Camera issues

Machinima, while relatively inexpensive to make, (most films require only a game platform, game, video capture card and movie editing software) has several challenges it must overcome. Red Vs. Blue, the series I'll be focusing on in the paper faced, and overcame, many of these obstacles.

According to the humorous and only slightly exaggerated history Red Vs. Blue has posted on their site, the series is "a movie INSIDE of a video game." Quite literally, the characters, locations and props are all contained within the universe of the game. The movie is shot using a game console equipped with a video capture card, with all of the action taking place inside of normal, everyday television. There are no physical cameras or crews working on an elaborate soundstage. Instead, the crew sits inside of normal office, and record their lines amongst the clothes and hats of creator Burnie Burn's closet.










Courtesy of Bungie.net. Creators Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum work on an episode of Red Vs. Blue.


Which leads to some very interesting questions...

I. "We call him CameraMan."

If you're creating a movie within a game, where the hell is the camera? Machinima is created within the confines of a game and so, there is no physcial camera to hold, no film to process. Producers must use the camera provided by the game to film the footage. In the case where the camera provided by the game is in the third person (the camera shows the character you control from outside of their body, as well as your surroundings) filming footage is realitivly simple. The producers can control the camera angle to fit the action taking place on the screen.















Kingdom Hearts. An example of the third person camera.


However, when the game being used is a first person camera, the production becomes much more difficult. The camera is controlled by moving a character, and the action is seen through that character's eyes.


Halo. An example of the first person camera.


Although this provides decent control of the camera, a large problem remains. Many games shot using first person make use of a HUD, or Heads-up display.


Halo. Aspects of the HUD are highlighted.

The HUD typically contains in game information such as health, ammo and location. For the purposes of machinima, This is problematic. Being able to see the HUD and weapon of the character makes it clear that the camera actually is a character in the game. For producers, this poses a question: Do we make the camera a character in the show, or do we ignore the HUD and take away some of the video's quality as a movie?

The creators of RvB faced this very same question when they chose to use Halo as thier graphics engine. Although the crew considered making the camera character, they ditched the idea when a better solution presented itself. Letterboxing.


A scene from RvB. The HUD is eliminated by using letterboxing on the top and bottom. However, the crosshair remains.

Production

The term machinima is derived from the combination of the words “machine” and “cinema.” The title refers to the fact that the movie is in fact the work of a machine. Machinima movies are, in the words of Red Vs. Blue creator Burnie Burns, “movie[s] inside of a videogame.” The filmmakers will use the engine, usually in the multiplayer mode of the game, to manipulate the in game characters and locations to fit a written script. By dubbing voices over the animated sequences, a machinima film resembles any other animated film, for a fraction of the cost. Rather than utilizing a team of animators working on top of the line computers in a Hollywood, machinima producers need only a few copies of a game, a few game consoles to match, a video capture card, and some basic video editing software. Films can be created in a week, rather than the year or so that other films would take to be released.
However, machinima does have its limitations and obstacles that producers must face when creating their films. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on a single established machinima series to describe and address the issues machinima producers face when creating their films.







The tools of the trade. Two Xbox 360 systems, with a color coordinated controller for each.







Although the production process remains the same as it did before the release of the Xbox 360, it became decidedly less cluttered.









Rooster Teeth staff member Geoff Fink with the old RvB production system.




















The new production system, including the winning faceplate design for the director's system.

Camera tricks

The very first shot in the internet series Red Vs. Blue is a sweeping crane shot that scales up the side of one of the buildings, from the ground to the roof. Using the first person camera, it isn’t possible to achieve that shot by simply causing the character to look towards the sky. The camera needed to be level with the characters that were standing on the roof, and thus, the producers needed to find a way to physically lift the camera. To solve this problem, they stood the cameraman on the very end of the gun turret positioned on the tank. By using a second character (named ‘Driver’) they slowly raised the turret, which caused the cameraman to rise to the level of the roof. This process had to be done slowly and carefully however. If the tank moved too quickly, the game would interpret the movement as an enemy attack, and act as the cameraman had been run over by the tank, thus killing him.

In many of the locations on the maps that the producers can use, there are no areas where a character can stand and be able to film an overhead view. The areas that are high enough to use are usually too far away from where the action needs to take place.

When the creators of Red Vs. Blue where faced with this challenge, they decided to utilize an aspect of the Halo multiplayer system. When a player is killed, there is an automatic wait time, or respawn time, before the character can return to the game. During this time, the camera view that appears on the character’s screen is a sweeping view of all the other players in battle. This view is usually an overhead shot. The producers used this shot to film a character driving up a base by simply removing the on-screen stats that appear while a character respawns and brightening the screen so the viewer does not know that the cameraman has died.




An overhead shot acheived using the respawn camera.

More times than not, camera issues can be faced in the same way that traditional film issues are dealt with. If a shot needs to contain several characters that need to appear to be standing in the same location when they are in reality a distance away from each other on the map, the film can simply be edited together in post production.



Although the characters in this scene appear to be talking to a character that is only a few feet away (not pictured), they are actually across the map from each other.




A scene only available in the single player campagian mode, this shot has been edited into the video during post production.

When Red Vs. Blue was first being produced, the creators needed to come up with a way for characters that were identical in appearance to be distinguished from one another. Since the viewers can not see the characters faces, or any other characteristics, the producers decided to distinguish them by changing the color of the armor they wear. Each character is identified by their own unique color, which is usually a shade of their team’s color: red or blue. Within a short time, the viewers became accustomed to which color indicated which character, even if they hadn’t been identified by name.

There were very few instances in which the color of a character changed. Each of these times, the change was actually addressed in the series, acknowledging and often making fun of the viewers dependence on the color of the armor. When one of the main characters, Church, dies and returns as a ghost, one of his teammates commented that he couldn’t possibly be who he said he was by saying, “You’re not Church. Church is blue. You’re white.” Even though the charaters voice and manner remained the same, his teammate refused to believe him simply because his armor was a different color.




One of the rare occasions when a character adopts a different color: the time travelling Churchs including Yellow Church.




The character of Simmons is distinguished by maroon colored armor.





In the series, each character posesses a different color of armor that is used to identify them.

Visual Effects

When creating machinima, many producers do there best to create scenes that can be easily replicated by ordinary viewers in there own homes on their own systems. They do their best to use only the props and objects that naturally appear in the game. Although this helps keep the series true to the game it was created from and keeps the series looking realistic in terms of the animation and graphics provided by the game.
Using only in game graphics however, is very limiting. Many games do not allow players to add or manipulate props other than weapons and vehicles. Even then, the game has very specific rules about how those props can be manipulated. Some areas do allow objects to be added under any circumstances, and those objects will only appear under certain conditions. If they are moved, they will often disappear after a period of time.
Although producers try to remain true to the in game props, there are times when different objects and settings become necessary to the story. In cases such as these there are several options for producers.




The graves of Tex and Church. An example of photoshopping.



By using photo editing tools, the producers can add in any number of props for any reason. To illustrate such points as the death of characters, or to hang signs in areas that normally do not have them, the producer needs only to go in and during post-production, ‘photoshop’ in grave markers or simulated pieces of paper. With careful editing and choice of prop, the edits can appear almost natural, as though they appear in the game naturally. The graves and wrench that appear in Red Vs. Blue are examples of edited props that, at first glance, look as though they belong in the scene. They are not objects intended to be a part of a visual joke, so it only makes sense that they be designed to blend in. For props such as clothing or signs that are intended to be jokes inside of themselves, there is no attempt to make them appear as though they belong.
In the same thread as added props, there are numerous visual effects that producers add to scenes in order to drive in points are make certain plot points work.
One of the first visual effects that the producers of Red Vs. Blue used was that of the appearance of the infamous Ghost of Church. When the plot of the story called for one of the characters to die and return soon after as a ghost, the producers had to figure out a way for the character to appear different than others, and be immediately identified as a spirit rather than a person. To achieve this, they needed to make the character appear practically transparent.
To create this effect, the producers had to film scenes containing the ghost character twice. The first time contained the fully opaque character performing actions and acting out dialogue. The second shot had to be filmed at the exact same location and at the same angle, only without the character. The scenes were then laid on top of each other during postproduction, diluting the scene under the character appeared practically transparent, and the scenery could be seen through him.


The Ghost of Church.



A second dramatic visual effect the producers used involves a baby alien that appears in the fifth season of the series. Although the character that is used for the alien in available in normal gameplay, the producers needed to shrink down the human sized being to one no taller a few feet. Although the producers have yet to explain how they created the effect, it has been theorized that the character was filmed separately and shrunk down using an editing tool. After the character had been shrunk, the moving image was reinserted into the original film.





Tucker's baby. A normal sized character shrunk down in post production.

Misc. Collected Research

An interveiw with Red Vs. Blue creator Burnie Burns: Red Vs. Who?

There is an Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences. How's that for validation? There isn't much for me to copy and paste here, but at the very least here's the link to the website. If you don't know much about Machinima, check out the FAQ page, and educate yourself.

Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences

Remember kids, knowledge is power!

This is also noteworthy. An entire internet archive of machinima! How much better could it get?

Archive.org: Machinima

And last but not least, an entire blog dedicated to Machinima. I think I need to find its RSS feed, if it has one...

The Machinima Blog

Here is a short article about the Machinima Film Festival, as well as a link to the website so you can see the nominees.

2006 Machinima Film Festival: Nominees
See all of the 2006 Machinima Film Festival nominees in one place!

2006-10-12

From the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences:

"After a grueling screening process, which was spent scrutinizing an exceptionally strong field of entries, the 2006 Mackie nominations have been selected.

We want to thank all of you who entered this year's competition. It was an extremely tough process and only a matter of fractions in some of the entry scoring--further proving that talent not only exists in the Machinima community, but thrives. It's no doubt that Machinima is quickly becoming the showcase for a next generation of artists.

Below is the full list of the Mackie Award categories and this year's nominees. Links to the online works will be posted within the next few days."

Machinima Film Awards

Note that Red Vs. Blue is nominated for best voice acting, best writing, and best series. Good luck to them!

Machinima

Machinima (pronounced [mə.ˈʃiː.nə.mə] or [mə.ˈʃɪ.nə.mə]), a portmanteau of machine cinema or machine animation, is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre (film created by such production techniques). As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using real-time, interactive (game) 3D engines, as opposed to high-end and complex 3D animation software used by professionals. Engines from first person shooter and role-playing simulation video games are typically used. Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms. As a film genre, the term refers to movies created by the techniques described above.

Usually, machinimas are produced using the tools (demo recording, camera angle, level editor, script editor, etc.) and resources (backgrounds, levels, characters, skins, etc.) available in a game. Sometimes television commercials may be made with machinima, such as a recent Coca Cola commercial. Although the topics are often based on male-oriented shooter scenarios, others have been made with romantic or dramatic topics as well.

Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation. It can also produce more professional appearing production than is possible with traditional at-home techniques of live video tape, or stop action using live actors, hand drawn animation or toy props.

Although most often used to produce recordings that are later edited as in conventional film, machinima techniques have also occasionally been used for theatre. A New York improvisational comedy group called the ILL Clan voice and puppet their characters before a virtual camera to produce machinima displayed on a screen to a live audience.

Wikipedia.org: Machinima

A good place to see machinima in action is Red Vs. Blue. Simply head to the video archieve, and you can download the low resolution versions of the episodes. Each one is only about six minutes long. Below you'll find some screenshots of the recent episodes of Red Vs. Blue, which will give you an idea of what it looks like. All the images are copywrite 2006 RoosterTeeth Productions.


Characters Church and Sheila

Grif and Simmons, facing down Sheila's cannon barrel

Doc (or Doc/O'Mally) and Grif

Caboose. Just because.



Wikipedia Entry on the Production of the series: The Production of RvB


Answers.com article on Rooster Teeth Productions: Rooster Teeth