Machinima expert Hugh Hancock is exploring with us the benefits of collaboratively making films using Machinima – particularly using Moviestorm.
This is a beautiful animation of a Byron poem made by Hugh.
Bloodspell is a feature film made by Hugh, released in 2007, and that ended up being the 2nd most watched film in Scotland in 2007. It cost $10,000 and was put together with 1 FT and numerous volunteer crew. It would have cost $40m as a real film! Its fast, cheap and enables you to get to the hard-to-reach or create work with people virtually. Machinima allows you to animate really quickly and to a really high aesthetic (if you like the computer game aesthetic).
Little Big Planet – a PS3 game you can significantly customise and that has just been recently released, allows you to create your own worlds, characters, and levels that you then share.
To see just how emotionally moving animation can be, check out Waltz With Bashir – released in the UK Nov 21st.
We’ve just a movie by giving instructions to a player in massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft over the phone whilst we filmed them here – a bizarre experience! One interesting point from Hugh is about differentiating videoed content from the “noise” / the amount of video on the internet – he thinks about how to market it first.