Free Pixel

I saw the movie back then, but somehow I missed it: Kathleen Turner played in Monster House and not just any part, she plays the coolest part: the house.

According to Hollywood lore, Zemecki’s convinced her to take the part arguing that she had played the sexiest animated character ever …

… now it would be time to play the ugliest. Good call!

Monster House itself is a bit of a strange mixture. The acting is all mo-cap and has its Polar Express zombie moments but this one is a lot better than the other Zemecki’s adventures in this area (Beowulf? Christmas Carol?) and it is mainly because of the house. The “real” actors are much more cartoonish in Monster House but they can still be strangely off. However, the “fake” house is spot on. A real showcase of animation in full action. In the making of special features of the DVD you can see a glimpse of Kathleen Turner all wired up for the performance capture as she leaps forward … literally playing the house.

There is also another making of that talks about the special controls they used to control the camera – and I wished we had seen that before we worked on comparable problems. It is not so easy to really see the actual set ups used in real life and we could have used it as a much better starting point than the Wii controller we used originally.

Finally, I had to wonder what happens to the data set of these kind of movies. As full-blown performance capture pieces they could be re-used in all kinds of ways. Yes, Monster House was also released as 3D – one more reason to see how those camera swoops were made. But I am thinking about other options, too. This could be the perfect data set for a Machinima were a new director could get down and dirty. Gil Kenan, director on Monster House, was pretty fresh from film school himself and went straight to an Oscar nomination with that one.

It turned out that I was able to visit some exhibition spaces during my stop-over in Berlin. On the one hand, it is Biennale time and so I stumbled down into cellars in Mitte and up into Kreuzberg’s attics to look at the stuff that art is. Frankly, the setting was not much different in the other visit I managed: Andreas Lange took me into the rooms of the future Computerspielemuseum in Friedrichshain – still one big empty building site with a lot of renovation ahead until they will open some time in winter.

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There is not much music left on the Music Television network these days.  Anyway, the story starts with a random encounter of music on MTV: Green Day’s “Last of the American Girls” kicking it off with “She puts her makeup on like graffiti on the walls of the heartland.”

Being hopelessly out of fashion with my musical taste, I can still see how that fits into a commercially viable pseudo-revolutionary post-punk philosophy. What was somewhat different was that the video was the Green Day: Rock Band version. All band members appeared rendered in low poly goriness and half-acceptable lip synching.

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Picking up on Erik’s last mail and following the Ebert “issue” … if it really is one. It so happens that I got completely blown away by Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle just the other day and it also just so happens that Ebert noted this film to be one of Miyazaki’s weakest:

A parade of weird characters comes onstage to do their turns, but the underlying plot grows murky and, amazingly for a Miyazaki film, we grow impatient at spectacle without meaning.

It is probably obvious that I could not disagree more – but this is not about the issues of taste and film reading as such. Instead, let’s use Miyazaki’s film as a jump off into a machinima issue – that of an animation world versus a game world.

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but they can inspire 1296 comments (and counting) when attached to Roger Ebert’s latest blog post on this hoary old topic. At least he replies to some of them.

And some ripostes are rather witty.

Don’t worry guys, he’s just too old to understand.

Ebert: Don’t worry, Chance. you’re just too young to understand.

Ebert is taken to task for never quite defining art, but still saying games can never be art. He may have replied to this somewhere but to find that reply is rather daunting. I was amused by his statement that Shadow of the Colossus cannot be art because 10 gamers agree with him, Spot the problem with that argument.

One can develop a kind of obsession with those lovely Rube Goldberg machines done in all kind of game engines (and real world craziness). They are obvious plays off the underlying physics engine but at the same time, they are displays of the world they are staged in. Ending some ridiculously complex chain reaction with a kick into Breen’s behind is just the right way a Rube Goldberg machine should end in Half Life and it is different from a non-engine specific machine with just the same functionality. Stupendous and hilarious and material stuff.

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No, not from us,. but a call from the Humlab in Sweden.

Submissions are invited for an edited book with the working title Understanding Machinima: essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds. Machinima – referring to “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies” as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds – is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds. Machinima’s increasingly dynamic use and construction of images from virtual worlds – appropriated, imported, worked over, re-negotiated, re-configured, re composed – not only confronts the conception and ontology of the recorded moving image, but also blurs the boundaries between contemporary media forms, definitions and aesthetics, converging filmmaking, animation, virtual world and game development. Even as it poses these theoretical challenges, machinima is expanding as a practice via internet networks and fan-based communities as well as in pedagogical and marketing contexts. In these ways, machinima is also transformative, presenting alternative ways and modes of teaching and commercial promotion, in-game events and, perhaps most significantly, networking cultures and community-building within game, virtual and filmmaking worlds, among others….

Please submit a 400 word abstract and a short bio via e-mail to understandingmachinima@gmail.com by 30 August 2010. We expect that final essays should not exceed 7,000 words and be due on 30 December 2010.

I mentioned it before but as the speaker list completes itself the event is shaping up nicely. So if you are around, register, come by, and engage:

The Art History of Games, a symposium and exhibition jointly organized by SCAD-Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology

February 4-6, 2010
Rich Auditorium at the High Museum of Art
1280 Peachtree St N.E., Atlanta GA 30308

Register at: http://arthistoryofgames.com/registration

The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form.
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This is one of those issues I that can cause only trouble but I am supposed to write a short piece on a related issue and the question I cannot avoid is: How to define machinima?

A caveat upfront, nobody who is too busy doing it should be bothered. This might be one of those self-perpetuating problems academics like. It just so happens that I am such a creature and that I cannot avoid it.

With all due respect, Marino’s definition of machinima as “animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3D environment” or Hancock/Ingram’s “Machinima is making films with computer games” and a “technique of taking a viewpoint on a virtual world, and recording that, editing it, and showing it to other people as a film” are both mainly utilitarian. The phenomenon needed some description and these statements provided the necessary descriptions by people who were part of this phenomenon. They offer an initial approach and remain immensely helpful as such. But once you shine any overly critical flashlight on them problems arise. So here are some musings about a work-in-progress machinima definition.

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Shirley Martin wrote a book. Honestly, I don’t know much more about it then the blurb ending in:

.. Haunted by dreams of a nightmarish creature and taunted by unhelpful adults Sam must unravel the hidden past of his parents and the secrets behind the Ring of Time before he loses the one thing he has left in life, his sister.

So I probably won’t read it. But what is interesting is that she has published a trailer for her book. Not any trailer, but a machinima piece made in Moviestorm. A book promoted by a video created on a game system and all of this distributed over the net (Lulu to be precise). And if you really want to buy it you can get is as download – of course.

That is quite something.