What is different about the machinima community?
The new artist pages feature at Renderosity is inspirational, as is their thriving community. I would love to see the machinima community one day come together in this kind of way, in meaningful discussion and sharing which transcend the boundaries we’ve constructed (or allowed to persist) between subcommunities around specific games. Renderosity is a great example of what a united community can do. I’m sure they’ve got their share of trolls/griefers to deal with, and I’m not saying they’re perfect, because they’re not. But immersed in diversity, awash in 1001 reasons to fragment… they thrive. There’s commerce, there are tutorials out the wazoo, a colossal array of fora, it’s really amazing.
And looking around, the contrast is rather stark.
Machinima.com has had the unrealized potential to be that kind of place for years, at least in theory. But since the day Hugh and Gordon founded it back in 2000, the ratio of content contributors to spectators has always been pitifully low, relegated to the burden of an often under appreciated few. And that’s not changed a great deal in these many years. Sims99 has actually had a stronger showing in the area of wikis, director profiles, etc. (and they have an enormous movie collection), but they continue to face the challenge of having a large majority of their membership pretty much only interested in one platform. Machinima Premiere probably has the best diversity of the three in terms of platform coverage, and it’s got an impressive degree of content (esp. reviews and its wiki), but its comparatively small active membership is beleaguered by periods of feast-or-famine in the level of activity, coming and going like seasons.
Then there are the communities with no real pretense of outreach beyond the scope of a single game. On WoW and Halo specific sites, in particular… it’s not uncommon for their participants to talk about “the machinima community” as if its history and scope does not extend beyond their own sphere. Half-Life 2 machinimators tend to isolate themselves, as do iCloners.
Here’s the thing. There are tons of different brands of 2D and 3D software out there, each with their own product-specific communities… Daz, Max, Bryce, Maya, Blender, SoftImage, Poser, POV-Ray, and more… way too many to list here. And they all have communities which are focused specifically and solely on their technology flavor of choice. And yet… any one of the artists using one of these tools could go to Renderosity.com and, provided they’re not an obnoxious twit, could find a community there ready to exchange ideas, collaborate, and generally let iron sharpen iron. Are there individuals there who are pompous about their own personal favorite tools? Yeah, probably. But still that cross-technological art community teems with life, standing as a place where one can go and can reasonably expect to find common ground rather than sectarian conflict.
So what is different about the machinima community? Why have we not evolved in this direction? Why has no site yet succeeded at building this kind of place? For the purposes of this article, I am defining ’success’ as having A: the will to be that way, B: the resources to fund it, and C: the appeal to draw and keep more than just a handful of active content contributors.
We’ve got an enormous number of talented writers with interesting perspectives, yet a relatively small number of active blogs, and a pittance of articles and essays. We’ve got a community literally FULL of people who know how to deal with digital video online, have a microphone of some sort, and have access to free screen capture tools… yet as Anthony Bailey pointed out to me not long ago, we have a quite astonishing lack of video tutorials. There’s no question we’ve got the talent to produce this kind of content which, ultimately, will help others become better at this craft, or lower entry barriers for the uninitiated… and yet, we rarely do. Why is that?
Perhaps the biggest question of all, though, is this. Is the solution even to build such a place (or transform an existing place)? Or, when we’ve come together in that way, will we - in the larger scope of computer generated art - be ourselves another dissociated fragment of the more significant whole? In other words, is the solution to bring a Renderosity paradigm to machinima, or to make machinima a part of a place like Renderosity.com with the rest of its cousins?
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If you build it, they will come.
I do a lot of form lurking myself, but all the machinima sites have pushed the forms into smaller and smaller windows. I love sites like http://www.cgchat.com where I can just hang out all day at work, hit the refresh and see what wild project someone’s working on. I’m not too interested in specific game communities as I am machinima, so those form sites don’t do much for me. Also, when machinima.com went nuts and folks split, we seemed to retreat to our blogs, that cozy little place we all need between communities. With the MachinimaFeed to keep us centralized on the blog front, I think that problem will fix itself when a machinima community site is made that’s more interactive/intuitive.
I honestly hope machinima.com can be retooled into such a site, but I think they’re more interested in creating ad space than fostering a real community. (Please, please, prove me wrong! I miss you!) Mprem works, but is limited by the software driving the back-end. I’ll hangout there forever if it stays as professional as it is now, but there’s a lot of untapped potential…
Comment by Buddy_DoQ — September 12, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
There’s a certain apples and oranges issue here.
Renderosity is focused on people creating still images - which take a few weeks at most. This means lots of short projects with downtime in between.
By contrast, Machinima is about movies - and not just movies, but comparatively very high-production value movies. Even the low-end WoW or Sims movies require a hell of a lot more compositing and complex video work than your average YouTube effort. That means that a “short” production time is a month, and a long one - well, here’s BloodSpell coming into its fifth year now.
That means that there are a lot more people with their heads down for a lot longer, and I suspect that people mostly blog and write articles when they’re between projects. (Technically the smartest time to write articles is when you’ve just completed a project and are publicising it, but that never happens properly.) Longer production times = the “feast or famine” syndrome.
There are other issues too, but that jumped out as something that’s different between the communities.
Comment by Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — September 12, 2007 @ 6:01 pm
This is where we hit the inside-out/outside-in POV again.
The number of Machinima producers who’s allegiances start and end with the game far outweigh the ones using the game as a blank canvas. As a result, only the few who see Machinima as a serious production approach tend to gravitate outside the silo’ed worlds of HBO (that’s halo.bungie.org) and the WoW forums.
On the opposite side of this is a site like Renderosity, where serious people working in Max, Maya, even Photoshop, are encountering the same problems as each other, regardless which software they are well-versed in. How do I make believable water? What’s the best technique for unwrapping?, etc. These common problems form a bond of sorts - an audience for their stage. While WoW machinimators might face similar problems - they stay glued to their own forums to find the answers - because the game itself provides the common bond. So, the numbers of serious Maya/Max/Photoshop artists heavily outweigh the number of serious Machinimators.
Again, we’re stymied by the usual Machinima issue - it’s “new” and therefore there’s not enough people practicing or preaching it seriously - solving problems, creating sites, etc. While building such a Machinima-specific site would certainly be help, getting someone to act as a recruiter for that site would also need to happen - that’s key. This person would need to reach out to those game communities/machinimators and guide them towards the benefits of the machinima-specific site - and drive their discussions there. From that, hopefully the site gains the traffic/trust quotient that creates community.
Yes, that’s a load of work for sure. But like what most of us here have experienced, pioneering these areas not only takes a huge heap of effort, but loads of patience on top of that (/me looks at the calendar and notes that Machinima is 11 years old).
To me, the real question is: does anyone want that job?
Comment by ILL Robinson — September 12, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
Dang, forgot to add.. thanks to Overman for once again providing his unique perspective and bringing up another excellent topic for conversation…
Comment by ILL Robinson — September 12, 2007 @ 7:27 pm
So in five year’s time when there’s a veritable deluge of machinima sites, the problem will be too many people, too much noise, too many articles, too many forums.
Comment by bllius — September 12, 2007 @ 7:44 pm
I remember Tom [Jantol] (and not just him, a few other people) making a remark a few months ago about how more people at Mprem should write and post articles and how-to videos / tutorials. Questions at Renderosity most likely edge towards the more general like Paul mentioned. I would assume that questions more specific to the software those people are using are asked at forums geared towards users of that software.
The machinima community is (generally speaking) a huge-ass brain trust and talent bank. Tom asked why people rarely post articles about the types of angles they use, where they position the camera and why, and stuff of that nature. I remember replying down the line saying something along the lines of “that’s what makes machinima so cool though; how raw and visceral it is - instinctual without any guidelines.” (or something like that but probably less cool sounding =P)
I stand by that too… to an extent. I learn something new every single day, and every single day I become more and more humbled by how much there is to learn. Personal discovery and learning through experience is awesome, but it’s nice to learn things from people who have been there and done that.
90% of machinima sucks. That’s really blunt, I know, but can you argue with that? 60% of that 90% sucks because it’s more amateurish than instinctual. It may suck because of the writing, the characters, lack of forward momentum, lighting, poor sound, or a wide variety of things.
I don’t think I know a lot, but I wouldn’t doubt that I know one or two things that someone else may not that would be helpful to them. And I DO know that you guys all know something I don’t that would be helpful to me. I’d like to see more writing of personal experience with machinima. It’s great to hear about people’s new projects, but I’d really love to hear about the core technology, philosophy, and the processes that drive those projects. I know I’m hypocritical saying it, but I’d love to hear more about that stuff. I think that once more people start opening up and talking about their work that more people will follow suit.
Comment by KradProductions — September 12, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
Bill wrote: “So in five year’s time when there’s a veritable deluge of machinima sites, the problem will be too many people, too much noise, too many articles, too many forums.”
No, I don’t think a volume of content or users is anything to be called a problem. Rather, the radically decentralized growth model we’ve adopted (which ironically enough, I was praising a year ago) does seem to have its disadvantages vs. a centralized share point a la Renderosity.
Comment by overman — September 12, 2007 @ 10:37 pm
I agree with the poster who said most machinima sucks. There is a ton of vomit inducing sims 2 crap on YouTube that only gets views because it uses a top 40 song and a bunch of 14 year olds think it is “cooliez.” There are those of us though who want to get better and better at the art but get stuck due to the lack of resources and tutorials.
Also I have seem some excellent machinima directors who are very selfish and only care about aquiring an audience, not helping anyone else out who honestly want to better themselves.
Comment by Charlemange — September 13, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
I have to disagree there a bit. I’ve never encountered anyone worth their weight in salt that’s good at machinima that would turn down anyone with a question. When I first started up I was your typical screaming noob asking anyone who would listen how to do this or that. Guys like Allen Marshall and others really helped me get going when I didn’t even know them and they weren’t even entirely familiar with Halo.
That is at least one good thing to say about this fragmented community - people will generally give you help or point you in the right direction if you come to them with a question.
Comment by KradProductions — September 13, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
MOST people do give help, but I have seen first hand a very tiny select few who have refused to help others who honestly want to be better. (Not the ones who ask “omgz how do u make uh vid plz?”) Or they say “oh it’s a director’s secret.” This type of mentality is lame and selfish.
Comment by Charlemange — September 13, 2007 @ 7:43 pm
Those people who would claim that a certain technique or something is a “director’s secret” are full of crap. Nearly no one these days has an original idea, me included. We take what we like from what we see and what we hear and we blend it into something that could be considered original in it’s own right because it hasn’t been blended in that way before. I like filmmakers who openly talk about their inspirations and the techniques they use. It helps some people become better filmmakers themselves and I think it’s a way of paying it forward, so to speak.
Comment by KradProductions — September 13, 2007 @ 7:55 pm
Krad is right. As usuall. As many times. Well, sometimes.
No, really, in 2-3 years of my involving in Machinima I never, never saw question like “where to put camera and why”. Never. Not some engine related questions, there is plenty communities around every engine, but FILM MAKING questions.
And this is spooky.
Comment by Tom — September 14, 2007 @ 2:46 am
I’ve moved away from forum centered communication for machinima precisely because of the problems Overman points out; little practical information being exchanged. There’s a lot of territoriality and ego clashing (along with several trolls), but not much in the way of focused sharing of practical information about films and how they are being made. Jason, Ingrid and I have set up Machiniplex.com to deal with just that problem. We focus on the films and present information on how and why they were made. In the future, we will provide video tutorials and, if we can find the technology cheap, live tutorials for small groups on subjects like sound editing, acting, compression, etc. The site is a work in progress, but we feel we are moving in the right direction. And I think one of the first questions we will address in our “Workshop” section will be “where to put the camera and why”.
PS I’m hoping that Hugh’s and Johnnie’s excellent “Machinima for Dummies” book (which answers the camera question, btw) will inspire a new batch of filmmakers and rally some of the old-timers like myself.
Comment by Ricky Grove — September 14, 2007 @ 11:25 am
TOM: Why is all the burden to initiate the learning process placed on the student? i.e. in order for a topic to be brought up, someone must ask the right magical question? Can you imagine how stifled the learning would be at an institution of higher learning if the curriculum were limited to only the imagination of the uneducated students?
Professors exist for a reason. This filmmaking knowledge you speak of… if you’ve got it, start teaching it, and questions will certainly follow.
Most machinimators would feel like they were making themselves look stupid by asking “where should I put my camera”, as if having to ask that question raises another question: Can I call myself a filmmaker if I can’t even feel confident enough to choose my shots without asking someone’s advice?
That same person, who’d likely not volunteer their question (or even think to raise it) would DEVOUR an article or exegesis on the subject. Tom, why aren’t you writing articles or doing video demonstrations of these techniques, or even sharing with people how it is that YOU learned them so they can maybe go do the same? That would, it seems to me, be a more productive contribution than simply lamenting a lack you perceive. We ALL could do more of the teaching thing.
Comment by overman — September 14, 2007 @ 11:27 am