How are we making machinima?

Last lesson Ms. Parish said something like 'I like what you've done but I have no idea how you've done it'. Here I'll try to put that right by explaining what machinima is and how to use it as a film technique. If you look at the URL of the last post you'll see that was what I originally intended to slip it in there, I decided it's worth a full post. I'll also try my best not to be patronising.


We play Halo 3 and act out the scenes using the in-game models, the scenes take place within the locations of the game. It's crowning advantage is that you're simply using an existing stage to tell a different story, it bypasses the normally tiresome animation process by using the game-engine and all the content which is already available. We 'film' the shots in the Halo 3 Theater, the camera allows us to view the events of our match from almost any angle. I record the HDMI output of the Xbox 360 as the events play out on screen. I'm able to re-wind and fast-forward to any point in the game so I can see the same action from any number of actions. There's a whole other bunch of options, if I have time I'll post screenshots of the menu, for now though here's the timeline of the editing so far:

This morning I added the last scene of the spaceship taking off. Jonny supplied the background on his file-share. The map used there is Standoff. I recorded the spaceship in Gmod, which I'll come to now. Gmod is a sandbox game which allows the player near-complete freedom to do what they want in the virtual world. You've no doubt heard of the Grand Theft Auto series, it's like that but with no story or plot and a far greater freedom to experiment. However they share the gameplay mechanic that allowing the player to do what they want is fun. It's useful for us because I can go into the inbuilt map gm_construct, make all the walls green, build a spaceship, attach thrusters to it, go into camera mode, spawn a camera to track the spaceship then turn on the thrusters and use FRAPS to film it as it shoots across the room. The green walls are important because I can then use them as a green-screen in editing. Two tips when making machinima which I've picked up over the last year:

• Never have two actors talking at the same time, or if you do be very careful that the audience doesn't get confused.
• To lower the weapons in Halo press the Left-Button, Right-Button, the Left Thumbstick, down on the D-Pad and then the A Button. And if you were raised on Street Fighter that should be a doddle. You must be in a local or LAN match for this to work.

And here's an exceptionally good example of machinima, made by Rooster Teeth, that's my favourite episode of their Reconstruction series.
If you have any questions please comment. I'm a bit thin on comments here.