a question I've asked before: What happens when the machinima tools get so good that it's indistinguishable from traditional movie-making CGI? Is that the end of machinima? It would seem to me that if the machinima community wants to ensure its survival as a unique genre, it has to focus on what distinguishes itself from CGI and standard filmmaking.

Take, for example, the loss of Game Over or Trash Talk to Company of Heroes for the award of "Best Virtual Performance: Custom Animation". Let's compare.

Game Over was made in Second Life by one person, with all of the visual elements created from scratch using the Second Life engine and mostly audio post-editing.

Trash Talk is half a dozen folks getting together with premade sets and props, who are able to put together shows live.

Company of Heroes was made by a team of people who work for the same studio who released the game, have access to all the artwork and the platform itself, and who basically used off-the-shelf software with some fancy post-editing.

How then, does Relic Studios win for its own damn promotional video? (Which, by the way, I can't even find available for download on the Net!) How is anything they do with their own platform "custom animation"? For that matter, why aren't all video game commercials submitted automatically for consideration? I'm sorry, but the World of Warcraft Coke Ads and the entire 20 minute episode of South Park's "Make Love, Not Warcraft" pretty much blow away everything in the Machinima Festival, hands down.

or, hm, the feature length Final Fantasy: Advent Children?

The point is - machinima should not be about making the best-looking commercial piece. Again, if it is, then they belong at the Academy Awards or the Cleo Awards. Heck, if we're counting commercial pieces, I'd like to suggest that every single awesome cutscene and opening intro to every single video game with one published should be considered for an award.

"What Machinima Needs is a shot of Estrogen"

As a (male) person at the Machinima Festival said it. War films, war films, war films! Why is it that not only the majority of machinima is war-related, but they dominate the festival's winners? I realize there's a lot of war games out there, but even war games can be used for non-war storylines. It seems us war-hungry males just *have* to have our war-dominated machinima.

Or another idea: Maybe war is popular in the winner's circle at the Festival because the war games tend to *look* more realistic - bringing us back to my original point.

I'm sorry, but at some point, machinima as a genre needs to grow up and realise that piss jokes and missile-out-of-control humor makes for great comedy, but that comedy isn't necessarily what makes a film great.

Throwing Down the Guantlet: A Challenge

I know there's some machinimists out there who read this blog, and some friends of machinimists. Here's my challenge:

Make some machinima that's beautiful, has a great story, clean editing (both visual and audio), and doesn't rely on humor or violence as primary crutches to keep the viewer's interest and isn't made by the same people who made the software/game it's made on. I'll personally pay $250 (US, not L$) as a token prize to the first person who can come up with something that will wow me this way, and I'll also personally promote your machinima on this blog, and to all my machinima friends. Make it at least 5 minutes long, not including credits or title screens. :)

I want to push machinima forward! Let's do it!