Personal Project Write Up
The Last Storyteller – A World of Warcraft Machinima
By: Jacek Mackiewicz
Supervised by: Alex Rawson
International School Basel 2011-2012
Word Count: 3,460
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction
My goal for this project was to create a short animated movie, using the new technique known as “machinima”. Although this was the broad goal, my strict purpose was to create a movie which could be enjoyed by everyone. Since machinima is a new way of movie making, it isn’t very popular amongst “non-gamers”. People that don’t play video games, usually aren’t interested in everything that surrounds them, and so don’t know about machinima. I wanted to change this with my project, I wanted to show my teachers, and the parents of my friends, what video games can be used for, how art can be created with them. I wanted to show how it shouldn’t matter whether a movie is animated from scratch, made with real actors, or uses a certain game’s assets, what really matters is the art of creating the movie, the story that it tells and the way it influences it’s audience. And that was my ultimate goal, to get the audience, no matter what age or gender, to think. Whether it’s about the story that I have written, the times we live in which allow everyone to create a movie using simple programs, or maybe creating a story on their own, my goal was to provoke something in all my viewers.
There are actually many reasons for me having chosen this project. Many inspirations worked together, but I think there are two main ones which really stand out. The first inspiration is my utter love for games. Any game, whether by a huge studio or a small two man team developer, I simply love games, and I’ve always enjoyed drawing characters from them, writing characters’ back stories, etc. As long as I got to be creative with something already given to me. As you can tell, this is what machinima is all about. When you are given tools, what will you do with them? What kind of story will you create? My second inspiration is the amount of machinima I have myself watched. There are thousands of them on YouTube. And I will never forget when I first saw “Tales of the Past III” a whole 88 minute machinimated world of warcraft movie. In this case, the movie told a story about the game, but it was an incredible movie. And it truly showed off what can be done with machinima. Ever since I watched that movie, I always wanted to try creating a machinima myself. Martin Falch who was the director of that movie, was a huge inspiration as his other, shorter machinima were always very entertaining, they had great story which really left you squeezed in your chair thinking. I think he was my biggest inspiration along with Oxhorn who creates short, 5 minute comedy machinimas that me and my sister always watched and laughed. And I wanted to try my hand at something like that.
There are actually many reasons for me having chosen this project. Many inspirations worked together, but I think there are two main ones which really stand out. The first inspiration is my utter love for games. Any game, whether by a huge studio or a small two man team developer, I simply love games, and I’ve always enjoyed drawing characters from them, writing characters’ back stories, etc. As long as I got to be creative with something already given to me. As you can tell, this is what machinima is all about. When you are given tools, what will you do with them? What kind of story will you create? My second inspiration is the amount of machinima I have myself watched. There are thousands of them on YouTube. And I will never forget when I first saw “Tales of the Past III” a whole 88 minute machinimated world of warcraft movie. In this case, the movie told a story about the game, but it was an incredible movie. And it truly showed off what can be done with machinima. Ever since I watched that movie, I always wanted to try creating a machinima myself. Martin Falch who was the director of that movie, was a huge inspiration as his other, shorter machinima were always very entertaining, they had great story which really left you squeezed in your chair thinking. I think he was my biggest inspiration along with Oxhorn who creates short, 5 minute comedy machinimas that me and my sister always watched and laughed. And I wanted to try my hand at something like that.
The primary specifications for this “dream” of mine were to create an 8 minute comedy/spoof movie, machinimated using World of Wacraft. I had a book of funny quotes I could use, characters I could mimic from other movies, etc. This idea of mine was quickly dropped when I realized that making my movie a spoof would limit the audience a lot. Most adults wouldn’t get the references, and some teenagers probably wouldn’t either. 8 minutes was also a stretch as I found out just how much time it takes to create a machinima. I changed my specifications into making an animated, voice acted machinima about the art of storytelling itself. I wanted to make a story about telling stories. This was influenced by my thoughts and conversations with friends, how I noticed that stories are getting rarer, people prefer television and the internet to a good story.
This ties in well with my area of interaction, Human Ingenuity. My product has pretty much everything to do with human ingenuity. Not because it’s something that I created, the reason is far more complex.
I wrote the story for the machinima, and although you don’t see much of it in the actual video (due to montage, cutting out bits, making sure it’s not too long) I tried to create a whole world. There was a story with multiple characters, plots, etc. that is one side of human ingenuity, creating something. Such as creating a story for a movie that I will be making as well. But it’s also exploring a new art form, creating using new technologies which were unheard of 10 years ago. Machinima has been around for 20 years or so, but it only really became popular recently, in the last 5 years with the creation of it’s YouTube channel. It was human ingenuity that allowed machinima to exist in the first place, when gamers recorded themselves playing with a camera and then added voice over to it. Programs kept being developed allowing directors filming within the game as if it was an animation studio. With the rise of new technologies, new software, it’s easier for people to make their own movies, anyone can become a writer or a director, which really spreads up peoples wings, allows them access to a brand new art form which is easily approachable from a making and viewing perspective. Not only that, but human ingenuity takes over the whole process. From writing the story, to creating the script, to creating the characters (their clothing, their hair, their model, etc.) choosing the environments, lighting, filming and then finally voice acting it, everything requires imagination and ingenuity.
I wrote the story for the machinima, and although you don’t see much of it in the actual video (due to montage, cutting out bits, making sure it’s not too long) I tried to create a whole world. There was a story with multiple characters, plots, etc. that is one side of human ingenuity, creating something. Such as creating a story for a movie that I will be making as well. But it’s also exploring a new art form, creating using new technologies which were unheard of 10 years ago. Machinima has been around for 20 years or so, but it only really became popular recently, in the last 5 years with the creation of it’s YouTube channel. It was human ingenuity that allowed machinima to exist in the first place, when gamers recorded themselves playing with a camera and then added voice over to it. Programs kept being developed allowing directors filming within the game as if it was an animation studio. With the rise of new technologies, new software, it’s easier for people to make their own movies, anyone can become a writer or a director, which really spreads up peoples wings, allows them access to a brand new art form which is easily approachable from a making and viewing perspective. Not only that, but human ingenuity takes over the whole process. From writing the story, to creating the script, to creating the characters (their clothing, their hair, their model, etc.) choosing the environments, lighting, filming and then finally voice acting it, everything requires imagination and ingenuity.
My time plan (which didn’t work out in the end at all) was to create and finish the storyboard a week or two after the summer holidays, be ready with all my materials by the 5th of September, finish the machinima by the 1st of December and have the rest of time to write the report. Due to a lot of technical issues and problems the machinima was done 11th of January in 2012. I will discuss those problems later, but I have to say that sometime in December I simply abandoned the idea of a time plan. First of all, knowing myself I know that I work better under stress. If I was to look at a calendar and see that the final date for personal project is the 19th of January, I would probably write the report on the 17th or so.. When I was under stress with the machinima production, with my family’s support, I managed to do quite a good job at it, better than I expected. The reason it turned out better than expected, is because I used different software than I originally had in mind.
At first I was meant to create this machinima the way most machinimators do it, using Sony Vegas Pro (which is a $700 program) I found that way to be very irritating, annoying and unprofessional however, and I swapped to a third party software “Machinima Studio” with it I created a far more professional looking piece and I was actually quite pleased with the end result (unlike with Vegas) the main reason for this however was money. I wasn’t going to spend 700 dollars on a program that would create a horrible, choppy machinima, while being extremely difficult to use. And so I came across Machinima Studio.
This was important, as the name suggests that the developer of this program created it entirely to make amazing machinima. In fact reading over the features list on the website seems like a dream come true. The program is amazingly simple yet intuitive and it lets you do everything you could need in producing an amazing machinima. And this is very important. If someone was to introduce machinima to a broader audience, he would need the proper tools for it, they would want the machinima to look and feel good, feel immersive so to say. To really give the viewer a feeling of watching a world, not just a few choppy scenes recreated in a software program, but an actual world with it’s own characters, story, etc.
At first I was meant to create this machinima the way most machinimators do it, using Sony Vegas Pro (which is a $700 program) I found that way to be very irritating, annoying and unprofessional however, and I swapped to a third party software “Machinima Studio” with it I created a far more professional looking piece and I was actually quite pleased with the end result (unlike with Vegas) the main reason for this however was money. I wasn’t going to spend 700 dollars on a program that would create a horrible, choppy machinima, while being extremely difficult to use. And so I came across Machinima Studio.
This was important, as the name suggests that the developer of this program created it entirely to make amazing machinima. In fact reading over the features list on the website seems like a dream come true. The program is amazingly simple yet intuitive and it lets you do everything you could need in producing an amazing machinima. And this is very important. If someone was to introduce machinima to a broader audience, he would need the proper tools for it, they would want the machinima to look and feel good, feel immersive so to say. To really give the viewer a feeling of watching a world, not just a few choppy scenes recreated in a software program, but an actual world with it’s own characters, story, etc.
Description of the process
The whole process started with the idea, a comedy machinima. After having drawn 9 pages of storyboard and then leaving on holidays, I quickly dropped the idea of having an 8 minute long movie. This had to do with my research. I interviewed TauriMovies who is a famous World of Warcraft machinimator, and once he told me the amount of time it takes to create a machinima and what goes into the process, I decided that a short, story driven movie would be much better for creation. I watched many online tutorials on using Sony Vegas together with WoW Model Viewer (a third party program for putting together Warcraft’s models) I bought a magazine which had a tutorial on creation and I watched lots and lots of machinima as an inspiration. When I had all this data and this knowledge, I started creating my machinima.
At first I spent about a week creating around 20 characters that I could use within the movie. This process was tedious, as World of Warcraft has probably around a billion various looking items by now, so imagine all the possible combinations that you could have, and you had to make sure the character looks good! Also naming items “The Last Despair” may be cool in game, but when you’re creating a character, and you want a blue shirt you have no clue what “The Last Despair” will be. Once I had all my characters created I downloaded Sony Vegas and got to work. Now to sum it up shortly, it was the most boring and unsuccessful action of my life. Since you had no direct control over the characters, you had to film them within Model Viewer the way you wanted them in the final machinima, this process was absolutely hair-tearingly awful. It was hard to get the animations right, and then place the character where you wanted. Regardless, I went on with the process, being fully aware that my backgrounds didn’t want to work for some reason. Then all of a sudden the Vegas trial ran out (it never reminds you or tells you the days left. A horrible move on Sony’s side.) I was either forced to buy the program or abandon all work. In short, I bought a computer that my friend was selling since it was twice as cheap as the program. I then downloaded another trial and continued work. The machinima was about 60% done when I left for Christmas, although it looked choppy and rather awful. When I came back to continue work, I found all my files gone. Deleted or disappeared, it didn’t matter how or why. All my work was gone. And I was really not going to put up with the Vegas way of editing. After hours of searching I found a great indie program called “Machinima Studio” which is basically a massive sandbox, able to load every single model from many games, put them in a scene and allow you to control everything to do with it. From the animations, to lighting, to camera movement, etc. This program was fantastic, the answer of my prayers. I finished the whole 2 minute machinima within 20 hours of work on it (although there were other problems..) when I finished work with Machinima Studio I had 10 scenes completed which I put together using iMovie (windows movie maker on a mac basically.)
There were a lot of other ways I could have done this machinima, but each created a lot of problems and limitations. World of Warcraft actually has a built in “record a machinima” function, but that only allows you to record your gameplay, limiting your creativity a lot. There’s an extended version of that program, also developed by an indie developer which allows you to control various factors within the game. But as I said, even though you have more options, you have no freedom. You are limited to what the game world offers you. There is the Sony Vegas method, which I described above and which is the most famous, well known method. But I’m never touching that program again.
There were a lot of other ways I could have done this machinima, but each created a lot of problems and limitations. World of Warcraft actually has a built in “record a machinima” function, but that only allows you to record your gameplay, limiting your creativity a lot. There’s an extended version of that program, also developed by an indie developer which allows you to control various factors within the game. But as I said, even though you have more options, you have no freedom. You are limited to what the game world offers you. There is the Sony Vegas method, which I described above and which is the most famous, well known method. But I’m never touching that program again.
I think that the technique I ended up using is really the most profitable to everyone. I managed to create a rather good looking machinima (brilliant compared to what I had in Vegas.) I found the process enjoyable and fun, plus I spread the word about a very small and very unknown program. It’s a win situation for everyone. Since Machinima Studio really does deserve more attention than it has, I plan to maybe create some tutorials for people that want to get into machinima, that way they can forget about mistakes that I’ve made.
Analysis
To be honest without the original inspiration from the huge amounts of machinima I’ve watched, I wouldn’t be writing this report right now. Inspiration really is such a power tool of creation. And it all begins with the things you love. I have been playing World of Warcraft for 2 years or so now, and I really do enjoy it. I like the universe, and I love the fact that people created movies using it. I thought that one day I could do that too. And along came personal project, and immediately I knew that my product would be a machinima. After having done some research I found out that it is quite simple, and anyone could do it, all it required was time. And although at first I wanted to do a spoof type of movie, a short comedy, my sister quickly said that the idea was stupid and no one would find it funny. Since this came from an eleven year old I decided she was right and changed the machinima into a more serious and story driven movie. Which was my best decision in this whole project. The second best decision was going for Machinima Studio.
The most important part of any project, alongside the initial idea is the actual execution of it. And always when creating something there are choices the creator faces, decisions to be made. I also had a bunch of choices, which altered my final product. It doesn’t simply come down to whether to use software a or b for creating the machinima. Like every movie there are a lot of other choices. How much lighting do I use in a particular scene? Do I leave this scene in or do I cut it out? Is this character really necessary to have within a given scene? How much of a warcraft feeling do I give in this scene? I remember a very small detail upon which I was thinking, do I call the town that the action happens in it’s Warcraft name or do I make up a name for it?
I think that in the end I did enough cutting for the movie to be short and to the point, while leaving space for the viewer to imagine what happens next. To be quite honest, I’m very pleased with the result; I was expecting my machinima to look worse upon completion. In the end I quite obviously didn’t reach my original specifications, but I definitely reached everything I wanted to reach with this machinima. The feedback was great, both from my friends that know everything about machinima, to teachers and parents that never seen it before. I think that introducing a new art form can produce various results. I had the luck of having everyone enjoy my machinima so far. And I think this is mostly due to those decisions while “filming” the camera angles, the lighting, etc. seemed as if it was in a real movie, giving the audience something they are familiar with. And that’s the effect I wanted to achieve, introduce something new while having a familiarity with it. So that the audience will simply see it as an animated, voice acted movie.
I think that in the end I did enough cutting for the movie to be short and to the point, while leaving space for the viewer to imagine what happens next. To be quite honest, I’m very pleased with the result; I was expecting my machinima to look worse upon completion. In the end I quite obviously didn’t reach my original specifications, but I definitely reached everything I wanted to reach with this machinima. The feedback was great, both from my friends that know everything about machinima, to teachers and parents that never seen it before. I think that introducing a new art form can produce various results. I had the luck of having everyone enjoy my machinima so far. And I think this is mostly due to those decisions while “filming” the camera angles, the lighting, etc. seemed as if it was in a real movie, giving the audience something they are familiar with. And that’s the effect I wanted to achieve, introduce something new while having a familiarity with it. So that the audience will simply see it as an animated, voice acted movie.
Conclusion
Now that the project is done, I can clearly say that I’m never working with Sony Vegas again. The whole process was very painful and produced god awful results. Not only that but the amounts of problems I had with it were simply immense. I spent more time fixing problems then actually working. I always found a soluteion for each problem in the end, until all my files got deleted. At first I was furious, but then I was actually quite happy it happened, thanks to that I produced a movie of better quality which was also really enjoyable to film and produce. At first I was worried after having submitted my movie to YouTube because I know of the hate and prejudice people have towards World of Warcraft, it’s the laughing stock of the internet. I was expecting many dislikes and crude comments but to my positive surprise everyone (so far) seems to love it! And so that resolved the biggest problem that I truly had with the machinima. Once I’ve created it, once the 6 months of problems were over and the movie was safely saved and finished, I was simply worried about the feedback, but thankfully that problem has saved itself!
I used Human Ingenuity in as many ways possible. At every stage of the production I was thinking of the impact that human ingenuity has on my project. Without it, I really wouldn’t have done anything. There would not have been on original story with original characters, nor would there have been a program to put it all together in. Not to forget that without human ingenuity, machinima would never exist! It’s very interesting to observe all these things evolve and how many ways there are of doing something. I think that is the biggest strength of machinima making, the freedom you have. The freedom starts with the story that you create, it goes onto the various characters you use from various games, continues with the different software that you want to use, with new ones being developed all the time. I personally had so much freedom whilst creating, that it was often hard for me to decide what to do next. And while this is a strength, it’s also the biggest weakness.
Especially while using Sony Vegas. Since you don’t actually control your models within S.V. you have to have everything recorded the way you want it in the end, which I found an absolutely horrible method. Maybe it’s just me as there’s thousands of machinima made using this method, but for me it’s simply awful and not user friendly in any shape or form. This is good though as it adds up to the experience and knowledge I have if I decide to make a machinima in the future.
Speaking of which, if I was to do this project again I would have done a couple things differently. I would have first of all written a good, believable story with one or two key characters that would be easy to put into film. Then I wouldn’t have wasted time on trying to think of silly references and so on, but I could get straight on with filming, which this time would be done in a program which actually works for me, and I wouldn’t need to waste a lot of time trying to get everything to work. I would also have more time to test voice acting, maybe hire someone from a voice acting forum or have a friend do it, simply improve the quality of sound. The sound effects in my final video turned out very choppy for some reason, and I wish I would have known that this is what they would have sounded like before I uploaded and saved the video.
Based on this experience I might make another machinima or two if the YouTube audience asks for it enough. I’m thinking of maybe doing a tutorial on Machinima Studio as there aren’t many out there. Also, one thing that I now know is that I no longer consider this a career option. Before I started I thought it would be a dream come true if I worked for machinima (the YouTube channel) thankfully I tried it out first, and it’s definitely not something I would want to do on a daily basis. Once every few months, maybe, but definitely not a career choice.
Especially while using Sony Vegas. Since you don’t actually control your models within S.V. you have to have everything recorded the way you want it in the end, which I found an absolutely horrible method. Maybe it’s just me as there’s thousands of machinima made using this method, but for me it’s simply awful and not user friendly in any shape or form. This is good though as it adds up to the experience and knowledge I have if I decide to make a machinima in the future.
Speaking of which, if I was to do this project again I would have done a couple things differently. I would have first of all written a good, believable story with one or two key characters that would be easy to put into film. Then I wouldn’t have wasted time on trying to think of silly references and so on, but I could get straight on with filming, which this time would be done in a program which actually works for me, and I wouldn’t need to waste a lot of time trying to get everything to work. I would also have more time to test voice acting, maybe hire someone from a voice acting forum or have a friend do it, simply improve the quality of sound. The sound effects in my final video turned out very choppy for some reason, and I wish I would have known that this is what they would have sounded like before I uploaded and saved the video.
Based on this experience I might make another machinima or two if the YouTube audience asks for it enough. I’m thinking of maybe doing a tutorial on Machinima Studio as there aren’t many out there. Also, one thing that I now know is that I no longer consider this a career option. Before I started I thought it would be a dream come true if I worked for machinima (the YouTube channel) thankfully I tried it out first, and it’s definitely not something I would want to do on a daily basis. Once every few months, maybe, but definitely not a career choice.
All in all, I’m very pleased with how my product turned out to be and the knowledge I gained on the way. I just wish I didn’t have to put up with so many mistakes in the process, but errors happen and you need to figure out a way to get rid of them, just like I did in the end.
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