Machinima in 3 easy steps – plus advanced tips

“Machinima, a portmanteau of machine cinema, is filmmaking within a real-time, three-dimensional virtual environment which often uses 3D video game technologies. The first machinima film, entitled, Diary of a Camper, was originally created in 1996 by the Rangers (United Ranger Films) using Quake and was inspired by 1993’s Doom, which allowed players the ability to record gameplay. However, the term machinima was not coined until 1998 in response to an increasing use of other game engines to create movies.”

Thats a quote from this blog post from wikinomics.

We had a run in with machinima last January when we created our invitation to the first feature film screening in second life. We used the game like environment of second life to have characters representing susan and I talk to the camera, dance around, ski, swim and do other things to convey our idea. The idea was that the digital world is more ideal then the real world and the best we can hope for is to emulate the digital world in the real world. We showed that by explaining that in second life you have time for vacations with the people you love that you don’t have time for in real life. And that in second life you can instantly distribute your film all over the world and have interactive discussions with the audience during and after the film. That is exactly what we did and here is our machinima video:

So here is how you create Machinema in second life:

1. Create your characters in second life using the built in tools to change clothes and facial structure.

2. Use snapz pro to record your screen and try to use a frame rate of around 12 frames per second and if you have space save in the animation codec and if you don’t have space save in the DV codec. And chances are you don’t need to record or save any audio.

3. Edit together with your voice overs and music and then post.

MORE ADVANCED TECHNIQUES

LIP SYNCHING:

If you want to get more advanced, you can create a series of images that represent the mouth opening and closing. Crazytalk is an application that can create this. Then write a special script in second life that will display all of those images in time with the speaking. Brian Chirls did this for us by learning the second life scripting language and getting his hands dirty making it do what he wanted it to do. Another way to create lip movement is to overlay the movement in final cut pro using the crop tools to just replace the mouth area and the key frame tools in the motion tab to track the characters movement if needed.

CAMERA MOVEMENTS:

On of the biggest reasons to do machinima is that you get a world and character completely created for you and you just get to go around and shoot in it. One good way to show off the world is to have camera movement. So mess around for a while in second life and you’ll get good at holding down the option key while dragging the mouse to get your camera to move very slowly in a cinematic way. You can also get the keyboard shortcuts down that will follow a character. Just always have the record buttons ready or maybe even be already recording because sometimes you loose a shot because you have to let go of the keys to engage the recording software.

CHARACTER BLOCKING:

Make sure you have help. You need to operate the camera so you’ll need other people logged in to do what you want them to do with the characters. These people should have experience moving characters around in second life since it’s a little bit complicated sometimes and you want it all to be as natural as possible.

SPECIAL POSES:

In second life you have to buy, borrow or make poses and movements. So when we have our characters dance, we had to go get that dance script and run it. And when we lie down on the blanket at the beach, we had to buy that script. So look around, chances are you can find any script you can think of, make friends too. The poses infront of the sundance channel sign were donated by a random secondlifer that just happened to be passing through.

CONCLUSION:

So your reason for making machinima might be as simple as ours which is that we had an event in second life so we wanted to use the technique or it might be your main filmmaking medium as is the case with this series that sold to HBO and will soon air. Either way, machinima is pretty fun and another interesting filmmaking exercise that does translate knowledge about real life filmmaking techniques as well. Thats how I view second life anyway. As a place to try out social experiments that can later inform your real life.

This image is from the series “My Second Life” that sold to HBO.

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