Making Movies with Machinima

not at home. I don't want to leave anyone out, all of you, all of you at work who should be working. But instead of listening to us, thank you very much, why don't we get started? Okay, So to start this off, I thought we would go to our tried and trusted method of reading a little a listener mail. And this a listener mail comes from Mori. Mori says, Hey, guys, lately, I've become obsessed with the Machinima web series Red Versus Blue and was wondering where Machinima started and how it's made.

I'm sure many others have suggested this to you, but I think it would make a great topic for you guys to talk about your dedicated listener morey Well, Mari, actually you're the first person to bring this one up. Yep. Ever, no, I mean for us, But I actually wrote how machinima works. And I too, am a fan of Red Versus Blue. And I'm just going to let you talk because up until today when we were doing research for the podcast, I hadn't even never even seen an episode of Red

Versus Blue. But you had at least seen some machinima, right, like maybe a code Monkey video or something. Well, yeah, okay, and I wasn't thinking of that. All right, Well, let's let's define what maschinima is before we get started. Okay. So, massinema is essentially using an existing computer generated world and sometimes characters to create stories. Yes, machine animation, machinema, yep.

But it's not like regular you know, computer animation. No, because all the work for building that world and building the graphics has been done for you. You are actually using a pre existing product to create your stories. Yeah. It's almost like, uh, you know, using one of those kits that you might find in uh, you know, a

piece of movie making software. You know, you've already got the pieces you already get the camera angles and the and the characters and and those things, but rather than using the toolbox that comes with that kind of software,

you're actually using games. And uh, it actually can take a couple different forms, right, I mean it could be basically your recording of the actions, uh, you know in the games that permit it, um, you know, recording of the the actions of the characters, and then basically making up a story to go with that, or actually taking uh those pieces and making your own from scratch, which

it seems would be a bit harder. It might be a bit harder, but in my experience, those tend to be the most enjoyable ones to watch, because it's not like, uh, you're trying to force words to fit the action. You've already created the action and now you're or you already created the words, and now you're you're creating the action around it. Um. It's a lot like a puppet show.

I mean, it really is most similar to puppetry because you have players who are manipulating or actors if you prefer, manipulating characters on the screen using controls, and the characters are responding appropriately, and then by doing that you can create scenes, and by stringing scenes together, you can actually tell a story. Now the recording of video games, that's not new. A lot of people have been doing that

for quite some time. There were people who would videotape, say a speed run through a video game, like let's say someone is really really good at super Mare Brothers and wants to videotape ah, an attempt to complete the game as fast as humanly possible and uh and would you know, videotape that upload it to YouTube or some other service, and that would be that. So that's one step. Yeah, I mean there are tons and tons of walkthroughs for all kinds of games, not not you know, not just

the kinds that you would make machinim out of. I mean there are you know, this is how you play Level six, you know, all kinds of stuff. There's actually, yeah, even more now that you have things like achievements in Xbox three sixty and you've got you've got entire websites.

And in fact, Rooster Teeth, the company that produces Red Versus Blue, they have a separate product they call Achievement Hunter, where they show how to achieve certain achievements in Xbox three sixty games so you can go and watch a video and that they explain it that way. So, yeah, you have the these which are instructional. They're not telling a story, and they're not using the game in any

way that it wasn't meant to be used before. And in fact, several games even include the ability to record footage within the game itself, like Quake. That would be the example that actually that's kind of what started machinima off in the first place. So let you have the game Quake that allowed you to to record short snippets of gameplay, usually so you could brag it to people about, Hey,

look how many people I sniped in this game or whatever. Right, But then you had a group of people who got very clever and they said, hey, how about we use Quake this. You know, we can record stuff. Let's record um a little story. And they did, and that was the beginning of what became machinima. People said, hey, you know, that's an idea. We can actually create what looks to be a computer generated animated film, but we don't have to develop any of the environments or characters. We don't

have to create any of the animations. All we have to do is write the story and acted out and then we're done. The game will do everything else for us. And uh, I mean it sounds easy when you put it like that. There a lot of different barriers you have to get through while you're creating it. I could think of a major one. What's that Basically you can't shoot anything as part of your movie that doesn't actually already exist in the game. Yeah, that's um without without

any post production. That is true. If you are going to shoot your story using a game, you are relying upon the uh the environments and the objects and the characters that the the game developers have provided to you. Now, there are some games that have very big communities where the communities actually are allowed to submit new items for the game. The SIMS does that. Several other games do that as well, where you can actually develop and build an object and then imported into the game and even

offer it to other people. So there are ways around it. Sorry I didn't go ahead. I was going to point out that actually a lot of it uh e A stuff like especially along the Maxis line, like the sims UM you know, spore basically spores one giant uh community as part of the game, you have to basically have an Internet connection, and um, you can find other people's

creations as you play, as you run into other species. Basically, the chances really great that you're going to run into something that somebody else created as part of the you know, the startup of the game when you're creating new creatures, and uh, I remember back in some City days when I used to play the game that, uh, you know, later versions of the game would let users create new buildings and you can import those into the game, which

was kind of cool. Um, So, I mean, it just sort of seems like machinima is just sort of a a logical next step where you would, you know, build on the community. Yeah, and a lot of games do support that, not all of them, of course, Just like several games have the ability to to set a camera anywhere in the game. Here's some other cool things about

machinima that you know, you can't do in the real world. Okay, with a lot of games, you can break the laws of physics, right, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can. You can. You can have you can set a camera on the ceiling and you don't have to worry about securing it. There it just it'll stay there because you told it that's where it belongs. With a camera on the ceiling. Oh oh that hurts, I'm having a video flashback. Or you can put it in a corner. Nobody puts

baby in the corner, but you could put a camera there. Um, so you can. But the new thing is you can put the camera anywhere. You can put it in the middle of the sky and it's gonna be fine because you know, if you tell it that's where it needs to be, that's where it's gonna be. No, no, not every game supports this, I should add some games do, some games don't. But for a game that does, it gives you unlimited options of where you set your camera. You can do as many different angles as you like,

and you can get some really cool effects. Now, other games you have to obey whatever the game's rules are. You can't ness necessarily create a camera, and you may actually have to have one player act as the camera, capture that player's view and use that as the main view. Now, that's how Red Versus Blue works. One of the characters that's in the game that you never see is the camera. The camera's looking around and the point of view of

that character becomes your view into the world. Now. It also means that when they want to do things like crane shots or aerial shots, they have to come up with really clever ways of doing it. For example, for a crane shot, they would have the camera man jump on the end of the tanks turret and they would have someone sit in the tank and then slowly raise the tourret to the right level, and there's your crane shot. For the aerial shot, they would have someone jump on

a bansheet. They'd fly the banshee up into the air and the cameraman would very carefully perch there and capture the footage. And of course this could cause some problems down the line if you if you just accidentally twitched the controller just a little bit, you fall off and then your shots ruined. Um. But the nice thing is if your cameraman dies, he responds in thirty seconds, so unlike real life, where you know it takes longer than that.

I mean, you can't respond at all. Uh So you know there's no report of you know, six people died during the shooting of this, but hey, they're all back alive now. No, it's more like the report from mashinimas this one guy died six times while doing that, right as opposed to six people die. You know, I got a question for you, Um, so are they playing as as in the case of Red Worst Blue, where they're

actually playing the game. Are they playing online with you know, where anybody could run into them, because that would mean that it would be very difficult to control the action that you're seeing in the film. Point But how but they're playing together with multiple people. What what they're doing is they've set up a land. They've yeah, they've hooked up multiple Xbox machines, and so that puts a limit on how many people you can have in a scene

right there. Um, if they do any network stuff, it would have to be a completely closed party system, because otherwise you would have all these people just randomly pop up and you would have all these different little messages popping up on the screen. That would be that would ruin your shot. So life where you know, somebody stumbles into the show like, oh my gosh, it's you guys,

I'm so sorry. I think it'd be more like he'd stumble into the shot and then be like, Okay, I'm gonna snipe Sarge, and then I'm gonna snipe Caboose, and then I'm gonna snipe Church because boy, he deserves it. And uh, these are all characters from Red Versus Blue, and uh yeah, I think, um, my experience with people online pretty much means that instead of being silly, they're

gonna first they're gonna kill you. Then they're gonna be silly so you get you get shot first, and then they do whatever their little victory dance happens to be, which usually is involves them crouching right over your face, sadly and simply. I think they do that in real life too, crouching over your face. I don't want to know what you're doing this weekend, Chris. Let's just move on.

So again, Missinema is another way of telling stories. And the important thing here to remember is that, I think for for the most successful missinema folks out there, the thing that comes first is the story. And uh that means that you know, if you have a story and it's worth telling, it doesn't really matter how you tell that, it just matters that it gets told. And massinema is

just one tool that's available to you. And then the cool thing about missinema is it's a tool that allows you to go to places, to have sets, and to have special effects that you could never do in practical terms, you know, things that you know, the average movie maker, amateur movie maker, i should say, has no hope of achieving on his or her own without such a tool. But with mishinima, you can go into other space. You

can you know, have all these cartoonish characters. You can have these huge routes that you would never are actually see in real life, all interacting in different ways. So it really opens up a huge number of options for

you as a filmmaker. Well, Um, one of the things that as I was reading your article, Um, one of the things that I found really compelling was the legal issues behind all of this, because you know, you are using someone else's art, and uh, you know, it seems like in one way it might be good for the gaming companies because it's drawing a lot of attention to the game. You might say, Hey, those characters look interesting. I wonder what game they're from, and you know, it

looks like a lot of fun. I might check that out. Versus the need to protect copyright and intellectual property and stuff. Yeah, that's that's one thing to keep in mind if you ever decide to take on a machinima project for yourself, it's good to find out if the company has any sort of the company that makes the game, if they have any sort of policy on that kind of thing. Some companies are totally cool about it, and like Bungee that makes Halo or used to anyway before the whole

Microsoft thing. Um, Bungee was incredibly supportive of the roost Rooster Teeth people when they were making Red Versus Blue, and they could have gone the other way. They could have said, hey, you know, that's our intellectual property that you're messing with there, and yeah, your your jokes are all funny and everything, but um, please stop because that's our work. But they didn't. They said this is great, um,

have fun, and they even got behind it. They even contracted the Rooster Teeth people to make official Halo videos as promotional tools for things like when Halo two and

Halo three came out. So it pays to do your research before you go and start making your project, because the one thing you don't want to have happen is to create something that people love and is genuinely getting some success and then get penalized for it, right, And that's that's just terrible when you poured your heart and soul into a project and then you're told by a company, Hey, you can't do that, and if you keep doing that, I'm going to sue you for X amount of dollars. Yeah, yeah,

I can't count how many times? Never mind, um so at least three since Wednesday. So what would you recommend for someone who wants to start doing this? They say, you know, I'm I'm willingly give this a try, you know, at least to see how complicated it is. I mean, what do you need? Do you need basically just the game console and and and a computer? Said that you can dump the stuff into the computer and do some editing, or I mean, does this need a really complex expensive rig.

It kind of depends on what games you're using, and it depends on what your ultimate um goal is, and also depends on how high your standards are. Frankly for

a production. Uh, if you're using a game that has an in game capture system where you can create you know, cameras, third person cameras and capture the the images there, you may not need anything other than and the computer, a few copies of the game so that everyone who's participating can you know, essentially act on the scene, and probably I would say, some video editing software so that you

can add audio tracks in later. In my experience, trying to capture audio while doing these things doesn't work very well. I wouldn't imagine so well for one and for one thing, it's just hard to concentrate on, oh, this is my line, and then I have to move over here, and I have to waive the gun, and if you're doing all of that all at the same time, it gets it

gets pretty complicated. If, however, you do what a lot of what practically every animator does, which is you record the vocal tracks first, and then you have those to work off of while you're creating the scene, it makes it a lot easier. So you need some software to capture the vocal tracks. You'll need some microphones obviously um so microphones and the software to capture the vocal tracks.

You'll need the copy of the game. If it does not have in game video capture software included, you will need to find a tool to allow you to do that, something to record the video output from that, right, and in all, if it's a console system, you're gonna probably need something so that you can hook the console up to your computer to capture that footage, because most console games don't have the the record feature built in, at

least not until fairly recently. Um, since the achievement Hunter stuff has really taken off, there have been some a lot of games to include some sort of recording software so that you can record particularly spectacular wipeouts or whatever, and then upload dumps so that people can enjoy watching your character catch fire as these flipping through the air screaming um, which I find endlessly entertaining by the way. Um,

So yeah, there's a huge variety. I mean, it goes from as simple as you can get with if you wanted to record everything in game and you're happy with that quality, there's that level, and then there's the whole all right, I need video and audio editing soft where I need microphones, I need maybe even creating a little sound studio. The Red versus Blue guys, they started off by setting aside a closet, coding it in foam, and shutting the voice actors into the closet to record their

lines and they're done that. Yeah, yeah, I have been there. I am looking at one of those right now. Yeah. In our podcast studio, we have a little corner set aside for sound booth stuff. And the sound booth is is really not much more than a glorified closet. It's it's comfortable and safe in there, actual custom built it is I have. I've actually stood in a you know, an actual cultural class like the egg carton foam. Yeah. Well that's how the Red versus Blue guys started. So, um, yeah,

you can start with a pretty small investment. But if you want something that's gonna really be snazzy and and have you know, nice titles and things like that, you're gonna want some video software, video editing software, and some audio editing software. Um. For those people who think I have an anti Mac bias, I actually recommend Max for this kind of work. I think that Max, I think I think Max are great machines for editing media. Um. I edit all my media for all of my personal projects.

I do all of that editing on a Mac. So you're admitting that your anti Mac bias is just a faux anti Mac bias for now, but I'll bring it up again later some other podcasts, you know it. Yeah, they'll never die. Well, Um, the audio equipment and I've always worked with UM. Now I don't own a whole lot of it myself, um, but I do have access to studios and just about everybody I know he uses a Mac. But um, you can use PCs for it.

Certainly you're playing a complications out there for it. Yeah. Yeah, just can get a little expensive, you know, getting all the getting the soundboard and the mics and all that stuff. Probably want to start small, and it seems like you wouldn't exactly be looking to put these in Hollywood anyway, probably. I mean. The strange thing is is that for the really popular ones, some of them have been shown at

at film festivals or at at other big events. So there have been some cases where stuff that was made on an Xbox with some guys who just thought of some funny jokes while they were playing some some video games have been shown to a full, full theater audience, which is pretty impressive when you think about But that's the other nice thing about machinima is it's another way for the average person to really break into a creative industry that traditionally was really closed off. I mean, you

had to have phenomenal luck to get into the entertainment industry. Um. Yeah, connections or luck or some combination thereof. But if you have enough talent, patients and and some you know, good old fashioned effort to put together a really good machinema project, you can get a lot of attention and and even make a living off of it. Yeah. And uh, I mean especially considering the amount of money that you might

have to spend. Again. And the underneat thing is that Mishinima has introduced me to a lot of stuff that I never would have really found out about otherwise. What Jonathan Colton, Uh yeah, Well, so when I was writing how Massinima works, um, one of our fellow writers, Tracy Wilson, wrote to me and said, Hey, have you seen this music video. It's a Mishinima music video. And it was a Mishinima music video to Jonathan Coulton's song Code Monkey, and it used the world of Warcraft right, And so

I watched the music video. I was immediately enchanted by to use a world of warcraft kind of term. I was immediately enchanted by the the both the song and the video itself. The video was just really cute. It was really well done and sweet, and so is the song. And um, without it, I never would have found out who Jonathan Coulton was. And now I'm a huge Jonathan Culton fans. So um, that's, you know, another one of those things where I'm like, well, I'm glad that I

found out about machinema. Of course, I had already watched Red Versus Blue up up to that point. Um, so I was somewhat familiar with mishinima already, but I had never seen the music video. Yeah, I learned about Jonathan Colton through John Hodgman because I right, yes, and I listened to the Hobo names and he played the song and he played the song over and over again without stopping for like, and that's how that was my introduction.

Two minutes after minutes after minutes, a very very long clip, but but that was my first That video was my first introduction to machina and I didn't even know I was being introduced to it. And even even videos where you might think, oh, this is video capture footage, this isn't mashinema, sometimes it turns out it actually is maschinema. For example, the Leroy Jenkins video from World of Warcraft. Do you know what I'm talking about? Okay, it's a

famous goofy video on YouTube. If you guys have never seen it, go to YouTube and type in le Roy Jenkins.

And it shows this group of adventurers as they're about to go into a very dangerous area and as the leader is explaining what their tactics are, one guy's like, let's do this, hero Jenkins, and he just runs into the room without helping, you know, without stopping to listen to the strategy, which results in everybody dying, and every someone yells out something along the lines of like, Leroy, you idiot, and you hear him say, well, at least I got chicken, and that's the end of it. This,

this is goofy little thing. So of course the video makes the rounds as Leroy Jenkins totally screws up this raid that everyone had planned. And I'm probably using the wrong terminology, please forgive me. I'm not a World of Warcraft player, but anyway, he messed up the plan. It turned out later that this was all just it was all staged, so it actually was machinima you know, Um, I had my notes on computer this time for I mean,

Jonathan knows that, but you all don't. And now that I look it up, there are about four thousand six nine videos with Leroy Jenkins. Yeah, that's one of the first, very first couple. Look like they're the ones he's talking about. Everything else apparently has been applied to, uh, Star Wars, paper Mario, and all kinds of other things. I've got a friend who has a band and they have a song about Leroy Jenkins. And to investigate this tenpenny Travelers,

so you guys do a Google search on them. They're awesome. We're going off on a tangent and unfen some of our listeners. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah that's right. UM, let's get back on task. So do we have anything else you want to talk about as far as mashinima goes. I mean, we talked about music videos, we talked about making stories, we talked about how you do it? Yes, I do, all right, go for it. Um. One of

the best games to use for this. I notice you list some in your in your article, but you know, it seems like the the shooter games Third person Shooter seems to work well, third person or first person first person shooters usually because you're using the point of view of the shooter. Yeah, well, I guess, I guess I keep thinking of Halo is a third person you're actual person? Well, I think I think it all depends on what you want to do. Like the world of Warcraft, music video

stuff is awesome, it works really well for that. Um it's a little harder to tell a story now that that stop people. I mean South Park did it, but uh, I think the difficulty there is creating a story where random people aren't walking into frame and screwing up what you're trying to do. So I would say avoid online games unless you are able to do a localized instance exactly.

If you could do a localized instance of an online game, that's fine, But otherwise you're gonna have random people just show up and like can I group And you're like, dude, we're totally like shooting a movie right now, can you like not be here? Um? I get that all the time in real life. Actually, dude, like, can we have you across the street because we're like shooting something. Um, So it would just happen to me online as well.

So localized rather than online. Uh. The shooters work really well in the sense that it gives you a really good cameraman. It's easy to control the camera angle, it's easy to point at different stuff. You know, it's and you have an active person there as a camera as opposed to just a stationary camera and every all the actions moving around it. So you can do things like running towards someone as a zoom or you can uh you know, turn to the left or right as a

pan um and you don't have to worry about stationary camera. Uh. The flip side of that, of course, is you may be limited by the physics of the world, like the Red versus Blue guys work, but you can find ways around that. Um. So really, I say, first of all, pick a story that you like, then think about the environment that it would most it would be the best in, and then find a way to use that environment in

your storytelling. I think if you if you look at the story first, that's what's really going to make a good product. I think instead of saying, hey, I really like Halo, let's find let's make make a fun the story for Halo, it works better if you say, hey, I've got this funny story it would be even funnier if we said it in a universe with futuristic soldiers. Why don't we use Halo? I think that's the best

way to go about it. Okay, See, I had this problem because I was I was trying to make a machine Emmo with a solitaire game, and it really didn't go anywhere. No, it really wasn't working out. I tried to make one using the game of Tron, and then I found out they already did that, saying so yeah that I think that was it for my question. All right, Well, then that wraps up this discussion on machinima. But that does lead me to our second instance of a listener mail. Excellent.

This listener mail comes from JT from Joplin, Missouri, and JT says, Hello, I just found your podcast last week and really enjoy them. With my job, I do a lot of driving all over the US. Your podcasts are great to listen to while driving. This traveling also brings up a question. I was listening to your podcast about to J three G and fog Networks, and I received a text. When I went to reply, I had no signal on my BlackBerry Bold World phone from a T and T, but I still had good signal on the

Sprint phone. My company issue to me, I see this a lot both ways. Some areas the Sprint phone works, and some areas a T and T phone works better. And of course some areas both are good. I expect the Sprint phone to do to go in and out as is not a world phone. My question is, can you really call it a world phone when it doesn't even work all over the US? Thanks and keep up the great work, j T. All right now, JT, Yes, you can call it a world phone because the world

phone does not mean it's going to work everywhere. What the world phone means is that it works on the frequencies used in the United States as well as in other parts of the world. Ye. Yeah, I mean otherwise, well, I mean for marketing reasons. Uh, some places phone just doesn't sound as cool, right, Yeah. The the issue we have here is that it's not that the end Hanna.

You know, a world phone doesn't necessarily have a more powerful antenna, doesn't necessarily receive signals better than any other phone working on any particular frequency. No, But frequency is the key here, because there are frequencies of all of all genres chres. There are all kinds of frequency, all right, Yeah, that's a better one. Um, I'm thinking on the fly here. Um. Yeah.

So there are frequencies in all different ranges all over the world, depending on the governmental regulations of the country you happen to be using your phone in. Right, So, in the United States, we have two different kinds of phone technologies, basic phone technologies. They get more complicated, but basically we have C D M A and G s M. G s M is the more popular one throughout the world. Okay, but even G S G S M has four different

frequencies upon which it operates throughout the world. There is, um there's the eight fifty and the nineteen hundred bands, which the United States uses, but Europe uses nine hundred and eighteen hundred bands. So you have two different sets of bands, and phones that run on one will not work on the other. But if you get a phone that is capable of running on any of those four, it's called a quad band phone, that would be a

world phone. It would be It means that you can go to Europe and it will still work on Europe's system. It does not mean, however, that if you go around the corner to that dead zone that affects your other a T and T phone, that your phone will still work. It could still very well be dead. So I hope the answers your question. Jt Uh. Thank you for writing in greatly appreciate it. That was a great question, And it'll all work out fine until four G comes along. Yeah,

we'll have to buy new phones. That's okay. I'm sure that iPhone will come out with a new phone as soon as four ghaits you know, any minute now, probably pretty much. September is right around the corner. That's when the big announcements come. If any of you have any questions, comments, suggestions, anything like that you want to shoot our way, you can write us. Our email address is tech stuff at how stuck works dot com. You can read how Machinima works at how suff works dot com. It's a pretty

darn good article, if I do say so myself. It's been a long time since I've read it. I mean, I wrote it ages ago, so to read it now, I was thinking, hey, you know, I actually did a pretty good job with that, and I wasn't even in your editor at that time, and not Yeah, I think it's you know an excellent art right. I think Julie edited this one. Well that was a long time ago, so anyway, check that out guys, and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and

thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house Stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you