Blind sets standard for all World of Warcraft-inspired machinimas |
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| BY Kristen Spencer Dec. 31st, 2008 | More on: |
Even if you’ve only recently emerged from your sensory deprivation chamber, you’ve probably heard of Machinima, the art of creating miniature animated flicks from the nuts and bolts of existing gameworld graphics engines. This emergent genre of film is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of gamers, but it’s also sometimes a testament to these same individuals’ inability to manipulate characters or organize storylines beyond a silly dance or witty repartee.
That’s not the case in Blind, a World of Warcraft-inspired vignette from Percula that delivers all the action of a Bruckheimer blockbuster. It really showcases what a dedicated and determined machinimators can create using just the in-game tools at their disposal. The manipulation of the characters is masterful and the editing of the action is energetic, though I did prefer the second viewing in which I muted the sound. If only someone could combine the frenetic pacing of Blind with the clever dialogue of wildy-successful but action-deprived Red vs. Blue, they’d be sitting on a machinima goldmine.
December 31st, 2008
at 4:23 pm
You know, if it wasn’t for that insanely annoying music, then this film would be genius.
December 31st, 2008
at 4:56 pm
The difference between this and most machinimas. The person is skilled enough to extract the models and textures from WoW and then rig and animate the models by hand. Alot of the animation in this are custom and not in the game.
December 31st, 2008
at 5:04 pm
Yeah, that music has got to go. It works much better as a silent film.
December 31st, 2008
at 7:41 pm
LOL, there are sound effects you know, and the music matches the video. Don’t watch it w/o the sound.
January 1st, 2009
at 3:46 am
…………………………..Worst music ever, good video though
January 1st, 2009
at 4:05 am
i don’t watch machinima too often but of all movies that i’ve seen so far this’ one of the best. decent story, good animation, bad wow graphics but what can u expect of wow and very bad music. as ppl before me said, “that music has got to go”! what were the lyrics in? japanese and english? it’s not that ppl don’t understand them or something, it’s the rythm of the songs, the melody which does not really fit with the story and animation. anyway, overall this was a good machinima movie. nice. u keep doing this.
p.s. the editor of the article should refrain from writing about stuff that he’s not familiar with. discarding so many other gd machinima producers is bad. u have no idea what u’r talking about.
January 4th, 2009
at 12:44 am
Firstly, I love this piece.
Secondly: Kristen I have to agree with some of the others, it’d be nice to see a little follow-up work done before you knock a group, even if only by saying they should live up to a standard. Percula has already told other sites he/she is a former game developer who’s got some time on his hands thanks to recent economic troubles. I’m guessing he was a Cinematic Animator for somebody, although what studio he was with hasn’t been revealed yet. But he’s obviously a fantastic animator. I’m going to draw a distinct line between “animator” and “puppeteer” since you used the phrase, “using just the in-game tools at their disposal.”
Allow me to educate you a little in the ways of WoW machinima.
Most of the stuff you were complaining about is the lowest level, least complicated method of making WoW machinima. It’s done entirely in-game. That means on real servers, with a guy using wasd and his /emotes. A few decent pieces have been made this way, but only because of good scripts, most of its trash as you noted. This would be “true” machinima.
Then theirs the next tier up: Machinima that uses programs such as Mapviewer, Modelviewer, Aftereffects, etc. This is where one rips the character out of the game, shoots them on the equivalent of a greenscreen while they run animations that are available in the game, shoots some footage of the background in another program (maybe in game, depends) then composites it all together, much as was done in classic 2d animation. You tend to see a lot of lense flare and special effects during these, stuff added in using Aftereffects. The flying knives in this current piece are a good example, as is the breaking of the chain and the falling lantern. This type is only “in game” as in that the art assets, animation assets and such actually exist somewhere in WoW. We still call it machinima even though it kind of breaks the definition of taking place in a virtual 3d environment, technically mostly 2d composited scenes.
Finally you reach what our friend Percula has done: Ripping the animation rigs out of the data files, creating custom animations in 3d Max or Maya (or some such), and either importing levels into his 3d program (not sure if you can do that, I’m not an animator) and runs his animations. As you’ve noticed, this takes a lot of skill and he should definitely be applauded for this piece, but calling it a “standard for machinima” is really stretching the definition a little. The character and level art assets were the only pieces you could find in game.
This is as far from “using just the in-game tools at their disposal” that you can get without shooting live-action film and compositing it in as well. It takes a lot of outside software, and professional level talent (which is ok, machinima doesn’t technically say you have to be an amateur filmmaker, but those of us who’ve moved from the machinima community to the game developer community constantly argue whether or not what we do, working in game engines to create cinematics, is still technically “machinima”. We usually just end up agreeing it would be bad form to submit a game for a machinima award ;)
As for story? Yeah, a good job of non-verbal story telling, but really? Any depth to it? Girl tries to kill demon disguised as human. Human male tries to stop her. That’s a setup for a scene but it’s hardly a paragon of storytelling. “Edge of Remorse” came out 2-3 years ago had an actual conclusion, and was essentially the same story. Couple people fighting over another one. My WoW machinima days are a bit behind me but I keep up enough to know there are a multitude of movies with stories at least as engaging, although not nearly so thrilling in their fight sequences.
That being said I agree, this is one of the best pieces I’ve seen recently, Percula’s got talent. Just…phrase yourself a little better ;)
January 5th, 2009
at 1:49 pm
Thanks for the comments! I was a little out of my field on this one, but I definitely didn’t mean to knock machinima or machinimators - quite the opposite in fact. I’m just really new to it and let my enthusiam to post what I thought was an interesting introductory example among the many awesome mini-machinima movies get the better of me. I hope to learn and share more machinima. Thanks to everyone for the patience and the mini-crash course!
January 10th, 2009
at 12:10 pm
what music you use
February 26th, 2009
at 11:46 pm
Just a late addition to this, I hear a lot of people that don’t like the music. I, personally, find it a bit annoying to mix Japanese and English but it’s pretty evident to me that the choreography in this machinima was purely inspired by the music. That makes it ok to me.
I believe Percula stated something of the sort. A lot of us are artists in some aspect and I can understand and appreciate the video with the music as a complete work. So I’m ok with it if he credits Namie Amuro’s song as inspiring enough for him to make this in his down time. I’m sure that he never imagined that he’d get such a recognized response.
I’m sure some guy somewhere saw a painting of a man dressed like a woman, in his opinion, only to be drowned out by the praise/controversy of something called the Mona Lisa later. Not to say this video is anything on that scale, but it’s an artist’s creation that came from something that he found inspiring which makes it art nonetheless.
At least almost everyone agrees that it’s #1 or so in the list of WoW machinima’s out there. The music will always be a disagreeable point now and in the future.
Ok, just thought I’d say that. Night folks!