A practice in machinima. I worked with a representative from the University of Southern California's Institute of Creative Technologies on a project to prove that machinima could be used to create social situation training videos.
I was given a short film clip to analyze and reproduce using the game Sims 2, in the time period of about one month (May 2006). My job was working specifically with the game itself, creating the set and the characters involved. The process of actually filming the scenes to be edited together also fell to me.
Original Film (3.33 MB)
Introduction to the problem (20.1 MB)
Main Dilemma: Quicktime .mov (8.42 MB), Google video
Positive Outcome: Quicktime .mov (6.16 MB), Google video
The movie set in a Sims 2 Packaged Lot (3.33 MB,
requires Sims 2 and the "Open For Business" expansion pack)
(written for inclusion in the formal survey/report)
In many ways, Machinima is a great deal cheaper and easier to use for filming just about anything, when compared to filming with real live people and props. In the case of filming in Sims 2, the only tangible costs are in time and purchasing the game itself. Your props are in endless supply and can be easily modified in color and placement. Your actors are made up of pixels, don't require any salary and are completely tireless. As long as you have the patience to figure out the rules of the virtual environment you are working with and how to make them work for you, then machinima can easily become the most productive mode of filming available to you.
In my opinion, the most important thing about filming with machinima is to be familiar with the game you are going to use. Playing the game and learning little details about how the Sims function and move and interact with one another will help make your machinima look more realistic and make your life easier when creating sets and filming. For example, find out if the game you intend to use has a "photograph" mode, where you can remove the user interface. Depending on the game, cheat codes can also be useful and a time saver. In Sims especially, each Sims has their own virtual needs and wants. Using cheat codes like "maxMotives" and "motiveDecay off" will enable you to basically remove those needs so that your Sims will continue to act for you as long as you need them to.
The most difficult thing about filming in machinima is learning towork around the natural bounds of filming within a game. Sims have many quirks that come from having all their behaviors programmed, such as where they will stand when interacting with other Sims or what path they choose to take when getting from one location to another. Learning these quirks and how to work around them is especially important.
For example, when a Sim is directed to move from one location to another, the programming checks the distance of the move and if it's large enough, the Sim will run to the location. This can be problematic if your film calls for all your actors to be walking. The solution in this case was in realizing that a Sim could be directed to sit in a chair at the desired destination and, as a result, the Sim would always walk to the chair despite the long distance. So the illusion that Sims were walking around throughout the office workspace was achieved by placing chairs out of sight of the cameras.