Machinima directors use bits of code cobbled together from video games tocreate low-budget films on their computers, writes Danny O'Brien
Later this month, curious cinema enthusiasts will gather at a film festival in the suburban splendour of Mesquite, near Dallas, Texas. At the Trail Dust restaurant, between the Texas-sized steaks and the rodeo next door, they'll sit down to peruse a raft of movies delivered direct from the harddrives of indy directors' PCs.
The movies they'll watch will be recreated at each showing, with each scene recreated from a script that describes props, scenery and the actor's every move, but leaves the images to be painted as they're seen, by a computer, in real time.
Every one of the films will have been written on a microscopic budget, on standard home computers, using bits of code cobbled together from commercial video games. Indeed, many of the actors they'll see will be repurposed video game characters - plays acted as, as it were, by the descendants of Pac Man.
This is machinima, and it gives an insight to the future not only of computer-generated animation business, but perhaps one day, all movies. It's also a textbook lesson in how Moore's Law is bleeding into every industry.
Moore's Law says that the number of transistors on a square inch of microchip doubles every 18 months. By extension, this means that the speed and complexity of computing hardware increases exponentially. But PCs aren't the only component that benefits from Moore's Law. The specialised hardware used to create three-dimensional scenery is on the same J-shaped trajectory.
Thirty years ago, real-time three-dimensional graphics - video hardware that could portray a simple scene on a monitor as quickly as a computer could calculate it - were restricted to flight simulators and military levels of investment. Now that capability is found in many desktop PCs, inside video cards produced by companies like billion dollar Silicon Valley companies such as nVidia and ATI.
These video cards were designed to cater to the insatiable needs, and disposable budgets, of serious PC game players. These days, complex video games, like those flight simulators, sketch out their three-dimensional universes as simple scene descriptions - put a wall here, move a rocket into that man over there. Because these are interactive games, that description keeps changing, and so the depiction has to keep up. To keep the gameplay fast and furious, the painting of the scene - with all its vivid texture and detail - is left to dedicated hardware in the video card. The better the hardware, the more photorealistic the scene, and the quicker it is presented on screen.
In a world where most of the commodity PC hardware has little incentive to innovate, the speed of development among these high-premium video cards is impressive. Modern cards are now getting to the point that they can depict complex scenery - and, more importantly, complex actions by recognisably human characters - in real time, on a home PC.
Nowhere near the tortuously constructed marvels of Titanic, Final Fantasy and Toy Story. But good enough, certainly, to attract the attention of those with a yearning to make their mark on the big screen.
Scenes cranked out on video cards using video game software have two advantages to the fledgling director: both hardware and software can be grabbed off the shelf for hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. And they run in real time, which means that instead of mimicking the long, laborious process of creating animated movies (as modern Hollywood CGI does), machinima directors work the same way as live action movie directors. They put the props in position, call out action, and direct the scene as it rolls out in front of them. If it doesn't look right, they can try it again until it is right. Just like replaying a game.
The movies you'll see at Mesquite - or at your local desktop box office, if you download them from http://www.machinima.com/ - are not exactly high- quality productions. Escaping from the mould set by the computer-game code they borrow heavily from is difficult. Most feel more like trailers to a video game, not works in their own right. And from (admittedly often charming) failings in plot, dialog and characterisation, the graphics themselves seem unimpressive compared to what we are accustomed to seeing on the big screen.
"Machinima compromises quality to reach spontaneity," concedes one of the movements' British founders, Mr Hugh Hancock. But already the approach is achieving results that neither conventional film-making nor traditional computer-generated animation can manage without a great deal of effort. And while most of its camerawork is traditional, it can occasionally pull off tracking shots and movements that would be impossible on a traditional set.
But, as in all film-making, the real result is the bottom line. Machinima is cheap. Very cheap. A standard PC will do as your camera, set, cast and crew. And while the quality means that Hollywood is unworried for now, machinima is already on the march into its markets.
Hancock's machinima company, Strange Company, started producing shorts from hacked-around video game code five years ago. Now his evangelising at independent film festivals is financed by the company's professional machinima work for TV and video production houses. Cheap animation with high-speed turnaround has a large potential audience.
And while it's low-budget, low-quality productions now, Moore's Law says it will get even cheaper and better with every 18-month generation of video card. Budgets for film and TV, long set on a skyrocketing course by blockbusters and ever more demanding audiences, will soon bump into the traditional plummeting prices of Moore's machines.
Machinima's advocates are ready for their close-up: the Mesquite festival is already organised by the humbly named Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.
In conversation, they're a bit more restrained. "I'm not sure whether machinima will survive as a genre in its own right," admits Mr Hancock, "But that's because traditional film-making, computer-generated animation and puppeteering are all on a collision course with it. The future of movies will be a mix of them all."
And when that happens, the young directors of the future might find their best training will come, not as a gopher at a studio or a draughtsman at an animation house, or even a Hi-8 wielding film student, but as a game hacker in their own bedroom.
