Reinhard Gutzat

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Sadly my project ended up differing from my original idea quite significantly. The simples way to put it is that it ended up a lot worse than I had wanted it to. In fact, I hadn't originally wanted it to be bad at all. :P Having taken much too long to come up with an idea to begin with, as a result not having enough time to work on it, and encountering more problems than i had feared, it really ended up not being very good. It's quite worthless, to put it politely.
The worst thing is that I can't even really say that I learned a lot by overcoming the problems, because in the end I never did solve most of them. When I couldn't load the map I had originally wanted to use as the setting, I thought i had come up with a solution by finding a simpler map and reworking it to look more fitting for the scene. For some reason though, I never got my scenes to work in it. I tried over and over, following the faceposer tutorial we used for class step by step, but it just wouldn't work. I have no idea what I was doing wrong, especially given that I've successfully done it before for the class assignment. In the end I just recorded the scenes in faceposer directly, which, needless to say, is lame and doesn't look that great. The sound is also pretty bad, and due to lack of time and issues with faceposer not recognizing or reading half the words in a lot of the wave files I was trying to use, the video's a lot shorter than I had intended, with fewer characters and less interest. It's a tragic 30 seconds short, sounds silly, and is kind of roughly put together. But I did try. Oh well.

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With all kinds of other final projects that had to be finished and with more finals coming up as well as my papers due for studying abroad next year, I haven't had time to work on this final at all since last Friday until yesterday. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what to do for the setting, since the map I had intended to use won't load, but I've got all the voices and scenes completed in faceposer, for the most part anyway. Also, since I'm not sure how to add or trigger other sounds later, I might go ahead and add battle sounds to the scenes in faceposer.
Another problem I've come across (oh joy), is that I can't find the rebels I had intended to use for the piece anywhere under the list of npc's in the entity tool of the hammer editor. This isn't a huge disaster perhaps, but it means that I might have to use other characters like Eli and Barney etc., which won't have the same significance to the video. I'll also have to redo the gestures for them, since they don't have the same gestures as the rebels. This will take a bit of time.
Honestly I'm really worried at this point and I rather doubt that I'll be able to get the video completed by tomorrow. I don't know. I'll try to work on it all night tonight, despite being tired from having done so for previous projects this week already, but we'll see.

So what I've decided to do for my final project, at long last, is to go with my original idea of using movie dialogue to create a scene in Half Life 2, using Half Life 2 characters. Rather than exactly re-creating a scene however, or creating new dialogue with lines from different movies, I have decided to use modified lines from the movie "Full Metal Jacket", specifically from the scene in which the marines are being interviewed. Beyond finding their responses rather amusing, I think using these lines in a Half Life 2 machinma piece can be somehwat significant in a couple ways. For one thing, having changed the lines to leave out any direct reference to the Vietnam war, they could be quite fitting to the current war in Iraq, or indeed any war. This (hopefully) could make my piece an interesting comment on war in general. The viewer will see young soldiers saying silly, stupid things against a backdrop of ruins and destruction. Of most significance will be Joker's lines from the movie, since he, as probably the most intelligent marine, intentionally says the silliest things, making the war out to be a big game.
This leads me into the other aspect of my piece, which is tying it to Half Life 2 or videogames in general, or at least shooters. HL2 is in many ways a perfect game to use for a scene of war, as there is a war taking place in the later part of the game. Therefore, while making a comment about real wars, the setting will be the war torn City 17 from the game, and the soldiers will be represented by the rebels. Most importantly though, the connection between my machinma piece and FPSs will be in the very use of an FPS and the chief element that sets it apart from other games, violence, to make a video about war.

Well, today was a long and frustrating day, but I think I've sort of gotten somewhere.
I played around a lot in faceposer, trying to get characters to walk, run, and sit down and stay seated, basically none of which worked. The sitting, walking, and running gesture sequences are so short that it's hard to blend them into a longer, smooth looking scene, besides which for some reason I couldn't get the scene to work in a Half Life 2 map. This isn't such a big problem, as I don't think the overall quality of my piece will be compromised if I keep my characters' gestures relatively simple, which is to say, standing in one spot rather than moving about. Still, I'll try to look into this some more.
Next I started working on my lipsynching with much frustration, panic and dismay as nothing seemed to be working out right, only to discover, not five minutes ago, that I had forgotten that I needed to download the Speech SDK. I'm downloading it right now, hoping that the bulk of my problems will be solved by it.
On the upside, I've found and downloaded a free version of an audio recording program with which I can record sound from DVDs reasonably well, then convert them to wav files on a different program. Not having been satisfied with my own recordings for an original narrative, my microphone being extremely shitty, and limited as I've mentioned before to pretty basic character choreography, I'm going back to my original idea to do a scene from a movie. I will post a full project description later. If there's enough time, I even have an idea for another, much shorter machinima that I'd like to do as well.

The only screenshot I have to post so far is a very lame one of breen form faceposer.

So here's a random one just for fun :P

Although I've thought about this for a while I actually still haven't come up with a very clear idea of what I want to do. All I know at this stage is that I want to make a machinima piece using Half Life 2 and possibly also Garry's Mod. I'm going to use a Half Life 2 map, although I'm almost certainly going to be adding a custom texture, and if I come up with something fitting for the scene, I might also try to make one or more custom props, time permitting.

What I've envisioned so far is some kind of humorous or interesting dialogue between two characters in the style or spirit of something from a Jim Jarmush or Quentin Tarantino film, the latter having been heavily inspired by the former. More specifically, I'm thinking something along the lines of "Coffee and Cigarettes" or "Pulp Fiction" and "Resevoir Dogs". In fact, failing to come up with my own dialogue, I might re-create a scene from one of these movies like the "Few Good Gmen" machinima we watched in class. In fact, it might be interesting to take lines from different movies and put them together to create new dialogue.

Clearly this would involve either myself and a friend recording my own lines of dialogue or finding WAV files from movies online, which I have already been doing.
Some research for this project would include such things as trying to find out how to choreograph more complex scenes in faceposer in which characters interact with objects in the environment. I noticed, for instance, that there were "gestures" in faceposer that included sitting down or getting up out of chairs, though I wouldn't know exactly how to have a character actually end up in a chair.
Further research might included 'studying' various films and even comics to get ideas for interesting shot compositions and camera angles to emphasize mood and convey a sense of space or the passing of time.

Clearly this idea needs to be developed a lot further, but for some reason I just can't come up with anything more for now. Once I know more clearly what I'm doing though, I should be able to do a fair bit of the work at home, such as choreographing scenes and creating custom textures.

Here's my deathmatch map with totally the mechanized organic custom texture.

Original Image:

Well, here's my silly looking deathmatch model, all dead.

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Download model files

Operation Bayshield is a short machinima piece made using the Quake engine. However, unlike the two other major machinima projects, Diary of a Camper and Quake done Quick, that came out around the same time (within the year after Quake's release) it was not a demo movie, in that it did not rely on gameplay. Rather, characters were presented in the third person perspective and given life independent of player influence.
Operation Bayshield also differed from the other existing machinima pieces at the time, most notably the two mentioned above, in that its creators, Clan Undead, customized Quake material, giving characters custom skins and manipulating character images to simulate lip-synching. According to the reading, The Making of Machinima, "Clan Undead's second major innovation could be found in their singular attention to the movement and mannerisms of virtual actors." Characters would, for instance appear to be moving their mouths when speaking, or would move appropriately when laughing.

While Operation Bayshield was an interesting piece from a technological perspective and an important landmark in the creation of machinima as new media, I personally feel that the narrative quality of the piece is not very high. While it was clearly influenced by film in the way it was "shot", using interesting camera angles to evoke a particular mood or narrative effect in certain scenes, the story itself was rather silly and, if told well, one arguably not worth telling. Admittedly, not everybody shares the same sense of humor, and while I thought Operation Bayshield was just silly and quite childlike in its approach to humor, I'm sure there are other who might have found it quite amusing. Still, the story itself is one that can not be taken very seriously, even as satire, and looses itself in what becomes somewhat chaotic sillyness with no apparent point. So, while this machinima piece was undoubtedly important in establishing machinima as a possible medium for art, it is itself not art. I would say that is more about having gone through an interesting process in an experimental way than having actually created anything meaningful in the end, which is fine. Sometimes the process is more important.

Doesn't look much like me, but oh well.

I didn't really do anything interesting in with it, but here it is.

-Choose a goal and topic
The game must have a well defined goal as to what effect it will have on the player

-Research and prepare
Research the topic to see how it can best compliment the goals.

-Design program, I/O, and game structure to best represent the goals and overall idea of the
game.

-Evaluate the design
Identify common design flaws Make sure the design compliments the goals. Evaluate the game
structure.

-Program the game.
This includes a pre-programming phase in which the ideas should be put to paper carefully.

-Test the game
Polish and refine the game, fix problems.

I found his comments, particularly the following quote, on criticism refreshing and encouraging.

“Are you willing to be a noble and starving artist, or a somewhat wealthier artisan? Look within your heart, long and hard. If deep down inside you know that you met your goals, then ignore the critics and the public.”

Left 4 Dead is a co-op game being developed by Turtle Rock Studios, now belonging to Valve, using the Source engine. In the game, which can be played with up to eight people, one plays as either one of four surviving humans in a kind of zombie apocalypse in which all other humans have been infected by some rabies-type virus, or as one of four different kinds of “boss infected”, which are basically tougher variations of infected humans. The rest of the infected are AI controlled, however, to keep the experience fresh and exciting, Turtle Rock Studio has worked on AI technology that allows the AI not only to act in interesting ways, but which also scales the difficulty of the game depending on the players’s styles. The Player’s experiences will be monitored by a program called the AI Director, which will determine where and when to spawn enemies in order to keep the gameplay unpredictable. So if people playing as survivors have just fought off a swarm of infected, for example, the director might give them a quiet moment before spawning the next in some random area. In this way the players will never quite know what to expect and will be kept on their toes, and the same level will never be played through the same way twice.
Apart from that there is perhaps nothing all that remarkable about the game. Since it’s using the newest version of the Source engine the graphics are nice, but the gameplay seems relatively simple and the near non-existent plot serves only to give one the excuse to kill a lot of zombies. This is not a bad thing however, and it is perhaps that simplicity which makes the game look so appealing. It’s meant to be pure fun, and by the looks of it, it will be.

One game that comes to mind quite readily when reading McLuhan’s Games, Extension of Man, is the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. WOW is a good example of the kind of utopian or idealized representation of the real world that allows one to escape from the stresses of real life. In this game players engage in conversation and other social interaction, much in the way one might in real life, while a the same time fighting other players, slaying beasts, and doing all manner of other grand things they are not likely to accomplish in the real world.

What I find particularly interesting about WOW as a “social reaction” is the fact that the players spend so much time meeting and interacting with each other in a virtual space and though avatars. Sometimes WOW players spend more time maintaining or developing “friendships” with people they have never met in person and of whom they know only what they say about themselves, than with their friends in the “real” world. I think this may have something to do with the fact that social interaction in a virtual space makes people feel safer because they are not truly exposing themselves, and in the case with something like WOW, they are already interacting with people from a specific community that are likely to have more in common with each other. Meeting people in the “real” world can be daunting and intimidating, whereas something like WOW creates a sheltered environment in which people automatically share some common ground.
I’m actually not really sure where I’m going with this...I suppose it’s interesting to me that in some way WOW could be seen as a “social reaction” to two almost opposing aspects of reality. For on the one hand, as an online multiplayer game, it is by definition an extension of the social self, as one is playing with other people. This aspect of the game is a reaction to the social aspect of human nature. On the other hand, as I’ve said, the game alienates many people from real social interaction, pulling them away from the real world and placing them in a safer, smaller, simpler, but fake world. This aspect of the game is almost like a reaction to the idea that technology is driving a wedge into normal social interaction. People shut themselves off from engaging in natural conversation or meeting new people by listening to their ipods, talking or texting on their cell phones, managing their myspace profiles, or in this case, playing games.

Lamp leap

face

Mentioned briefly in the introduction of Videogames and Art, Counter Strike is an online multi player mod for Half Life, in which players join teams of terrorists or counter terrorists and fight each other in various game modes, most notably rescue/hold hostages and set/defuse bomb. Within these game modes, beyond just killing players on the opposing team, one has secondary objectives such as rescuing hostages or defusing bombs (in the case of counter terrorists), and is rewarded with money if one does so successfully, with which one can buy better equipment or weapons for the next round.

Counter Strike has long been one of the most popular and successful online FPS games, but can it be considered as art? One could certainly say that its creation involved many artistic processes, such as the creation of models and textures, but I personally don’t view the game in its entirety as a work of art. However, to me the question of whether something is a work of art or not, is often a very complicated one. After all, what exactly is art? This is a question that I struggle with a lot as an aspiring artist, and I obviously haven’t come up with a clear answer yet, nor indeed do I expect that I ever shall. As I see it now though, art is a form of expression through a creative process. The purpose of a work of art then, would be to express some kind of idea, feeling, concept, or message. I do not think that Counter Strike necessarily does any of these. There seems to be no message behind the game, nor is it meant to convey some kind of feeling or emotion. Rather, it seems to me that the purpose of Counter Strike is simply to create a fun experience.

Playing Half Life 2 is different from reading a book or watching a movie mainly because of its interactivity. The player interacts with the world, becoming part of the setting and causing the story to unfold because of one's actions, whereas in a movie or a book, one is passively watching or reading about the events, the characters, the settings, and the story.
Another difference is the pace at which the story unfolds. The story in a book would generally unfold more slowly, as the settings and environments as well as characters need to be introduced and described in words. In movies, as well as in Half Life 2, these things are introduced visually and audibly, so that not as much time needs to be given them. However, whereas Half Life 2 i more fast paced than a book, it is much longer and more drawn out than a movie could be, so that the settings and characters can be explored in farther depth than in movies. Finally, another big difference is that while movies and books must be entertaining in some sense, a game must be similarly entertaining, but with a stong emphasis on putting the player in fun situations, so that Half Life 2 has more fast-paced action than one would generally find in most movies or books.