I interviewed Daniel Foucher for this week's Online section, in an article about machinima. Machinima is the art of making films from computer game engines, and Daniel's tour de force is using players in online games to create truly engaging and captivating pieces of public performance-as-cinema. His alter ego is Javier, the mastermind behind the Cantina Crawl series in Star Wars Galaxies in which up to 160 people perform choreographed dance moves. Daniel records the footage and cuts it together, putting it to musical soundtracks. The results are fantastic.
I was only able to get a snippet of his words into the paper piece, so continue on to the whole shebang. In the interview he explains why he prefers online games to offline ones and four essentials for building successful machinima films.
What is a Cantina Crawl? The Cantina Crawls are events which happen in Star Wars Galaxies, primarily for the entertainment professions and those who support them. I'd like to say we carefully plan them, but trying to get entertainers to move from point A to point B is like herding wet cats. :)
We set a night, a time and a place in game to meet. People descend upon the place, and then party and from time to time we "crawl" to a new location, usually player built cantinas within the game world. People jam and have a good time, and I film what goes on, using fraps and as steady a hand as I can muster.
When the crawl event finishes (usually about 3-4 hours later), my work is just beginning as I have to transfer all the video footage to a mac, and then edit it to music, performing whatever post production I need to do. This often takes me weeks, as I do have a day job. :)
What do you think explains the huge popularity of the Cantina Crawls? Initially, I believe they were successful because of the theme and the concept behind them. It was an event, and it was an excuse to get out of the same old cantina most entertainers seemed to feel stuck in. Once I began to shoot videos, they became a sensation, due to the popularity of the films and the enjoyment people felt at seeing their avatars featured in them.
There have been both positives and negatives with the explosive growth of the popularity of the crawls. Some people would probably prefer the time when we did them with 6 people, others enjoy the atmosphere when 160 people join in the fun. In the end it's academic, as they've taken on a life of their own and the growth or decline of the popularity is beyond my control.
Why did you start making machinima? It seemed like a natural fit for the events we were running. The crawls dated back about 6 months before the first film was made. I'd already had a video production background, and when I saw that the software existed to capture smooth, full frame video from a game, and saw what others were doing with this technology, I decided to give it a shot.
Why did you choose an online game? I've been playing them for years. I didn't actually set out to make "machinima", and in fact would not have even recognized the term if you'd asked me back then. I enjoy online games, and running events and having parties, and presenting a video that captured the magic of an event for people to revisit over and over seemed to be an exciting and fun thing to do.
What are the unique benefits and drawbacks of making machinima in an online game? The benefits, I think, are the flip side of the same coin as the drawbacks. It's all about the other people playing the game. When you shoot a video in an online game, other people actually participate, and sometimes on a large scale. The resulting video is very special to those folks. They can also bring their own unique personalities and actions to the process, much in the way real actors do. The drawback is that, like with real actors, people are often unpredictable, and perhaps even more so in a game which they pay to play. It's very difficult to get a commitment out of folks for whom this is not a job, but entertainment. This is primarily why I never managed to finish a dramatic piece. I tried, but could not find people I could depend on for a cast and crew.
How is it different from making machinima in an offline space? I have never tried to make machinima in an offline space. I'm an incredibly social person, and while the process of editing and post production is a solitary experience, I want the emotions and activities of real people to infuse my films. Unless I was able to get a bunch of friends to come over and work on a video with me, it would not be much fun for me to shoot a video in an offline space.
Who dances with you? In real life I'd love to be at a dance club every night, but sadly I cannot. In virtual worlds, I can more often be found in Second Life currently, where I still dance with some of the friends I made in Star Wars Galaxies, and make new friends all the time.
What do you see as the future of machinima? We live in an age where creative minds are suddenly given outstanding tools that put the power of Hollywood in a desktop computer. My movies are all created on a laptop, using software that cost less than a thousand dollars. This trend is only beginning, and we are witnessing an increasingly narrow gap between the raw capabilities of a professional movie producer, and an amateur. It's a truly exciting time to be in this field.
As a result, I don't see a ceiling on the future of machinima. Certainly I don't expect to see a Cantina Crawl playing at my local cinema, but certain machinima series (like Red vs Blue) are probably already rivaling some major motion pictures in popularity.
I think machinima will always remain an "indy" type art form, and that is perhaps as it should be, but I see it increasing drastically in popularity and perhaps launching some careers directly into Hollywood. In fact, I'd be surprised if that has not already happened.
What can machinima creators do to ensure that machinima reaches mainstream exposure? I guess I would have four pieces of advice.
First and foremost, pour your heart and soul and all your energy into the film. If it's a hack job, people will see that and it won't go anywhere. Video production of this sort needs to be a labor of love.
Second, get the film out there. The web is a marvelous resource for this, with websites that will gladly host your creations and sites that will happily link to it. As with normal movies, it's important to create a buzz. Get it listed everywhere you can.
Third, beware the price of success! Shortly after I released my second or third film, the link to the download on my poor website was posted on a very popular news page. My web server died from the massive amount of attention it generated, people got upset, and I learned the hard way to get my movies mirrored on websites that could support the traffic.
Fourth, never ever give up. The first film anyone puts out sucks. I look back upon mine and shudder. We all improve with time, but if you give up, you'll never get to see that happen.
If this hasn't whetted your machinima-appetite and you're able to get to Edinburgh, the EIEF is hosting some machinima events for the general public. The Conference session (Friday 4:30pm) and Screening (Saturday 2pm) are mini-film festivals, covering the history, culture and platform of machinima, while people who wish to get their hands dirty can come along to the Go Play Games machinima master classes throughout the event.
