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ACMI Machinima Film Festival

Anna attends the ACMI Machinima Film Festival 2007 and reports on the event.

ACMI Machinima Film Festival : Interview with Gus Sorola : Interview with Stolen Life��

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The Introduction with Paul Marino

To begin the day, we were introduced to Helen Stuckey, ACMI�s Games Lab Director and Paul Marino (read his thoughts at his blog) who co-founded the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS) in 2002 and continues his work in it as executive director. Paul, an award winning, film director, animator, producer and voice actor (he helped with the voice of Elder Sam in Rooster Teeth�s Strangerhood: Season 1), has been a constant supporter in pushing machinima to the mainstream, out of online circulation and into a public consciousness with Film Festivals and award ceremonies to recognise the work of groups around the world. It was the wish to have machinima acknowledged as a legitimate form of media that led him to founding the AMAS.

To get us all warmed up for the day�s events, a screening of award winners from the recent 2006 Machinima Festival in New York was presented. Machinima from games such as Company of Heroes, Counterstrike, World of Warcraft and Tribes: Vengeance each having won in their categories of Best Technical Achievement, Sound Design, Voice-Acting Production, Direction and the like, many having won more than one �Mackie� but by far the tone was set from the beginning with The Adventures of Bill & John: Danger Attacks at Dawn. A French production, Bill Et John won four Mackies (Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Independent Machinima) and with its screening, had many of the audience in stitches from the adorable French yelps of panic. Definitely check it out. A complete list of the award winners can be found at the AMAS site.

MMO Machinima Panel

Moving ever onward and upward, the first panel of the day was a discussion on the machinima originating from MMOs and the interesting cultural context that could be found in them. Paul Marino was joined by Eddo Stern (Landlord Vigilante, Dark Game) and Chris Dodds (ACMI) in a discussion over the interesting �spontaneity of social circles� in an MMO environment and how it was reflected in MMO machinima such as the Protests in Second Life. It was also interesting to see how machinima has become a new way of presenting a social commentary, such as R.M. Bray�s Jean Charles de Menezes which used The Matrix Online to recreate the final scenes of Jean�s life and protest the shoot to kill policies enacted after the July bombings. To lighten the mood, there was also a quick clip shown from the South Park Episode Make Love Not Warcraft that highlighted the discussion on the movement of more commercial machinima becoming available and the growing impact machinima is beginning to have on pop culture.

But then it grew serious. Five short videos, mainly focussing on death in MMOs, were screened to help spur discussion on how MMO Machinima seemed much more personalised and emotion compared to other forms of machinima. Of the five, four of them were of memorials, each set in World of Warcraft. Two were simple memorials dedicated to Teletha and Tabbie, filming the marches made in honour of them and a few personal thoughts. The third was similar except for the little giggles you got from the �RIP Ignoramus� bubbles and the speech �I didn�t know Ignoramus but I heard he died and thought what you were doing was cool��. But the last.

Oh goodness. I didn�t think any MMO could sink so low.

From the Illidan server came Serenity Now, and with its members, decided to raid a memorial in WoW for the pure hell of it. The video was so� cringe worthy and disgusting yet it taunted you to smile at it, to find it funny. The queue of people waiting to pay their respects stood unsuspecting as the camera cut to a horde (pardon the pun) of rampaging idiots tearing their way through the landscape towards the funeral. Moments before they arrive an infiltrator casually comments, �Great day for a memorial.� Sure, it was hilarious, but it made you question how much was personal and how much of it was just a game.

Following this came more discussion on the way MMO Machinima takes on a personal nature, of which Eddo Stern predicted an 80-90% of all machinima used serious �me� ideas, though this was beginning to evolve into film that was more accessible by the general public. The majority of these MMOs provided context for the film maker, such as a fantasy realm in WoW but machinima made in, say, Second Life needed to have the context supplied. The idea that machinima has now been classified as either a) a tool which made it simply a means to an end, or b) a cultural by-product that was game dependent and challenged original game concepts and the confusion over whether it is turning gamers into film makers, or film makers into gamers made for interesting an interesting argument over how much influence machinima has had.

And with that stimulating point, we broke for lunch. We had an hour, and boy was it lonely :( I kept myself entertaining by keeping an eye out for Gus Sorola, who I�d seen earlier in the theatre sitting a scant three rows away from me! It�s strange to think I didn�t ambush him.

Returning to the theatre, we were treated to an entry from Machinima Idol, a competition ACMI had held to encourage and support budding machinima makers. However, they didn�t receive enough entries so their best was shown. Khalid�s Surprise, by John-Paul. Congratulations to John-Paul for a very entertaining effort!

Screen Writing Panel

Welcoming Damian Scott, Jackie Turnure, Jessica Hutchins, Lisa Dethridge, Peter Rasmussen and Paul Marino to the stage, we began the Screen Writing Panel. This largely focussed on the more intricate areas of film making with machinima as its tool. Lisa headed the discussion, beginning with ideas of how the protagonist in traditional media often was highly developed, linear and determined by the writers yet in games, the protagonist�s actions are determined by the player. Where film would be full of �pre-digested plots, character and series of events�, games generate their own psychology and have no need to create empathy when their player literally is the protagonist. There is no way a team of writers can lead the player around by the nose as it would a normal TV audience, they can only create the story world and leave it to the player to move through it.

Landlord Vigilante co-creator, Jessica Hutchins, then showed us a clip from her work that she helped create with Eddo Stern. Using material from games Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, The Sims 2 and Hitman, the character Lesley Shirley was created. A voice over was chosen over simple text to bring a more authentic feel of film to the piece with the program Crazy Talk used to manipulate the model�s lip for synching.

There was then a clip from Stolen Life, made by Jackie Turnure and Peter Rasmussen (Read Samo�s interview with them here) as a �hybrid� machinima piece that used both a game engine and Maya in order to �speed things up� production-wise and to allow for better manipulation. Peter described his anthropomorphic characters as a way for him to communicate ideas about our humanity � that it isn�t simply in a physical representation � and what the nature of intelligence is. Jackie described herself as the �objective eye� of the project, explaining the way they had managed a balance between making these characters extremely human while not crossing the Uncanny Valley.

Damian Scott then showed a clip of his Lab Requiem before sharing his thoughts on the state of machinima. For Damian, machinima (or Mack-in-ee-ma � he thought the accepted pronunciation made it seem soft and �mushy�) was full of limitations and that the majority of machinima was either comedy, surrealism or a mixture of the two thought it was slowly beginning to mature. The Orwellian themes of mistrusting future technology was what drew him to machinima and the ways he could make his games more cinematic � bringing machinima into a game world to intensify the game and involve the player more. He called the third person shots �fetishing the action� and that emotions could be drawn out by the camera. Paul Marino chimed in with his thoughts that the character development had now become an �evolution of culture, evolution of audience� and that traditional film methods were now becoming more and more obsolete as the audience gains more responsibility in the story telling and becomes the driving force of the narrative as opposed to being just passive observers.

Machinima has merged between traditional passive media and the new interactive. The drive of the audience has made more and more pieces come with a number of layers to them, enabling them to appeal to wider audiences as well as to encourage repeat viewing. The limitations of machinima may hinder some and encourage others but as its popularity grows (all were in agreement here), script writing was becoming much more complex and less straight-forward.

Reel 2

Highlights from the second reel of Festival award winners included the adorable Male Restroom Etiquette, Silver Bells and Golden Spurs, and Tra5hTa1k. All worth checking out.

Eddo Stern and Jessica Hutchins

This section showcased some of Eddo Stern�s work, most notably Tekken Torture Tournament and the Cockfight Arena. Each experimental games in which the games was linked to the physical world. In Tekken Torture Tournament, held in Los Angeles, players were hooked up to a machine that would give their arm electric shocks depending on the size of the damage received and how long they had played � by the end of the tournament, you saw players with gnarled fingers and strained muscles just trying to bash a button, any button without incurring any more shocks. Needless to say, it was a great success. Cockfight Arena was nowhere near as painful with players dressed up with wings and headgear complete with a beak. The roosters would then flap their wings to gain height and then attack by nodding their heads� beaks in order to make the game rooster peck its opponent.

As a treat, we were able to watch the entire Landlord Vigilante where the title character is described as an �arthritic ninja�. They discussed the ways the piece showed the way narrative strength worked with animation styles and techniques. Although graphics were blurry and somewhat clunky, the narrative held the piece together as quite engaging. Jessica Hutchins talked of how visual media has been growing more prominent in society and that the actual visuals of media have become for more important than the audio in regards to story telling and audience � sound came second to what they could do visually with Landlord Vigilante

With that, the first day of ACMI�s Machinima Film Festival came to a close.

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