It all begins (again)

I've been a machinima afficionado for several years now. A relative newcomer. More specifically, a complete n00b: I haven't created any machinima beyond the tutorial stage. I've experimented with Half-Life, HL2, UT2004, The Movies, GTA Vice City, IClone, even Machinimation - which I really like, by the way.

A complex of factors have held me back. First and foremost, inertia. I'm a middle-aged creature of habit who has to work to pay the rent, so I've had to battle my lazy inclinations.

Secondly, isolation. It's been hard to connect with a community of machinimists. This is down to a number of reasons as well. I'm not much of a gamer any more. When I was my game-playing peak, the games were called Missile Command, Asteroids, Defender, Tempest, and Choplifter, Rescue on Fractalus, and so forth. I enjoyed Castle Wolfenstein and Doom, but that was really the extent of my experience with FPS's. Never any multiplayer or online experience. So I didn't really know anyone who gamed in any major way.

Another major reason that I never really connected with a machinima community was the fact that I was globetrotting, in a way. I spent most of the 90's away from my home town of new york. So work and travel kind of usurped time I might have spent on my filmmaking interests.

A big part of machinima's appeal to me is its low threshold of participation. A half-decent computer, one or two popular games, and an internet connection is all you need. Yet ironically, I still find it easier to make traditional films - shot on film, even. This is because I understand it and I know how to find people to help me. Whether it's writers, actors, camerapeople, etc, I can assemble a crew in under 48 hours and be shooting in no time.

Also, machinima lends itself to certain styles and genres, not so much to others. Drama is challenging in machinima because it's so hard to nuance an actors performance. In this respect traditional puppetteering is far more expressive. Alas, most of the stories I want to tell are dramas. Similarly, machinima is most accessible if your story can be told using the stock assets provided with your game. If it can't you have to master the art of content creation - 3d modelling, level design, character animation, texturing, etc. That I can tell you is a daunting prospect for an aspiring machinimist.

So there it is - I've spent years wanting to make machinima, thinking about it, but not doing it. Well, I've finally decided to change that. I'm going to buy otee's Unity for the Mac. Did I forget to mention that I was a mac user when I got interested in machinima? Machinima tends to be heavily windows-centric, alas.

And that's the starting point for this blog. I'll be documenting my adventures in machinima using Unity. I hope you'll stay tuned.