Stranger 109

I recently had an opportunity to chat with Hugh Hancock about his recent addition to the machinima world, Machinima For Dummies. He and co-author Johnnie Ingram started the book last fall and it just came out this month. We talked at length about the book and a large portion of that conversation follows bellow. I will also be reviewing the book alter this week so be sure to look for that as well.

For those who are unfamiliar with Hugh, he is a staple of the machinima scene. As one of the two who coined the term (Anthony Bailey is the other), Hugh holds machinima particularly dear to his heart. His contributions to the culture of machinima both through his early role in Machinima.com and his current place at Strange Company more than qualify him as being one of the experts on machinima. In addition to promoting the book, he will be speaking on panels at this year’s Machinima Festival Europe as well as premiering his feature length machinima film BloodSpell.

In other interviews you’ve talked about your start in machinima as incidental. Could you talk a little bit about that process that so many machinimators go through, transitioning from playing a game to using the technology to make a film? What compelled you to do that? And what do you think compels others?

Basically there’s a concept of Machinima called “Inside-Out” vs “Outside-In” Originally developed by Eddo Stern, I think, and popularized by Paul Marino.

There’s a continuum on which machinimators tend to live. At one end is “Inside Out” machinima where creators tend to make movies from with in the game. They are fans of the game who learn that you can make movies with the game. And they make movies about the game, referencing the game. So you’re talking about stuff like Red vs. Blue, you talk about a lot of the Warcraft movies like ‘Can’t PUG KZ’ which came out a little while ago and is really cool. And so there’s a lot other really cool stuff coming from within the gaming community.

From the other end you have people coming from the direction that I come from, which is “Outside-In”, where you have a creative person or persons looking for a way to tell stories and they see machinima as a potential tool. And that’s pretty much how I came into machinima. I was very much into playing Quake, but I wasn’t very interested in making films about Quake. But at the same time I was searching for a medium I could tell the stories I wanted to tell in. And machinima had the ability do things that nothing else had. And that’s why I got into it. Because I could tell stories that wouldn’t cost me, you know, 10, 20, 100 million dollars to tell in conventional filmmaking.

When you and Johnnie Ingram were writing the book, who did you envision as your ideal reader?

That was really tricky. I think what we kept in mind was that an awful lot of people who are making machinima at the moment might be very technically adept, but might not have got the level of film knowledge or storytelling knowledge or know techniques that you would only pickup from spending years in the conventional film industry. A lot of machinimators today don’t necessarily have that information. So the first thing we wanted to do was write stuff for existing machinima creators as well as provide For Dummies stuff about stuff they already know, but also provide a whole bunch of stuff they wouldn’t or might not know because it isn’t easily available online.

In order to get decent amount of information on this stuff you’d have to, at the least, buy a book on filmmaking, a book on storytelling, a book on sound design. So we wanted to make the book a one-stop shop for all the information you need to know to make machinima. So we were kind of imaging a fairly new machinima creator, someone who roughly knew how to make films in the engine but didn’t know much about the craft of filmmaking.

But at the same time we also kept in mind that this thing was going to be in the bookstores and being picked up by quite a lot people that have heard of machinima but have probably never made a film and have no idea how to make a film. That’s why we include the Moviestorm software on the DVD with the book so you can take the book home and that afternoon start making machinima. So we were very much trying to have the introductory information for those people, but not just have an introductory book to machinima.

Basically anyone from any background, you know, I mean a very experienced film person could come and go, “Look, I know the sound theory stuff, I know the storytelling stuff, I’m better at this sound design stuff than the authors of this book are, but I know nothing about the World of Warcraft.” So the book tries to provide a fair amount of knowledge about all the things you need to know to make machinima, no matter what you know coming in.

This is obviously not the first “how-to” book for machinima. So how do you see this book as different from others like Paul Marino’s book or the one by Matt Kelland and Lloyd and did those others help in writing this book?

I was a really big fan of Paul’s book when it came out, but we really didn’t refer to it at all in writing this book because of the fact that it’s years later and because of the fact that this thing has to stand on its own. And obviously there’s Matt Kelland, Dave Morris and Dave Lloyd’s book on machinima as well, which again, it’s interesting to look at, but we really didn’t think about it too much while writing this one. In many ways, I think this book is very different from either of those two because we are trying to go, “Here’s the entire machinima field in one book.” It was a different goal. Obviously, a near impossible goal. So yeah, we didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking at those others.

The book is a rich resource of knowledge across a wide scope of topics and game engines. I know you’re well versed in Neverwinter Nights from your work on your feature length machinima film Bloodspell, but how much did you have to actually have to learn to be able to talk about it in the book?

Actually we had to learn how to use all of the engines we have a main feature on. I had done very little Sims 2 filmmaking. My first two films I made actually while writing the book. And I made my first World of Warcraft film while writing the book as well. Moviestorm, obviously no one had any experience with because we were actually using it before anyone else. And with Medieval Total War II, the only people that had done anything with that engine at the time were the developers. We are, I believe, the only source for how to make machinima for Medieval Total War at this point.

With the Sims 2 stuff, we had the advantage of having Phil Rice on board. Basically what we did with the Sims 2 stuff was we’d grab Michelle from Britannica Dreams and talked with her on Skype, had her tell us everything she knew. The World of Warcraft was interesting - we weren’t originally intending to release a film with Warcraft, but it’s such a fun engine to make machinima in that we just ended up making a film. And actually we probably shouldn’t have taken two days away from the writing the book to make it, but we did.

Doing the research for the Engines chapter was actually a nightmare because you have 20 engines there, quite a few of which have distinctly little information about Machinima creation available for them. So the amount of research we had to do there was really challenging, and we were really lucky to have lots of help from a number of people. The Second Life people were awesomely helpful. We were originally going to have a chapter on that, and I think Second Life is an interesting platform, but it just lost out to some of the other chapters in the book.

So what chapter would you have included if you could add another?

I would have personally really liked to have done a Neverwinter Nights chapter. But realistically, Neverwinter Nights is too obscure of an engine to do a full chapter on. I could tell you how to make that engine sit up and dance, relatively speaking, but the fact of the matter is there are easier engines to use.

I would have done a G-Mod chapter on Half-Life 2 because there’s some amazing stuff happening with that. Unfortunately it was the latest version of Garry’s Mod that has made so much possible and we just weren’t aware of it at the time of writing to include it in the book. We did consider Half-Life 2, it was one on our early lists of chapters, but we just heard from so many people that it’s a nightmare to use. And again with the beginner ethos in mind we decided to leave it out. But it would have been really nice to have had a chapter on that. I would also have liked to done more stuff about publicity as well because I think that’s such an important part of machinima. I mean, there’s a chapter in there on it now, but I would have liked to talk more about organizing screenings and film festivals. Just more about how to get your films out there because unfortunately there’s a lot of amazing films out there that haven’t been publicized at all, which is a shame.

What’s your single most favorite section of the book, the one you’re most proud of?

I would probably say the storytelling chapter because it’s so close to my heart. And I think it’s really important to discuss in the context of machinima. And because it was bloody-hell to write, while I don’t think we did perfectly, I think we did alright. Essentially, you know, it was trying to distill Mckee, Syd Fields, Jane Espenson and various sorts of people down to 10,000 words. And that was the absolute most we were allowed to have on that. It was a very tough write, and I hope people find it useful.

In writing a book about fast changing technology like games engines, the book obviously runs the risk of becoming quickly dated. What are some of the strategies you plan to use to overcome that?

Basically, as far as I’m concerned, the only way we could do this book was with a blog. With a blog it allows us to have a living document, it allows us to update us the stuff that changes over time. There’s not a lot of things that have changed since publication yet, but there’s a few. And quite a lot of the sections like Filmmaking, Storytelling, Publicity aren’t going to go out of date, but it’s absolutely vital to have a place where we can provide updates to all the stuff that does change.

Are there future editions in the works?

I’m not sure. We haven’t talked to Wiley about a second edition yet. We’ll see how the first one fairs. Certainly, we’re going to keep up with updating the blog for a while yet. We plan to provide some different samples, like we have some samples for the Medieval War Total War stuff. And we’re looking to do some writing on HALO 3, obviously we’re already covering the rapidly developing situation of “is machinima legal?” And we’re looking to cover some of the Half-Life 2 G-Mod stuff as well on there. We may bounce the idea around about turning the book into like some subscription service or something, but I mean it’s still in the early stages of the release so we’ll see what happens.

Lastly, if you had only one game engine to make machinima with the rest of your career, which would you choose?

Oh dear God (laughs). None of the ones currently available. Actually, I’m serious about that. None of the ones currently available. Machinima is still developing. It is way too early to comment on that. I think there are two or three significant problems…animation, for example, which will be improving over the next few years. I think the machinima we’ll see in the future will just be worlds apart from what we’re seeing today. I like a lot of the engines people use today and think you can do a lot of really cool stuff with them, but I think what we’re going to see in just a few years time is going to blow that all away.