For about a week or two, I’ve attempting to make some of my own machinima. How this sudden urge came about, I have no idea — I’m no big fan of Red VS Blue or…whatever else is popular in the machinima world. (In my video collection, among the many demos and goofy clips of “regular” game footage, exactly two machinima are present: the classic Apartment Huntin’ from the Quake 1 era, and the more recent A Few Good G-Men, the latter of which has marginal appeal.)
Nonetheless, I’ve been spending a bit of time in Half-Life 2 and Deus Ex with a few ideas of my own — not good ideas, mind you, but those buzzing bees around have to be released somewhere.
The first project used the Half-Life 2 engine and was a sad little thing called Mean Mad at Mossman. The plot of Mean Mad was, in its entirety, dashing around Black Mesa East like a mad ape while unloading various ordance into Mossman: Firing crates at her head, hopping around, bouncing Combine balls around in small rooms, shooting rockets at the wall, etc. This sounds like a good idea, unless you’ve actually played a bit of Half-Life 2: When you attempt to inflict damage (or any world event at all) upon a friendly actor such as Mossman, the character does not react at all. Nothing. No blood from bullets, no big meaty chunks from grenades.
This lack of reaction makes any attempted amusement from dealing out to death to moving actors on-screen a complete failure: Unload an entire magazine from a sub-machine gun into Mossman’s intellectual-elite features, and she’d still be blabbing on about the Black Mesa portal technology. Bo-ring.
I deleted all the footage from Mean Mad at Mossman, since after taking roughly thirty minutes of footage, it was obvious the best thing about the finished machinima would have been the title.
My second recent attempt at machinima fame came about during a second attempt of making a movie immolating Mossman. Already sounds like the next Citizen Kane, doesn’t it? For this next stunning production, I chose to employ Garry’s Mod, which at least would let me shoot models and have ‘em show a little physical kickback at the flying hot lead (although now they’d just be static models with absolutely no speaking or animation — win some, lose a lot).
However, in the midst of “production” — that is, attaching a rope to the top of Mossman’s head, attaching the other end to a wall, and then firing off the gravity gun so she’d fly around and smack gruesomely into objects — the model I was using decided that it’d had enough of my direction and began to ad-lib the scene.
The model, already hovering two feet off of the ground, began moving in a linear direction, coasting towards a nearby wall, and twisting its body around with the head as the pivot (encoded in XViD, about a MB large). I immediately began shooting footage, realizing (somewhat sadly) that a bug in the game probably had better ideas how to make interesting machinima then I did. The model continued along the level, twisting and coasting peacefully — until it met the wall, imbedding the upper body into digital brick and convulsing the lower half in a most, say, unnatural fashion.
As if frantic seizures weren’t enough for the making of the next Nosferatu, the model would occasionally pause its savage dance in mid-spasm, allowing the viewer to notice the legs of the model, which appeared to have been brutally snapped, bent, and reshaped into appendages that more resembled the shapes of cracks in concrete. Shooting the model would restart the frenzied flailing.
I knew I had the clay for bona-fide, true-blood, blockbuster hit in my hands. Now it just needed a little molding, a little touching-up, a little love.
Just kidding. While the footage was fun (in that not-so-fun kind of way) and the material somewhat creepy, watching a model goof off is about as exciting as an in-game character not reacting to being bonked on the head with a big metal chair. Attempts were made to round up the footage into a Silent Hill-esque trailer of sorts by some finessed editing and a variety of digital effects: blur, motion blurring, slowed or sped-up frame rate, and so on. Let the computer do all the hard work — yes, like making my machinima into something decent. Har har.
Trying to mould the impromptu footage into a decent bit of machinima was like trying to teach a headless, wingless duck how to swim: It would never be able to exercise the muscle and fat enough to be tasty.
The “final,” lame version of Mossman Possessed (XViD, ~2.5 MB) features a typical flailing-around clip and Porcupine Tree’s Trains “mechanized” and played backwards. It is not scary. Enjoy.
This illustrious track record brings us to the present, when a decision has been made to switch development studios from Half-Life 2 to Deus Ex, trailblazing the production for Bedlam in Battery Park, undoubtably the next Battleship Potemkin.
Bedlam has the disctinction of being the first machinima of this awkward trio of creations to actually have a modicum of pre-production in the form of a script — the quality of this script, written on the back of a printout for Oklahoma’s Withholding return underpayment worksheet (whew) during work, is evident only in the repeated claims to kill bums and sick people. The final scene of Bedlam even revolves around a grand tripping-out sequence after taking zyme, Deus Ex’s narcotic for the future. Quality, non?
Okay, so perhaps Bedlam in Battery Park has as much chance for greatness as Spam has for appearing in a four-star restaurant, but I will not be repelled from my grand machinima-making endeavors. Heck, I’ve even gone ahead and made a teaser-trailer for the imminent four-star production Bedlam in Battery Park (might be XViD, could be about 2 MB).
And how many times have people seen a good trailer, only to have the movie turn out to suck outright? That can’t happen, right?
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