Welcome Back
new messages
0 new forum posts
10 Game Industry Questions - Rob Blackadder

10 Game Industry Questions - Rob Blackadder

10 Questions by Cav

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2

Review by Cormac

Paul Mackman - Rebellion

Paul Mackman - Rebellion

Interview by Luke

Interview with Stolen Life

Interview from Samo - Thursday, 05 April 2007 @ 12:00am

One of the feature teams at this year’s ACMI Machinima Festival were Peter Rasmussen and Jackie Turnure, creators of machinima feature-length film Stolen Life. Both are extraordinarily committed to machinima as a medium, right to the point where they spent money out of their own pockets to bring their dream to life. Along the way they worked with names such as Chris Jones (Tex Murphy) and Claudia Black (Stargate, Farscape) who provided the voices for the lead characters Pi and Kieru. The film is described by them as ‘Future Noir’ an eclectic mix of Science Fiction and Film Noir which creates a dark and moody tale of mystery and intrigue set in a refuelling station on a lonely asteroid. Peter and Jackie were kind enough to take a few minutes out of their schedule at the Machinima Festival to stop and have a chat with Australian Gamer.





Samo: You obviously very committed to machinima, did you find it difficult to stay committed to the medium for a feature film when it would have been much easier to get funding for the film if it was made in a traditional sense?

Peter Rasmussen: One of the reasons I went to machinima is filmmaking in Sydney has been so tough recently. Most of it is, as a writer, you find a director that likes the project you work up the project with the director and once you have a reasonable draft you might get funding for development or you might have to do it on your own once you’ve got that you need a producer who likes the project and then the producer works for a couple of years trying to get money to actually make the thing, it’s such a long protracted process which might take years and at the end of it, it might all fall over and all you’ve got is a pile of paper. Whereas with this, even if it doesn’t turn out the way you want, if you don’t finish the entire thing, at least you’ve got something to make a trailer out of to show. At least you’ve got something constructed. So once we got started, every day there are little victories you accomplish something you couldn’t do before, every day you’re accumulating stuff, making more out of the project. So just by the business of doing it, it’s encouraging. It’s about the business of filmmaking, rather than the business of deal making. There was in independent American filmmaker who said “If I’m serious about filmmaking, I have to get out of the industry.” I think the joy of machinima is you can get your hands on the stuff and actually make the stuff without getting permission from anyone.

Jackie Turnure: The other thing is, because we were doing a film about robots, we weren’t just choosing robots because robots are easy to animate in a 3D program than people. The story was about robots for a reason and for us to create it in a traditional way would have been a 10 million dollar film. We’ve made something for a small speck of that and if we pay everyone back it will be more like $300,000, but $300,000 for an animated feature is nothing. Realistically, for us to even entertain the idea of doing it the traditional way, we might have gotten more traditional funding to get the script happening but getting the production off the ground would have been much more difficult. Also the amount of people, as a director to work with nine or ten people is really nice, on Happy Feet there are a thousand people, George Miller wouldn’t even have had contact with some of those people working on that film so for the idea of going into a major animated film with so many people working on it, it’s so off the clock in terms of where we come from and where we want to go.

Samo: Because there are no real precedents set for machinima as a feature film, you did actually spend your own money on the film didn’t you?

Jackie Turnure: Yes, we’ve heavily invested and I think the hours, Peter was full time for two years and me part time for two years, so you can imagine the deferred money. We haven’t paid ourselves anything yet and expenses like flying to Salt Lake City to record Chris (Jones), that was just us paying for us to go there and that was a big expense.

Samo: Such an amazing commitment, now Peter your background is in film with the first foray into machinima was with Rendezvous in 2000 which was nominated for best picture, best acting, best writing, best independent film at the 2002 Machinima awards in New York, not bad for a first go with a new media!

Peter Rasmussen: I think at the particular time, most of the machinima was a bit more raw, people were just getting their feet and because I come from filmmaking I had an understanding of structure and I could see that it was a quicker way of doing the short project and I think that it’s just that having the understanding of delivering a story and again, it’s just two characters floating in space so I tried to keep it as simple as possible. I think the reason it was successful is that people identified with the characters, there was a charming chemistry between the characters and the story had a nice development and conclusion.

Samo: Did you find it easy to make the transition from real filmmaking to machinima? Obviously there are different challenges with each medium.

Peter Rasmussen: Certainly, creatively the transition is, I have this idea in my head, and then I just want to get it on the screen. There are technical limitations, and you have to look at what the technology is capable of doing and rather than thinking of its shortcomings, you think of taking the strengths and working on those and working in terms of stylisation rather than try to recreate the real world.

Samo: I guess the beauty of machinima is that because of the real time rendering, there are infinite possibilities in terms of experimentation with camera angles etc...

Peter Rasmussen: Absolutely, in Stolen Life even when the thing was entirely finished, we were able to get somebody in and redo some of the models and so on and you redo the model once and every time you re-shoot it that model is the better version throughout the entire film.

Jackie Turnure: For me it’s actually closer to live action than doing traditional animation, because in traditional animation, everything is boarded and you’re really committing at the storyboard stage and it’s not like shooting a film where you might shoot coverage, a close up, a dolly shot round here, and then in the edit decide how we’re going to cut it together. Whereas in this, if I was directing a shoot, I walk onto a set, I’ve done a storyboard I’ve got a rough idea, but then there’s the set I’m sitting on and there’s a tree there and maybe if I come around I can get that. That’s what we were doing; we were on our virtual set with our characters blocking the camera and blocking our actors and playing around, so to me it actually felt more like live action than movie animation.






Peter Rasmussen: I’m not sure because I haven’t used my high-end animation thing, but I’m presuming they do each scene as a discrete thing and then edit it together later. I’ve actually got the software set up so I can output the scenes ready for playback and once I’m in Gamestudio, even though this clip has ended it leads on to the next one so I’m getting the experience of the thing, even though it hasn’t been rendered to video yet. I’m able to experience half a chapter in one go.

Jackie Turnure: The scenes are running live with all the voices and the characters but you’re moving around it like a game.

Peter Rasmussen: I might have just rendered a clip and if I feel it’s out of context I can go and watch the clips leading up to it and see how it feels and if it jars, it might start a bit too slow or if the pacing of it’s wrong I can see that immediately rather than learning about that later in the cut.

Samo: Because of the nature of machinima, the real time rendering etc, it obviously can never be up to the standard of a fully animated film. Because of this, can machinima go main stream and capture a main stream audience?

Peter Rasmussen: I think that depends on how sophisticated the approach is. You look at something like South Park, its mainstream but its pretty low end. It’s really just how you construct the characters and the story, and how well you use the qualities of the medium that you’re working with. Take the Warner Brothers cartoons, the reason that they work is because they’re stylised. Not being able to do photo-realistic things is not a disadvantage, in some ways it’s an advantage because you’re free, you don’t have to think about it. You need to think about the strengths of the medium. It’s like if you’re working in oils, there are things that oils are strong in and there are things that it just can’t do, so the artist finds out what they are and that’s what they work with.

Jackie Turnure: I also think that games, the whole graphics quality going up, you look at the latest games and they’re so cinematic that even the non-gamer can find something in them.

Peter Rasmussen: There is something about the aesthetic, it’s can be quite undefinable in that it’s something that’s not quite real, it’s just the fact that it’s three dimensional means that it’s in our world. There’s a kind of magic in-between universe that you’re taken into that you don’t actually have access to if you’re shooting something that’s live action.

Jackie Turnure: The big question with any animation, is why animation and not live action? There has to be a pretty compelling reason why it has to be animated. Obviously with us, we could have done a live action version of Killer Robot if we wanted to build robots that ran around by remote control and build huge sets but we didn’t want to do that.

Peter Rasmussen: I have a problem with that argument because people say, this could have been done with humans, if it was a human story but that would mean there’s no point in doing portraiture in watercolours or oil. Anybody that’s looked at portraiture can see that you get something out of that, that you don’t with, say, there’s a place for black and white still photography, for colour still photography, for...

Jackie Turnure: But that’s what I mean the reason for painting a portrait, you have a reason for doing it, it’s not just because it’s the cheapest, oh I can’t afford real actors so I’m going to do a painting. The reason, I think is a meaningful reason.






Samo: Now you worked with Chris Jones on Stolen Life, obviously gamers have a very fond memory of Chris Jones from his role as Tex Murphy. Did that have any bearing on the decision to cast him in the role of Pi?

Peter Rasmussen: It seemed like a really shrewd way to go, as a fan of the Tex Murphy things myself, I want to play the next Tex Murphy game or he had a brief series of radio plays and as soon as a found out they were available I downloaded them all and listened to them all, if he did anything, I’d consume it. So I knew that if I felt that way, then there’d be a whole population of other fans who thought that way. So that seemed to be a great reason to involve him in this but also I knew that the Pi character was a perfect fit.

Jackie Turnure: It was to get someone who could talk in that detective sort of Humphrey Bogart Film Noir. If it’s done in a kind of parody, it undermines all the pathos of it. The character is somebody that is a well known archetype, a very tough exterior; I don’t care about anything but deeply cares. Part of the film’s revelation is that he’s really lonely. He’s projecting this image of himself, like I’m this independent guy who doesn’t need anyone, but of course he’s like anybody and he’s deeply lonely and he doesn’t know it himself. He connects with Kieru on a profound level, not just a romantic level, because she is also deeply lonely because it’s really hard to be at the top, as the boss, you can never really be friends with all your underlings, she also has this kind of deep loneliness. The thing that reassured me about Chris’ performance is that we didn’t want it to be Tex so we recorded it away from Tex slightly but we knew that we weren’t going to get somebody who was taking the piss out of the hardboiled detective, or doing it in a way that was false. We had to really believe this guy was a Film Noir detective and I hope any good actor would do that but we had to find that voice whereas we knew we already had that voice.

Peter Rasmussen: Chris is so impressive because he’s got that range, he can bring you into the moment that you believe how serious the thing is but he’s still got that wonderful playfulness that he can’t resist, just tampering with it, putting a bit of humour in there. But he’s got a really strong understanding, in the pickups we were adding some stuff and you keep discovering what sensitivity he’s got for the work, even though you may not have discussed it with him. He’s got this really strong intellectual comprehension, an intuitive comprehension.

Samo: We starting to get short on time but I have two more questions, firstly, are you gamers yourselves?

Peter Rasmussen: I am.

Jackie Turnure: I am, the first game I really got into was Indigo Prophecy and the other game I’m interested in is Facade which is this interactive fiction. My husband is a big gamer and plays all the shooters and I’m always looking over his shoulder and I always decide to do the training and look around but as soon as the shooting starts I just lose interest. I’m part of that demographic, that Indigo Prophecy games like that.

Samo: Story driven?

Jackie Turnure: Yeah, still action but story driven, games like that. Also what I liked about Indigo, is that many times, if there’s a combat situation there’s usually another way of solving it, that I can get through by being clever or making a choice and I really liked that. I’m also very interested in Second Life; I spend a lot of time in there, I work for the Australian Film Television and Radio School and we’ve got an island set up in there, the whole role playing game virtual environment is something I really like exploring.

Peter Rasmussen: I started out on the adventure games like Grim Fandango, I’m terribly fond of those and I wish those games could grow a little bit more but I’ve also gotten drawn into the shooters like Halo and Quake. Unfortunately my machine isn’t fast enough to play Battlefield 2. I’m keen, as soon as anything new comes out I like to download the demo and see if it’s the sort of thing that I like. I put a lot of energy into doing research because aside from the cost, there’s something really disappointing about buying a game and discovering that it’s not actually to your taste.






Samo: For any budding machinima directors that may be reading, what sort of advice can you give to them to get started on their way?

Peter Rasmussen: Well to sort of get their hands on the stuff, I think machinima.com has got a start up package, a sort of Quake 2 package and that’s not a bad way to go. I haven’t researched it, but I hear the sandbox in Unreal Tournament seems like a good way to go. I think the pre-set packages are a good way to sort of test the water and try them out. The road that I’ve taken is a fairly daunting one, but it’s because I knew that I wanted a particular amount of control and I’ve had to write a lot of software myself. I did a lot of experimentation with Quake 2 and that informed my choices further down the road.

Jackie Turnure: Also something like Second Life is a good place to sort of record, they’ve got a really good setup but also looking at FRAPS I think what I would suggest is rather than just going in there and recording a game and trying to cut it together, is to actually write a one to three minute scenario with something funny or moving or whatever you’re interested in. Just a little two hander. Then go in using FRAPS just pick one location and a couple of characters and just start mucking around with creating a scene with two characters, practice recording, driving your characters around and then posting some kind of voice over and just get the feel of how, I think it will inspire you, because very quickly, even within three shots cut together and add a voice over, you can quickly start creating machinima and creating your own stories in a place that is familiar to you and you’re writing your own versions of stories that already exist.

Peter Rasmussen: Keep it simple. Keep it as simple as possible because it gets complicated very quickly. That was the thing I was trying to get across today is that I was trying to make the Stolen Live universe, the setup as simple as possible and it’s always what gives you the richest, the stuff with the most depth because there’s not a lot of junk there in the way and you get quite a lot closer to the characters, you get closer to the point of the story and you discover things about what attracted you to the story.

Jackie Turnure: Some of the best, like John Houston’s The Dead, the entire film apart from the last eight shots is a dinner party at a table, its one room and it’s totally clean. You don’t have to have multiple layers and a cast of thousands and helicopters. I think to start off, just write a scene between two characters. It could be a break up scene; it could be a fight it could be an argument but just do that much and then work it out because if it’s too ambitious to start with you hit the wall then you feel just like oh my god.

Peter Rasmussen: You’ll be exhausted.

Samo: Thank you very much for your time.

If you’d like to find out more about Stolen Life or Peter and Jackie, visit the official website at www.nanoflix.net


Discuss in official forum

Latest from Forum

Deejay @ 8:15am 2 Mar

"Would you like to be a Pepper too?"

Cartoon Boy @ 5:05pm 1 Mar

QUOTE (MickeyMOUSE @ Feb 12 2009, 12:21 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Gone With The Wind "Frankly My Dear I Dont Give A Damn"

CLICK!


My god, the word " damn " use to be such a swear word in the 1939's true fact look it up.


Didn't that cause like riots in the street, I mean I wouldn't know becaUSE i WAN'T ALIVE THEN , bUT Matt was.

"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse"
"Toto, i don't think we're in Kansas anymore."
"I lvoe the smell of napalm in the morniong. That strong thick gasoline smell, I love it!"
A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat"
"We rob banks"
"I see dead people!"
"it's Alive! IT'S ALIVE!"
"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."
"A boys best friend is his mother"
"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here this is the war room!"
"Hears Johnny!"
Just a couple from movies I've watched recently. You can tell I enjoy movies more then games.

Cartoon Boy @ 4:56pm 1 Mar



Schiggy @ 4:28pm 1 Mar

An entire generation waiting tables and pumping gas, slaves in white collars working jobs we hate, for shit, that we don't need. - Good line from Fight Club....he said typing on his laptop via wireless internet......HYPOCRASY

Lanky Picket @ 2:07pm 1 Mar

QUOTE
Pete: Wait a minute. Who elected you leader of this outfit?
Ulysses Everett McGill: Well Pete, I figured it should be the one with the capacity for abstract thought. But if that ain't the consensus view, then hell, let's put it to a vote.

Oh Brother, Where are Thou?

QUOTE
What you got back home, little sister, to play your fuzzy warbles on? I bet you got little save pitiful, portable picnic players. Come with uncle and hear all proper! Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are invited.

A Clockwork Orange.