Plan for Axel "The Cush" Cushing

As NaNoWriMo winds down, The Cush looks forward to new challenges, and begins to think about how to make machinima more user-friendly

Technically, NaNoWriMo is still going on, and I've still got about ten thousand words left until the end. I'm quite proud of my novel to date, and I look forward to the second draft, and to writing it at a slightly more relaxed pace than the first draft came out.

I was a little surprised that Ben Garney's recent .plan didn't mention his own progress in NaNoWriMo, but with the RTS Toolkit announcement, I can't say I blame him. It's big news.

It was strange that so many months after I started it, somebody resurrected this thread about machinima that I posted a while back. True, it's had a little more added to it since then, but with the creative and problem solving juices flowing, it's made me reconsider an idea I'd toyed with a while back.

Anybody who's been keeping an eye on Peter Molyneaux's in-progress title The Movies knows that one of the neat little things you're (supposedly) able to do in the game is to export some of the film projects you create as small machinima films, playable in some as-yet unannounced video format (Bink would be nice, AVI or MPEG might be more likely). It occurs to me that, with the unexpected success of machinima like Red vs. Blue, machinima might be ready for the next step in its evolution. Something that takes it out of the hands of the highly intelligent (or perhaps overly-intelligent) and makes things just a little less arcane.

"Arcane" is perhaps a relative term. To a person who's had video and theater training, terms like "bump maps" and "mesh deformation" are probably as arcane as "bump shot" and "mesh scrim" would be to a computer geek. A lot of the same concepts apply, however, insofar as 3D rendering and video production are concerned. The trick is getting the two disciplines to work together without losing any of the power and flexibility that each has to offer. To look at some of of the machinima tutorials out there is to drive yourself to madness, particularly if your code skills are weak or non-existent. Yes, Red vs Blue kinda cheats in that they're not doing things the "hard" way. I'd like to see machinima become almost as easy as that. I'd like to see a tool where a director (for lack of a better term) can use an interactive "working" screenplay system, associate certain models to certain characters, and literally be able to have each character hit its mark, delivering the right bit of dialog or the right gesture in the right spot at the right time. The framework of your average screenplay, when you remove the scene descriptions, has lots of potential for making the next generation of machinima creation a lot easier. The trick is making it all work together.

More later....