I'd be more interested in these ideas if the stuff Hugh turns out was at least well directed, but this trailer he released two weeks is just unbearably awkward:
Music and voice, but no sound effects, foreground or background whatsoever. Unsynched video and audio. Worst of all: Lack of even a hint of a compelling storyline. The voice snippets in there just sound like a random jumble.
That is not a future of film-making that will gain any hold.
The thing is, this basically suffers the same problems. It's not so much technical shortcomings (although the sound desperately needs work...but I'm a sound guy so I would say that). It's just that special effects, ultra-violence, money shots, and showdowns are not the backbone of a movie. Now, the eye-candy stuff is the most expensive in production terms on a real movie, and trailers are always full of eye candy because a) you want to catch people's attention and b) you need to sketch the story very quickly and pictures are the most efficient way of doing that. But the backbone of the story is the relationship between the characters that you care about, and you can't ever get to know characters enough to care about them if they're just walking around turned up to 11 all the time.
Look at South Park - visually speaking it looks terrible, the character design and animation is about as basic as it can possibly get. But it's involving because the characters act out their personalities in a consistent enough way that the audience can identify with them by mentally modeling their behavior. South Park sin't to everyone's taste of course, but you can think of lots of other examples, I just picked this one to point out that the visuals are the least important element. The surprise in a storytelling reveal comes from discovering that a character is not who you thought she was, or or from having a resolution between two conflicting elements within the same character.
The reason that tragedies are tragic is because there are many things you like about the lead and it's painful to see them lost because of the lead's poor moral choices and eventual downfall. Likewise the enjoyment in seeing a hero's triumph is in watching them transcend their weaknesses. Rocky wouldn't be a success if it was just 90 minutes of Sylvester Stallone boxing to victory. the film seems like it's about boxing, but it isn't. It's about a dead-end guy who wants love and self-respect. Only his girlfriend knows what his real goal is, because she's the only person he's able to be completely honest with.
The problem with Deathknights in Love is that nobody in this story seems to have any life outside of Being Epic, whether they're Casting Epic Spells, Fighting Epic Battles, or Making Epic Whoopie. I can't relate to them because they're not real people, they're WoW avatars. I think Valve's Team Fortress & source toolkit are a far more fruitful tool for Machinima because the characters are more cartoonish and have clearly delineated strengths and weaknesses, so while none of the related Machinima is Shakespeare there is plenty of scope for comedy. The relative lack of realism makes it easier to focus on the dramatic elements rather than the purely visual ones (camera moves, impressive entrances and poses, special effects etc.). I think this was also a key aspect of Red v. Blue's success - it's much easier to transcend production quality constraints with humor.
I work on a lot of low-budget films, many of which are dreadful - and what makes them bad is not the lack of production value (sets costumes, cinematography, FX etc. etc.) but the lack of life in the characters, who are usually so bad that the actors and crew hold the fictional characters in complete contempt; at least if the characters are ridiculous the film has a chance to be tongue-in-cheek funny, but often they're just awful. This is the opposite of the film school problem where the characters tend to be richly textured wonderful people (because the writers and directors want everyone to know how interesting and pleasant they are), but there's not much budget or time for production value so you get a lot of films where Nothing Happens and the nice people who live in the world of the film are never put under sufficient stress to make for an interesting story.
With Machinima, the temptation is to use the computer for all that stuff that would be impossibly expensive to do otherwise. And I don't blame anyone for wanting to do something that looks epic, because while comedy is easier to stage it's harder to write, and if you want to be dramatic then awkward/comic stuff lets the air out of the balloon and can actually be depressing. But the strength of epic stories comes from the character development and that ultimately means characters have to overcome their natural tendencies in pursuit of something else. I would be much more interested in (and forgiving of) the Deathknight story if started out with a character that was actually fearful and whose sole interest was in escape, survival, and relief from being someone else's target all the time. That's a situation where good and evil start to actually matter, and courage has to be found rather than just being a character trait for the people on screen to measure each others' bad-assery. Apocalypto is a good film exploration of this theme, not least because it has so little dialog and all the action is motivated by the lead characters need to escape.
Alternatively, I'd be intersted in a story where I find out why the villian is so bent on exterminating everyone else. It's not Because He's Evil; nobody goes through life doubling down on the belief that they're a bad person, people do evil things because they believe they're superior and that people who get in their way are obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of some worth (by the villain's standards) goal. A villain that just wants everyone dead doesn't have anything much to struggle for; even if s/he's a sadist, then there needs to be a struggle against boredom. If the villain completely succeeded in taking over the world and eliminating all opposition, what would s/he do then? Villains are either fleeing fears or pursuing goals just like heroes; when a plot revolves around Good vs Evil it's usually a sign that the story is basically Zombies vs. Zombies. Even in such a situation, audiences still want o pick a side; so the Alien vs. Predator movies succeed as action movies because we can anthropomorphize the Predator character more easily than the Xenomorph. If it was, I dunno, Aliens vx. Giant Spiders or Terminator vs. Predator (or any plot where both sides are intent on the destruction of the other and have little or no instinct for self-preservation) then it isn't that interesting to watch any more because questions of success or failure become so abstract as to be meaningless.
In short, I need a reason to care for characters other than their merely wearing metaphorical white hats or being the first people to appear on the screen before the Villains.
The reason I spent 13 years working on figuring out the tech (and more importantly, process) of doing virtual filmmaking is because it's not possible to do films with the level of character development/interaction I want them to have on a six week, marathon shooting schedule. I'm not even sure it's possible for people to do it period, even given infinite time.
But when it's virtual, I can get the performance from my actors, and then just completely nail the timing, camera, cuts down to the faintest of facial expressions, and I don't have to get it in realtime, on set. I can capture things, then cut performance together like you'd cut together images now, and iterate, iterate, iterate until it's exactly what I'm shooting for.
I've got a dozen films ready to go, and basically all of them can't be done today because the character development and interaction is just too damn unforgiving to do live, on set. I wouldn't even know how to start. For some of our films, we had to switch from a script to a prose description of the scene, the character's motivations, goals, etc. along with all of the cinematic cues need to accomplish that. A script is a very blunt story-telling instrument at the end of the day, and leaves out so much that is necessary to make a film that actually works.
Anyway, I guess I just wanted to say that not all filmmakers want to use virtual filmmaking to film the impossible, at least as far as action goes. I do want to film the impossible, but only because it'd be impossible in a one-shot live setting. I'm incredibly excited about how good filmmaking can be once we can do it the way I envision.
I'm surprised the author didn't mention Source film maker by Valve.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RYeKYj4vEY
it still takes few hundred to thousands of hours to put out a quality product, but it seems like it's had quite the impact on amateur scene.
10-year veteran of the CGI trenches here. The issue isn't really technology at all - it's the people. Blockbuster films would fly out the door at 1/10th the cost if directors/writers/executives/etc could make up their minds about nearly anything. That's not bitterness talking - I'm currently exiting the industry, as pretty much all senior-level people are - it's just reality. Truth is that film is first and foremost a subjective medium and adding more tools to the toolbox only creates more decisions that can be made later and later in production. Truly, the problems created by this process massively, massively dwarf any technical hurdles.
And peripherally, the business side is an issue too. Hollywood is in effect a massive ponzi scheme, taking outside money and shifting it around from one company to another inside the hollywood bubble. Lately that money has come in the form of state and municipal tax credits, but it could come from somewhere else tomorrow. Fact is that the game is owned by 6 giant studios who have no vested interest in changing things.
It will take another major innovation from an outside force - like pixar, for example - to really shake things up. But keep your eyes peeled, because the time is very very ripe for that to happen and it will happen fast.
And what about story-making? It became so boring these days.
I think, in the future story will be gamified. Like in an RPG, everything characters attempt will be decided against a fair dice roll. Your hero shoots at his enemy? You roll a dice. Enemy retaliates? You roll a dice. Your hero is killed? You roll a dice on his mysterious return, but if it fails, you move on.
If you get stuck you may rollback some story but you are not allowed to cheat. And then you just film what you've got.
This way, 24-style stories are simpy impossible and that's a good thing. Extremelly annoying.
I've actually used RPGs to produce the skeleton of a film's story before - see http://www.bloodspell.com/ , which included a few RPG sessions in its script development.
It works - particularly for avoiding "but why didn't the characters do X" moments, and providing unexpected twists.
That's a terrible way to run an RPG, IMO. But it would be an even worse way to write a movie. Give up 3,000+ years of learning about story in exchange for a bunch of random crap. "Yeah, the lead died from a burst appendix just before the confrontation with the big bad, but one of the extras introduced in the next scene got a really lucky shot and killed the bad anyway, so I guess it all balances out."
I think the code used in World War Z to animate the zombies was pretty amazing. But the models were still based on actual mocap. The hard part will be no longer using humans as the basis and generating everything and then directing it to appear real.
It's research aimed at "teaching" computer characters to walk ab initio - no mocap basis. And once they've learned to walk, they can also cope with objects in their path, impacts, and more...
I worked for 13 years on this problem (unlike the article, I focused on making films using the same skills used today in live-action, vs. having gamers start doing it), but in the end, couldn't actually get funded. (This was back in 2011, and we were raising $32 million, just over half of which was for hardware.)
I'm actually a filmmaker first, and learned programming after attending Siggraph in 1998 while going to film school and having a vision then of how to take Pixar's non-linear, iterative story/filmmaking process and use it to do live-action filmmaking. I knew it'd be at least 10 years before the hardware was ready, but there was a ton to do even before that.
Avatar got close to doing things the right way, on the way to becoming the highest grossing post-TV film, but was unable to iterate (due to lack of tech, but mostly because no one there actually knew that it'd be a good idea). Cameron got his first rough cut of Avatar more than two years into the process (!). By comparison, Pixar turns a new cut of their animated films around in a few months, and my process did so in about six weeks.
Anyway, all of this is to say: improvements in this area are going to have to happen the way the author is describing, even though the tech to actually re-build Avatar for around 1/10 of the cost has existed for three years now, because there is just no way to get the final solution funded directly.
Looking back, it should have been a warning sign to me that Pixar was funded out of Steve Job's own pocket to the tune of $50 million. Steve. Fucking. Jobs.
If he's the only guy willing to put money into this stuff (and to my knowledge, Pixar is the only company he put his own money into—it's also what made him a billionaire, BTW), then there's just no chance that Sand Hill, or worse, Hollywood, is going to fund it. It's not that they didn't like the idea or the tech, it's that a tech-based film studio is in a no-mans land as far as funding. It's never going to happen.
So I gave up, and now I'm CTO at a company doing a social networking app, and I just spent the last 36 hours prepping to finish up the custom streaming database I wrote from scratch which, according to my benchmarks, should do about 1 million writes per second AND 10 million reads per second—on a single box, fully encrypted between the client and server. Yee haw.
I can do that stuff almost in my sleep these days because the performance requirements of interactive, live-action style filmmaking where you can actually do physically-accurate lighting requires extreme optimizations in the software and hardware. That $16 million was a cluster than acted like a single machine, rendering inside a scene about 1.5 Petabytes in size, 24 frame a second. Social networking even at Facebook scale is a walk in the park compared to that.
But I get sad every time I read an article about this stuff, and remember what could have been. What a waste of talent to be doing this shit, when I could be making films. It reminds me of that guy who tweeted that all the best people in tech were spending their time trying to figure out how to make people click on ads. Yup, pretty much. Art? Who needs that?
But whatever, my plan now is to keep CTOing startups until I've got fuck you money and can just pay for a Pixar-like studio myself, out of my own pocket. Just like Steve Jobs did.
http://vimeo.com/84667337
Music and voice, but no sound effects, foreground or background whatsoever. Unsynched video and audio. Worst of all: Lack of even a hint of a compelling storyline. The voice snippets in there just sound like a random jumble.
That is not a future of film-making that will gain any hold.