Stranger 109

I want to introduce a new feature to the site that highlights a different machinima film each day. The focus will not so much be a review or a critique as much as a way to draw some attention to what I find as exceptional examples of the form. Obviously my own personal aesthetic will govern the choices, and I will be very upfront about that. However, I will try and touch upon some of the general trends in the production techniques that differentiate one film from another. Rather than embedding the films within the posts I will list them in the Vod:Pod on the lower right.

The first entry, Hellraiser: Ravenholm, comes from Ray Koefoed and uses the Source SDK and Half-Life 2 engine with Gary’s Mod 10. First off, I have to admit that I think HL2 is one of the greatest shooters if not games of all time so I tend to be drawn to machinima that uses its engine. To no surprise, one of my favorite machinima films is Randall Glass’ A Few Good G-Men. Both of these films make great use of the Faceposer software that Valve makes available with the game, coupling original soundtrack and dialogue from their respective films with spot-on lip-syncing that parallels anything you’ll find in a cutscene.

Drawing upon the Hellraiser films, the piece does a nice job of capturing both the mood and feel of the original text. And the series’ most iconic character, Pinhead, is recreated with a high level of fidelity that demonstrates the power of the Source SDK and Koefoed’s talent as a modder. One of the things that machinima like this as well as Glass’ reveals is the way that overall production value increases with the use of original sound. Videogame engines are great tools for creating whatever the imagination can conceive and using sound from the game can help maintain a polished feel to the film. But because so many films strive to be original in their dialogue they use home-recorded audio. Despite the advances of audio editing software and technology that is becoming increasingly more affordable, most average users cannot create studio conditions in their living rooms. The result is often audio that does not fit the scale of what the images portray. This is not a criticism of machinimators who choose to use all their own sound; I commend such efforts. Instead, it reveals that making machinima is a concert of skills that goes beyond just modding and editing. A machinimator must decide whether they want to work with limited though professional sounding audio by adopting the original text which they base their films, as the case with Koefoed, or create all new sound at the risk of sounding amateurish. I’ve seen amazing films that have done both. But I must admit that when I want to wow someone who has never seen machinima, I love to use a film that has a familiar audio so that they can see what is possible when I say to them that there are gamers out there using videogames to make films. Koefoed has now provided me another option that does exactly that.