Red vs. Blue is one of the most popular series of machinima shows. © Rooster Teeth.

Game-Based Previs for the Rest of Us
Even though much of the hot development in previs technology may be going on behind closed doors at high-end vfx shops such as ILM, the Pixel Liberation Front, The Orphanage and Zoic Studios, there is also a lot in the way of previs tools and methods available for low-budget filmmakers and even beginning students. A recent development being used for previs is machinima, the use of game engines to create story sequences. Although the original purpose of machinima (mah-shee-nee-mah), “the marriage of machine and cinema,” was to produce finalized filmic stories rather than previsualizations of larger projects, the process is basically the same — create sets and characters, move characters around in a certain way, try a different approach, repeat until satisfied. Game engines for machinima productions can be very low priced, and a few are even shareware. The director of a machinima project can either use a game interface to move the characters around, or use the simple scripting of the game engine to plan character moves. Lip sync editors are available to enable the characters to “speak” in response to inputting typed text. Although the output of machinima may not be up to Lucas’ standards, there is a startling number of creative and even breath-taking short movies that are being shown in machinima festivals around the world. The Academy of Machinima is a great resource for information on such festivals. One of the most popular series of machinima shows has been Red vs. Blue, from Rooster Teeth Prods.

The Art of Machinima, by Paul Marino, is another great resource, and instructs the fledgling previs student or filmmaker not only in how to use a game machine to set up story sequences, but actually includes a CD-ROM with a game engine to try out projects in real life. Machinima, by Dave Morris, Matt Kelland, and Dave Lloyd, is another great introduction to this new cinematic art form that can be used for previs. It is also possible to simply play a game and capture the motion of the characters. The Sims 2, from Electronic Arts, has a simple interface — just hold down the “V” key to capture video footage from game sequences. The virtual environment (though not technically a game) of Second Life has a similar in-world tool to capture video clips that can then be edited. One popular tool for video capture of game sequences is FRAPS, an inexpensive way to generate .AVIs to edit for final productions.

The Sims 2 has a simple interface to capture video footage from game sequences. © 2005 Electronic Arts Inc. All rights reserved.

And for the real novice, there is a hugely entertaining game out from Lionhead called The Movies that lets aspiring filmmakers learn many of the fundamentals of previs, including set design, costuming, character movement, camera placement and story development.

Summary
The use of game engines for previs has been very limited up to now. Previs experts have warned — with good reason — of the unacceptable resolution levels of existing game technology, as well as data incompatibility and high prices (for a single project) for some popular gaming engines. Nevertheless, the boundaries between high-end 3D feature vfx and game tools continue to get fuzzier, and the economic drive to merge movies and gaming into common pipelines may be unstoppable. “We are interested in the use of hardware for animation in previs and then production,” offers Imageworks’ Villegas. “Eventually, we hope the physics engines will allow a wide range of objects to move and interact with the same sense of mass and motion as they do in real life — allowing non-character driven animation to be more procedural.”

Finally, prominent pioneers of previs and fans of videogames such as Lucas and Peter Jackson seem determined to meld the two, making the emergence of common film and game toolsets almost a certainty. Easy and low-cost learning tools are available for students, who can ready themselves when these new toolsets emerge in the near future.

Christopher Harz is an executive consultant for new media. He has produced videogames for films such as Spawn, The Fifth Element, Titanic and Lost in Space. As Perceptronics svp of program development, Harz helped build the first massively multiplayer online game worlds, including the $240 million 3-D SIMNET. He worked on C3I, combat robots and war gaming at the RAND Corp., the military think tank.