Short Fuze wants more top-flight machinimators to show the world what Moviestorm can really do in the hands of experts. We're looking for established individuals or studios to produce absolutely top-quality movies using Moviestorm. You would be joining a small but rapidly growing team.
This is most likely to be a part-time role or freelance / contract work, and you can work from home or in our (Cambridge, UK) offices. It would involve a mixture of commissioned pieces where we are responding to requests from IPR owners (TV, movies and music) and your own original work, and we're after anything from drama and comedy to music video or experimental work. What matters is quality, delivery to time and fanatical devotion to the art. We're looking for movies that go beyond existing "gamer" machinima, and will appeal to a wider audience.
We'll provide full technical support, and you'll also get access to custom artwork and professional sound facilities. Payment terms by negotiation.
If you're interested, email me directly (matt [at] shortfuze.co.uk) and send links to your portfolio of machinima work (in any engine) and other film work if you have it, as well as details of any machinima or film awards you have won. You will need to demonstrate your proficiency with character performance, camerawork, editing and post-production.
Please indicate what type of films you like to make and your level of technical expertise. We would particularly welcome applications from people who are making movies in languages other than English, though this is not a requirement.
Start dates vary from immediate to October 2007.
Wednesday, 30 May 2007
Friday, 4 May 2007
Moviestorm hits the Big Time
It's been a hell of a fortnight. While we left the rest of the team at home to get on with building beta 1.4, David and I went on a whirlwind tour of LA and New York, meeting some of the people who have been involved in the machinima scene since, well, forever. We did a demo at the Big Time Picture Company, which meant that we were able to show movies in a real Hollywood screening room, on a screen twice as tall as me.
Matt dreams about hitting the Big Time
Hey, I can dream - I'm in Hollywood!
Well, almost. Of course, the one thing we forgot is that Hollywood screening rooms are geared up for projecting movies. Y'know, as in actual film? So we turn up with our lovely modern new-fangled laptop, expecting to connect it to a projector.... d'oh! Well, the nice guys at Big Time say that's no problem, we'll just.... oh, you have a Windows PC? If we'd had a Mac, it'd be just a minor problem, but a PC?
David finally gets the living room of his dreams
You can tell he's the CEO, he's in the suit!
So, after half an hour, we mostly get that sorted out, then we realise we've made dumb move #3. The lap-top's now in the projection booth, and I'm expecting to be able to run Moviestorm and talk people through what I'm doing. Projection booths are soundproof, dummy! They won't hear a frackin' word I'm saying! Eventually, with the aid of a speakerphone, we finally get sorted, half an hour behind schedule. Which is OK, because when we said 6pm, we didn't think about LA traffic, and pretty much everyone else is half an hour late too.
Frank, Jason, Ricky & Ingrid
You meet strange people at midnight in LA.....
When we finally got under way, it all seemed to go pretty well. At least, when we suggested dinner after the demo, none of them ran away screaming, so that was a good sign.
The next few days were a blur of meetings, interspersed with zipping up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, accidentally gatecrashing a party at the Beverly Hilton, airports, lots of interesting restaurants, and more anonymous hotel rooms. However, it was great to find time to meet up with several of our beta testers, and find out from them in person what they think of Moviestorm, and what they'd like to see us doing next. In a word, finish the damn thing, and release it - okay, okay, guys, we're doing it!
Great seeing y'all - let's do it again!
Matt dreams about hitting the Big TimeHey, I can dream - I'm in Hollywood!
Well, almost. Of course, the one thing we forgot is that Hollywood screening rooms are geared up for projecting movies. Y'know, as in actual film? So we turn up with our lovely modern new-fangled laptop, expecting to connect it to a projector.... d'oh! Well, the nice guys at Big Time say that's no problem, we'll just.... oh, you have a Windows PC? If we'd had a Mac, it'd be just a minor problem, but a PC?
David finally gets the living room of his dreamsYou can tell he's the CEO, he's in the suit!
So, after half an hour, we mostly get that sorted out, then we realise we've made dumb move #3. The lap-top's now in the projection booth, and I'm expecting to be able to run Moviestorm and talk people through what I'm doing. Projection booths are soundproof, dummy! They won't hear a frackin' word I'm saying! Eventually, with the aid of a speakerphone, we finally get sorted, half an hour behind schedule. Which is OK, because when we said 6pm, we didn't think about LA traffic, and pretty much everyone else is half an hour late too.
Frank, Jason, Ricky & IngridYou meet strange people at midnight in LA.....
When we finally got under way, it all seemed to go pretty well. At least, when we suggested dinner after the demo, none of them ran away screaming, so that was a good sign.
The next few days were a blur of meetings, interspersed with zipping up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, accidentally gatecrashing a party at the Beverly Hilton, airports, lots of interesting restaurants, and more anonymous hotel rooms. However, it was great to find time to meet up with several of our beta testers, and find out from them in person what they think of Moviestorm, and what they'd like to see us doing next. In a word, finish the damn thing, and release it - okay, okay, guys, we're doing it!
Great seeing y'all - let's do it again!
Monday, 23 April 2007
I'm not looking down on you dear, I'm just built that way
It made a nice change a few days ago to log onto our beta test forums and find that one of the users had started a thread on "things I like about Moviestorm", instead of the usual bug reports, problems, and suggestions. One of the things they mentioned was "the men and women are different heights".
It's one of those design decisions that gave me sleepless nights for months. I mean, it's obvious that men and women should be different heights, because that's the way people are - isn't it? But there's a hidden cost to this. Different heights means different skeletons, and different skeletons means different animations. And having two skeletons hasn't just doubled the animation load, it's quadrupled it in places. (Take two-person animations like tapping someone on the shoulder - we need separate anims for M+M, M+F, F+M and F+F.) It also means all sorts of issues with the code - if we change a character from male to female, the engine has to fire up the same animations, but for a different gender. More headaches. And, of course, the animations have to match precisely, so that your timing doesn't get thrown out of whack. And with all the added complexity, that gives the QA team a hell of a lot of extra work.
It would have been easy to take the approach made by Another Well Known Machinima Tool, and make all the characters the same height, regardless of gender. That would have freed up a lot of budget for making more costumes, more sets, and more animations, and made the developers' lives a lot easier, but, to my eyes at least, the end result just wouldn't have been so satisfying. I like the composition you get from different eye heights - it just feels wrong otherwise.
So, thanks to whoever posted that small comment on our forums, thank you. I can sleep again now.
It's one of those design decisions that gave me sleepless nights for months. I mean, it's obvious that men and women should be different heights, because that's the way people are - isn't it? But there's a hidden cost to this. Different heights means different skeletons, and different skeletons means different animations. And having two skeletons hasn't just doubled the animation load, it's quadrupled it in places. (Take two-person animations like tapping someone on the shoulder - we need separate anims for M+M, M+F, F+M and F+F.) It also means all sorts of issues with the code - if we change a character from male to female, the engine has to fire up the same animations, but for a different gender. More headaches. And, of course, the animations have to match precisely, so that your timing doesn't get thrown out of whack. And with all the added complexity, that gives the QA team a hell of a lot of extra work.
It would have been easy to take the approach made by Another Well Known Machinima Tool, and make all the characters the same height, regardless of gender. That would have freed up a lot of budget for making more costumes, more sets, and more animations, and made the developers' lives a lot easier, but, to my eyes at least, the end result just wouldn't have been so satisfying. I like the composition you get from different eye heights - it just feels wrong otherwise.
So, thanks to whoever posted that small comment on our forums, thank you. I can sleep again now.
Take a deep breath...
Passport - check.
US power adaptors - check.
Demo films - check.
Hotel reservations - err, David, you did get us somewhere to stay, didn't you?
So this is the moment of truth, where we get to find out what Moviestorm is really made of. In a few hours' time, I'm flying out to LA and New York with David B on the first leg of the Moviestorm World Tour 2007 to demo in front of our harshest critics - our users. It's been a long, hard road to get here over the last two years, but, man, it's been a great ride so far! In the spring of 2005, we were just two guys, in our spare rooms, with a mad idea. By spring 2006, we had a full-time artist, a couple of part-time staff, and a modest R&D budget. And now, we've got offices, a dozen full-time staff, freelancers, and hundreds of beta testers (sign up right here, folks) and we're on the verge of having a real, honest-to-goodness, mostly working, movie-making tool. And in the next week, we find out whether we're on the right track, or whether we've got to go back to the drawing board and do it all again.
The toughest decision we had to make (apart, obviously, from who got the one comfy office chair) was to bring on our beta testers at such an early stage. It was nerve-wracking letting people use it before it was anywhere near ready, but that's been critical to the development of Moviestorm. For the last six months, we've had users telling us, every single day, what they want out of a movie-making tool, and they've been involved in shaping Moviestorm right from the beginning. Yes, we've come in for a fair amount of "tough love", but it's been worth it. It's meant that we can be pretty damn sure that we're not just making Moviestorm into the tool that we want to see - it will cater for all sorts of users, and for all sorts of films.
Still, I can't keep hiding behind the safety of the Internet any longer. We've been hunkered down in our little bunker for ages, nurturing our little creation, and now it's time to come out of stealth mode and play. In a couple of days, we face the big wide world in person, and find out what they really think. Brickbats or Bollinger - the audience will decide!
I'm rather looking forward to it, I think ...
US power adaptors - check.
Demo films - check.
Hotel reservations - err, David, you did get us somewhere to stay, didn't you?
So this is the moment of truth, where we get to find out what Moviestorm is really made of. In a few hours' time, I'm flying out to LA and New York with David B on the first leg of the Moviestorm World Tour 2007 to demo in front of our harshest critics - our users. It's been a long, hard road to get here over the last two years, but, man, it's been a great ride so far! In the spring of 2005, we were just two guys, in our spare rooms, with a mad idea. By spring 2006, we had a full-time artist, a couple of part-time staff, and a modest R&D budget. And now, we've got offices, a dozen full-time staff, freelancers, and hundreds of beta testers (sign up right here, folks) and we're on the verge of having a real, honest-to-goodness, mostly working, movie-making tool. And in the next week, we find out whether we're on the right track, or whether we've got to go back to the drawing board and do it all again.
The toughest decision we had to make (apart, obviously, from who got the one comfy office chair) was to bring on our beta testers at such an early stage. It was nerve-wracking letting people use it before it was anywhere near ready, but that's been critical to the development of Moviestorm. For the last six months, we've had users telling us, every single day, what they want out of a movie-making tool, and they've been involved in shaping Moviestorm right from the beginning. Yes, we've come in for a fair amount of "tough love", but it's been worth it. It's meant that we can be pretty damn sure that we're not just making Moviestorm into the tool that we want to see - it will cater for all sorts of users, and for all sorts of films.
Still, I can't keep hiding behind the safety of the Internet any longer. We've been hunkered down in our little bunker for ages, nurturing our little creation, and now it's time to come out of stealth mode and play. In a couple of days, we face the big wide world in person, and find out what they really think. Brickbats or Bollinger - the audience will decide!
I'm rather looking forward to it, I think ...
Thursday, 29 March 2007
Less is more - except when it isn't
Machinima is a very cartoony art form. However much we improve the graphics - and let's face it, modern game engines have pretty awesomely realistic characters - everything's hugely exaggerated. If we want to show a character being sad, or angry, their performance in a game is usually as melodramatic and hammy as something out of Victorian vaudeville. Or silent movies, come to that. It's not even first year drama school acting.
I'd like Moviestorm to deliver much more subtle performance. You can say so much with a nod, a slight flick of the eye, or a tiny body movement. I'm not just thinking of Sergio Leone movies here (though I will confess that Leone is a bit of an influence on me). I'm thinking of real drama. Many years ago, Michael Caine gave a masterclass for the BBC on how to do a section of Educating Rita. It was fascinating - with just a few minor facial movements, he turned a good performance into a superb one. (I really wish they'd show that again - it was a classic bit of television.) As a result, we have a load of little body animations in, which don't seem to do much, but which should add up to a lot when it comes to characterisation. As Caine pointed out, there's a world of difference between acting for the theatre and acting for the camera. In the theatre, the guy in the back of the circle has to be able to see what you're doing: in a film, they stick a camera in your face and capture every tiny little movement. You don't need to be histrionic to be emotional.
On the other hand, unless you're right up close, all these little animations are meaningless. Tiny little facial twitches don't show up in long shot, so you do need a range of more melodramatic gestures. This kinda makes sense when you think back to my opening para here: games tend not to use close-ups, so they only have the big hammy gestures you can recognise at a distance. Which means we need to have the big exaggerated gestures too... you just have to make sure that you don't use them when you're in close-up.
I'd like Moviestorm to deliver much more subtle performance. You can say so much with a nod, a slight flick of the eye, or a tiny body movement. I'm not just thinking of Sergio Leone movies here (though I will confess that Leone is a bit of an influence on me). I'm thinking of real drama. Many years ago, Michael Caine gave a masterclass for the BBC on how to do a section of Educating Rita. It was fascinating - with just a few minor facial movements, he turned a good performance into a superb one. (I really wish they'd show that again - it was a classic bit of television.) As a result, we have a load of little body animations in, which don't seem to do much, but which should add up to a lot when it comes to characterisation. As Caine pointed out, there's a world of difference between acting for the theatre and acting for the camera. In the theatre, the guy in the back of the circle has to be able to see what you're doing: in a film, they stick a camera in your face and capture every tiny little movement. You don't need to be histrionic to be emotional.
On the other hand, unless you're right up close, all these little animations are meaningless. Tiny little facial twitches don't show up in long shot, so you do need a range of more melodramatic gestures. This kinda makes sense when you think back to my opening para here: games tend not to use close-ups, so they only have the big hammy gestures you can recognise at a distance. Which means we need to have the big exaggerated gestures too... you just have to make sure that you don't use them when you're in close-up.
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