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Experiments in Machinima

on Saturday 16 August 2008
by Harrison Heller

in Reviews
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Introduction

"Experiments in Machinima" is an exhibition of experimental machinima films. Machinima, derived from the fusion of the words "machine" and "cinema", is a New Media art-form defined as filmmaking within the real-time 3D virtual environment of a video game. As its name suggests, machinima often borrows heavily from the stylistic and structural conventions of traditional Hollywood film, including narrative, realism, and genre. Many of these machinima films directly reference the game in which they were made, either visually (using the game's characters and locations) or narratively (actually setting the film within the world of the game). Although machinima is still a young medium, it is beginning to develop its own quasi-avant-garde, with several machinimators producing works that experiment with narrative form and surrealist imagery. In most of these films, the cryptic, symbolic, and poetic visuals take center stage and the spectator becomes an active participant in the construction of meaning.

Instead of using video games, several of these machinimators use programs developed specifically for machinima production (iClone and Moviestorm), pre-visualization (Antics 3D), or 3D animation (MotionBuilder). In addition, some experimental works employ a "Frankensteinian" aesthetic, extracting 3D art (characters, locations, props) from a video game and cobbling together multiple elements from various programs to create an original vision. This hybrid production technique, referred to by Tom Jantol as "Anymation", challenges the narrow definition of machinima as real-time animation in video games. Other experimental machinima filmmakers heavily modify existing games, transforming them into surreal dreamscapes that bear little resemblance to the original commercial product. Thus, by way of their subject matter and unique visual style, many of these films succeed in partially divorcing themselves from their source material and production environment.

In the past, experimental films were locked up in art houses and museums. However, today, with the advent of the Internet, multi-media sharing sites like YouTube and vimeo provide unprecedented outlets for experimental user-generated content. For the first time ever, experimental works have been opened to a potentially global audience. Furthermore, the democratization of media production, first with the portable video recorder and now with web-cams, digital camcorders, and machinima have also allowed for much greater experimentation. Yet, sadly, few people are interested in making or watching machinima that does not conform to the conventions of commercial media production and, as a result, these highly creative works are often neglected and lost in the sea of more traditional content. Therefore, the goal of this exhibition is to call attention to several great works of experimental machinima.

"Person 2184" by Friedrich Kirschner

Person 2184 is a three part machinima series made in the game Unreal Tournament 2004. At this time, only two episodes have been released. According to the artist, the series "shows queer happenings in an urban environment not very far from here and now" and " the goal of the project is to give an idea of alternative art direction, content and story structure to interactive and non-interactive narrative".

Both machinima films follow mute, pensive figures who wander through the hyper-stylized black and white city that occasionally has splashes of color. The people who populate this city appear almost two-dimensional and progress down the street in jerking, back-and-forth movements. Many are transparent, adding to the crowded and multi-layered composition of each shot. Furthermore, the films lack dialogue and a traditional narrative, but instead contain fragments of story that the spectator must interpret for himself/herself. Unlike traditional film, which often hands meaning and plot to the passive spectator, viewers of Kirschner's work must actively work to arrive at an understanding of the piece. In some ways, both episodes seem to be commentaries on mass media. In episode 1, omnipresent ubiquitous screens play a looping short video of a red-headed woman, while in episode 2, the constant flash of the photographer's camera is everywhere. Perhaps the packed, overlapping, and pulsating visuals symbolize our over-stimulated entertainment culture of ubiquitous LCD screens, iPods, cell phones, and portable media.

Amazingly, Kirschner's work was done entirely in Unreal Tournament 2004 with absolutely no post-processing work. On his website, Kirschner writes:

"It was my second personal machinima project and I created some tools within the Unreal environment to facilitate the setup, to make the films more stable and add new functionality. Especially for the second part - the photographer - where i implemented flocking and crowd simulation, a more robust camera system and first steps into Depth-of-Field simulation. Especially the already fast turnaround times from idea to realisation (both movies took about a week from rough concept to finished movie) convinced me to start working on more intuitive tools and workflows for the last installment of the series. This work led into the overall concept of Moviesandbox, to make it possible to create movies and possibly interactive installations quickly and intuitively."

(Screenshot from the game Unreal Tournament 2004)

Essentially, Kirschner transformed the game from a science fiction based first-person-shooter to a bleak and abstract canvas for his unique vision. In addition, a viewer who owns Unreal Tournament 2004 can download the films as game mods and actually experience them in-game, rather than viewing them as digital video files. Interestingly, although the series was created entirely in Unreal Tournament 2004, the finished product bears little or no resemblance to the original game and could just as easily be mistaken for an experimental CGI animation. This complete break with the source game is a characteristic rarely achieved by machinima.

Awards / Festivals: "Person 2184" won Best Visual Design and Best Technical Achievement at Machinima Festival 2005.

Watch Episode 1 (YouTube): [link]
Watch Episode 2 (YouTube): [link]

Website: [link]
Country: Germany
Game Engine: Unreal Tournament 2004
Runtime: 3 minutes and 30 seconds
Year Released: 2005
File Size: 40 MB
File Format: .avi
Resolution: 720 x 480
Language: None

"Among Fables and Men" by Tobias Lundmark

"Among Fables and Men" was the winner of the Best Drama award in Warcraft Movies' "Fabled Few" machinima contest. This stunning piece of experimental machinima follows a man on a bizarre, fairy-tale journey, in the same vein as Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland". However, this loose narrative thread takes a back seat to the incredible visual style, which abandons traditional animation and machinima techniques for a paper cut-out aesthetic. Lundmark painstakingly constructs his images with 2-D digital cut-outs of World of Warcraft characters and environments, composited together in Adobe After Effects. Instead of using in game animations, Lundmark moves and warps his cut-outs to achieve the desired effect. This unique visual style eschews realism and challenges accepted notions of 2D and 3D space. The style, coupled with the lack of dialogue and the haunting and mysterious score, reinforces the dream-like atmosphere of the film. Although the work uses World of Warcraft art assets, Lundmark's compositions are unlike anything a player could possibly experience in game. Thus, the film manages to partially divorce itself from its source material, even allowing the viewer to forget that it was made using World of Warcraft. At the same time, it references other art-forms like the graphic novel. The use of split-screen adds yet another visual dimension to an already complex style, often providing the viewer with opposing angles of the same event. Since everything was constructed outside the game engine, "Among Fables and Men" also challenges the definition of machinima, which is grounded in the real-time capturing of 3D game footage.

Awards / Festivals: Winner Best Drama Warcraft Movie's "Fabled Few" Machinima Competition, Nominated for Best Machinima at Bitfilm Festival 2008. Winner of Bronze for Best Technical Achievement and Gold for Best First Film at the Online Machinima Film Festival 2008(OMFF).

Watch (YouTube): [link]
(Machiniplex): (link)

Website: [link]
Country: Sweden
Game Engine: World of Warcraft
Runtime: 5 minutes and 32 seconds
Year Released: November 2007
Download: [link]
File Size: 323 MB (HIGH-QUALITY)
File Format: .wmv
Resolution: 720 x 480
Language: None

"The Wizard of OS: The Fish Incident" by Tom Jantol

Based on a fragment of writing by renowned inventor Nikola Tesla,"The Wizard of OS: The Fish Incident" follows a silent and ambiguous "harlequin" figure in his battle against a cunning fish with a map for its skin. From its opening, when Santa Claus tumbles down his wikipedia page, its clear that this piece is unlike any other machinima. Jantol has crafted an extraordinary digital frame to contain the rest of his composition. This frame resembles some sort of bizarre 19th century invention and is composed of pipes (one actually spews exhaust) and moving gears. Throughout the film, this contraption uses a metallic arm to interact with and alter the image contained within the frame. This image often abandons logic and realism for unpredictable and highly imaginative scenarios that constantly challenge our perceptions of 2D and 3D space. The 3D figure and the fish battle across the boundaries between 2D images that only moments earlier looked like 3-dimensional environments, complete with effects like smoke or flames. At other points in the film, diverse backgrounds warp in and out in furious succession while the figure and the fish remain unchanged. Furthermore, in his struggle against the fish, the harlequin figure is armed with a variety of gadgets that sprout from his mechanical arm. These tools often contain 3D elements that extend from 2D planes which resemble windows in a complex piece of production software. Is the figure using some sort of advanced computer or is he actually a program or computer mind? Machiniplex.com's Ricky Grove appropriately described Jantol's aesthetic as "poetic anarchy".

According to Jantol: "Using mixed 2D and 3D is simply my understanding that nothing is really 3D in movies. I am not sure what "3D" actually means. We see everything in 2D, we have only two eyes laying on same axis. If we get third eye on top of the nose, which I seriously doubt we will, then it will be possible to see that third dimension. Till then it all comes down to nothing more then convention. This convention became really obsolete when software like AnimeStudio starts to pop up. Actually, every software where you can mimic 3D space using 2D planes makes this convention obsolete".

Jantol refers to his work as "Anymation", a hybrid animation technique that uses any tools necessary to fulfill the artist's creative vision. Unlike most machinima films that tend to be defined by their source game, Anymation subordinates the tools of production to the artistic idea. Its fusion of diverse elements and use of multiple software, defy neat categorization and perhaps even render the means of production irrelevant.

Interestingly, this surreal and fairly abstract piece is structured around the chase, one of cinema's oldest and most enduring narrative forms. Jantol refers to this structure as "experimental cliche", which on the surface appears to be an oxymoron. However, in grounding his piece in an old form, Jantol is able to play with and shatter pre-existing conventions and expectations. Furthermore, his juxtaposition of cliche and highly imaginative visuals only serves to reinforce the uniqueness of his work.

Watch (vimeo): [link]

Website: [link]
Country: Croatia
Game Engine: MotionBuilder
Runtime: 4 minutes and 31 seconds
Year Released: March 2008
Download: [link]
File Size: 57.7 MB
File Format: .wmv
Resolution: 720 x 480
Language: None

"Folie à Deux" by Tony Bannan

Winner of the Antics 3D Medical Shorts Competition, "Folie à Deux" is a music video about madness. Like many of the other films featured in this exhibition, "Folie à Deux" contains a loose narrative thread, following the strange hallucinations of a woman who collapses in a night club.

The structure of the piece beautifully evokes the irrational logic of dreams. In one surreal scene, a tiled bathroom wall opens up and a miniature ship flies towards the woman. The sequence is immediately followed by a cut to the woman running along the same ship (now full sized) on the open ocean. This jumping from location to location is a common motif in the work and is often triggered by a related visual clue (like the miniature ship). These visual clues are very similar to the concept of Freudian free association---the idea that the mind works as a network of associated images-- and the style perfectly conveys the character's erratic and fragmented mental state. Thus, the spectator is allowed to temporarily enter the woman's mind. Near the end of the film, this fragmentation is made literal by the use of split-screen and an even more dramatic warping in and out of different environments. Finally, the viewer is returned to reality as the dream-like images dissolve away to reveal a padded room.

Interestingly, the last few seconds of the film suggest that the doctor has completely imagined this woman in much the same way that Tony Bannan, the director, imagined the entire film. Thus, perhaps "Folie à Deux" could be seen as a commentary on cinema itself. In the past, film theorists have referred to movies as a kind of shared dream ---a vision or voluntary hallucination of sorts, while some experimental filmmakers have sought to free cinema from realism and rationality and move it toward more irrational, Freudian, and dream-like sensibilities. Bannon accomplishes this through his nightmarishly beautiful compositions, which open up a world closed to us during the waking hours.

Watch (YouTube): [link]

Production Company: Ammo Previz
Website: [link]
Country: Australia
Game Engine: Antics 3D
Runtime: 2 minutes and 5 seconds
Year Released: February 2008
Download: [link]
File Size: 27 MB
File Format: .wmv
Resolution: 720 x 480
Language: None

"Voices" by Kate Fosk

Like "Folie a Deux", "Voices" is a film about madness with an unconventional narrative structure. According to the artists, the film is "the story of one man’s battle with the madness that surrounds him, and the doctors who fight to save his sanity, in a world where crazy is normal."The opening of the film with its conspiracy imagery (men-in-black, black helicopters, etc.) establishes the nameless protagonist's paranoia and the distorted way he perceives the world. However, we do not truly descend into his mind until the TV screen that he's watching peels away to reveal a group of black-and-white masked figures. From this point on, the film is narrated first by one of these figures, then by a doctor, and finally ends with a line by the protagonist. However, all of these figures have the exact same voice, implying some kind of hallucinatory or imaginary quality to this narration which may be contained within the main character's very troubled mind. Unlike narration in conventional films, which serves to explain the actions depicted on screen, the nonsensical narration in "Voices" (ranting about pork pies, dogs, and conspiracies) raises more questions than answers. This "anti-narration" succeeds in capturing the irrational and bizarre obsessions of the mad man.

Fosk's compositions are extremely beautiful and surreal, contrasting vibrant, colorful, and bright backdrops against the eerie black-and-white masked figures. Once we enter the dream-like carnival world of these figures, one pale man with glasses and a goatee becomes the representative of the original protagonist. At one part of the film, this connection is made explicit as the figure actually morphs into the protagonist. Is he suffering from both paranoid schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder? Throughout the film, the protagonist seems aware of his madness and is seen shaking his head, as if struggling with his own mind in an attempt to rid himself of the bizarre visions and voices.

Note: The film was created with iClone, Moviestorm, and ZenCub3d and is thus an example of "Anymation". None of these three tools are traditional game engines.

Watch: [link] (look for the icon at the bottom of the page)

Production Company: Pineapple Pictures
Website: [link]
Country: United States and England
Game Engine: iClone, Moviestorm, ZenCub3D
Runtime: 6 minutes and 3 seconds
Year Released: April 2008
Download: [link]
File Size: 229 MB (HIGH-QUALITY)
File Format: .wmv
Resolution: 720 x 480
Language: English

"The Dumb Man" by Trace Sanderson (aka Lainy Voom)

"The Dumb Man" is a visual interpretation of the cryptic short story by Sherwood Anderson, read out-loud by Alex Wilson. This story is told as a kind of prose poetry which relies heavily on symbolism and metaphor, which are often very difficult to decipher. Throughout the film, the narrator himself admits and regrets his deficiency in his ability to tell a coherent narrative. At the beginning, he says, "There is a story.--I cannot tell it.--I have no words. The story is almost forgotten but sometimes I remember". Yet despite his protestations, the narrator attempts to tell his tale in the form of a highly and abstract, untraditional narrative.

From the beginning, Sherwood Anderson throws narrative conventions out the window. The location is "a house on a street", the nameless characters are embodiments of single traits, and there is no real protagonist, antagonist, or specified goal. Furthermore, at the end of the film, when it seems like something is about to happen, the narrator's doubt returns and he cuts himself off with the lamentation, "I have no words to tell what happened in my story. I cannot tell the story". Everything is described in a very hazy and vague style, creating a haunting and dreamy atmosphere.

Trace Sanderson complements this unconventional short story with dream-like visuals that harken back to the surrealist and Dadaist experimental films of the 1920s. These films embraced irrationality and used the juxtaposition of bizarre images to evoke emotion and liberate the imagination from the confines of realism.

Common motifs in "The Dumb Man" include water, giant eyeballs and a sky composed of the story's words. Much like Freidrich Krischner with "Person 2184", Sanderson used minimal post-production work and built almost everything in her film inside Second Life. One image of a man running on top of a huge eyeball seemed a particularly apt metaphor for the story---the' plot' is moving but is it actually getting anywhere?

Like the other films in this exhibition, "The Dumb Man" forces the spectator to actively work to make sense of the piece. This is the opposite of traditional cinema which foregrounds meaning and allows the spectator to passively and unquestioningly absorb the answers offered by the filmmaker. To me, "The Dumb Man" is a multi-layered work. On the surface, the film is an exploration into the construction of narrative and the challenges faced by the story-teller, often consumed with doubts over his work. The film seems to ask the question of whether this narrator is really a 'dumb man', unable to tell a coherent story, or whether his abstract composition has its own unique merit, even though it doesn't conform to previously defined literary conventions. Perhaps, the film offers us a window into the creative process of the storyteller. Maybe, he is frustrated because these fragments of images, ideas, and character traits that he has envisioned have not yet coalesced into a conventional narrative with a rigid, structured plot. Instead, we are handed a plethora of human emotions ranging from amusement (the dandified man) to doubt (the gray man) to nervousness (the wicked man) and from cold indifference (the white man) to burning desire (the woman).

Watch (YouTube): [link]
Watch (vimeo): [link]

Website: [link]
Country: United Kingdom
Game Engine: Second Life
Runtime: 5 minutes and 5 seconds
Year Released: January 2008
Download:http://www.machiniplex.com
File Size: 113 MB
File Format: .wmv
Resolution: 720 x 480
Language: English

About the author
Harrison Heller (aka "Nefarious Guy") is an American machinima director. His team, "Amorphous Blob Productions", is best known for the "Machinima! With Officer Dan" series. He is currently a student at Brown University.

Contact: amorphousblobproductions[at]gmail.com

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