This ep, we take a walk down memory lane to the first major peak of #machinima with a documentary produced by @ProducerStuartBrown, released in 2003. The film is a fly on the wall documentary of the creative practice of the legendary Hugh Hancock (founder of Machinima.com) and his @strangecompany 

YouTube Version of This Episode

Show Notes & Links

Artery: Machinima (2003) by Producer Stuart Brown, released on his channel in 2018 –

and also available on Archive.org HERE

Eschaton: Darkening Twilight, Strange Company, originally released in 2000, with introduction by Hugh –

Tracy’s Comments –

I loved Stuart Brown’s documentary – it beautifully characterises Hugh the innovator, his passion for his medium and his commitment to his team. As Phil says in his commentary in our podcast ep, I think Hugh was misunderstood in some of his comments – he was 1000% committed to making films and doing innovative stuff with creative technologies. He also acquired a bit of reticence over time and the many rejections his innovations took will undoubtedly have taken its toll. Hugh didn’t go to university, and was always proud to say he was self-taught in pretty much everything he took on. He loved martial arts, he was an avid reader and specialised in Lovecraft. He had a thorough understanding of the legal frameworks that impacted his innovations and craft – we had many conversations about this over the years. He influenced the development of games, technologies and their promotion, and creative practice in filmmaking.

I have no doubt that without Hugh’s vision, those early years just wouldn’t have gelled together in the same way as they did for hundreds, thousands and eventually millions of people across the planet.

Machinima.com was Hugh’s endeavour, supported by an equally passionate community, that just grew to a point where he felt it detracted from his main goal in life – to be a filmmaker. It started life under the auspices of Strange Company, which itself was a partnership with Gordon McDonald. In fact, Hugh first met Gordon when making the second of the Eschaton films – Nightfall (in 1998).

M.com was launched in Jan 2000 and was sold in 2004, just before YouTube launched – much earlier than folks at the time knew – and throughout the rest of his life, Hugh remained a shareholder in Inc. that bought it. There’s a whole story to be told about .com and Inc which Ben Grussi and I covered in some detail in our Pioneers in Machinima book (chapter 2) – in fact, by now you can probably ask ChatGPT about what we cover in that chapter. Suffice to say, that whole book is dedicated to the memory of Hugh and his contribution to what the world has come to know and love as machinima and virtual production.

Of this particular documentary, in the book, Ben and I comment how the film perfectly demonstrates the challenges of making machinima at the time: “… mobile phones were not smart, chatrooms were text based, cameras were standalone devices (except when they were actually the game) and big hair was de rigueur”! Frank Dellario estimated that machinima production techniques at that time could speed up a conventional filmmaking project 30-40%, and therefore made it a very real proposition for those looking to cut a few costs down. As Damien said, however, it would take a world pandemic for the legacy industry of filmmaking to finally recognize its significance – and the force of The Mandalorian (nice!).

Hugh remains a much missed part of all things machinima these days. I have absolutely no doubt he would have been right up in the ranking with his projects on modern streaming channels, celebrating its successes and showcases at film festivals around the world. He may well have been one of those whose contribution to the technological advancements in filmmaking would now be at the forefront of major studio production techniques. He would certainly have been someone with whom we could have had lucid and detailed discussions about all things AI and its impact on creative practice.

Hugh passed away on 5 Feb 2018 – 7 years ago this month.

So in closing my comments, I want to share a transcript of an interview I did with Hugh in 2014 for a funded project I did in the UK on digital creativity. Its not been shared in full elsewhere as an interview – unfortunately I can’t find the audio recording. Hugh gave me permission to use this. Enjoy.

Tracy Harwood Interview with Hugh Hancock, 20 May 2014

What new personal and technical skills as a machinimator have you acquired over the years?

My machinima career is responsible for almost every professional skill I have, with the sole exception of writing.  Its taught me to make films which I didn’t know how to do when I started making machinima, which explains some of my early work.  Its taught me game design, game development, programming, about four different programming languages, web development, web design, enough about marketing that I now have an eye-watering day rate teaching online marketing to other people, split testing, advertising, business management, productivity, 3D modeling, 3D animation, motion capture, networking, talking defense contractors in the Netherlands into giving me expensive pieces of kit for rather less than their value and the list goes on.

How would you say you have developed as an artist?

Well for starters I’m better.  From when I started, I was 18 years, that’s half my life, there is no aspect of my art that I have no improved at massively.  Visual composition, visual design, I had not the feintist clue when I started and now I flatter myself to think I’m not that bad.  I wasn’t a bad writer when I started but I’m now considerably better – I have considerably greater understanding of story and mechanisms.  I have in terms of production side of things, which is rather integral to our craft, because if you can’t produce the thing it never comes out, its night and day, just in terms of the speed of producing things these days, its massively different.  Yes, I have improved beyond recognition in almost every aspect of my storytelling and I expect in 10 years I’ll be saying the same thing about where I am now.

What motivated you create using machinima in the beginning and how has that now changed?

Originally, I wanted to tell stories, I would have loved to tell stories in a visual medium like film but in the mid 90s, trying to get into a career producing fantasy or science fiction films was pretty unthinkable – I mean I could do the numbers of how many people went to Hollywood and how many people made it as directors and they’re not favourable. So that’s why I got into it because it was an entirely new way to make films, but not just films, digital video, I would perfectly happily have gone down the indie route and a Kevin Smith but to make action films, fantasy films, retro films, science fiction films, all the things that normally you need a budget with 7 zeros on the end… [and how has that changed?] its now easier to make a science fiction and fantasy film without a budget of 7 zeros on the end, you only need 6 zeros on the end and a high number at the start.  No, in all seriousness, if I was starting today, I might not make the same choices.  Digital video has improved beyond recognition, compositing and effects software has improved beyond recognition.  If I was starting out today, I might not do live action because computer graphics are so much closer now.  Having said that, machinima still offers…. I’ve been thinking very carefully about the choice of media in the last few months and my feelings are that machinima still offers enough advantages that it is still a very credible alternative and better in many ways.  It means if you are doing low action filming, you’ve still got to get people to the place, feed them, get permits, particularly with a lot of the techniques that I’m using, things like photogrammetry I can…. Edinburgh for example is infamously hard to get filming permits for because Edinburgh City Council charge through the nose.  However, there is no problem at all with wandering around Edinburgh taking photographs of famous buildings, then processing them into 3D models and then sticking them on one of my computers.  So I can, essentially, make a 3D film set in Edinburgh without paying Edinburgh City Council a £1M, which is a pretty big advantage.

What are your aspirations for your machinima work?

My aspirations are pretty much the same as they’ve always been: I want to be a show runner.  I want to do the same stuff that Joss Weedon or Vince Gilligan, Chris Carter, Erin Sawkin, whoever, probably less of the drugs than Erin Sawkin, I want to do the same thing they do – serialise fiction in a visual form at a reasonable pace with a small bunch of people and hopefully have some people watching.

Would you say there is a future in machinima or is it just another technology for you now?

There is certainly a future in machinima otherwise James Cameron wouldn’t be throwing so much money at it.  Machinima is to a large extent the future of film making or fusion techniques using a lot of machinima techniques.  Motion capture is not getting worse any time soon, AI is getting steadily better, facial capture is getting steadily better and its, you know, virtually every Hollywood film is now made using a significant chunk of the machinima tool set.  Joss Weeden’s Adventures Assemble was made using the same capture system that I use here and I am fairly sure that most of the pre-visualisation for that was what, if you squinted at it sideways and had me in charge of it, would be called machinima production techniques. Avatar’s production, just about everything Cameron does is machinima – and he’s made his career out of what is rapidly turning into machinima.  At the end of the day, all the individual building blocks for machinima are hugely successful.  The only one that I think is currently stuffed, and is likely to remain stuffed for the indefinite future, and I’m very sad about this, is the use of game engine assets for machinima creation.  I think that the practice of working with game engine worlds and telling stories in those worlds and repurposing them is still enormously powerful but the way the law has shifted and the way everyone’s attitudes have shifted its an unfortunate ghetto and a dead end for anyone that goes into it because you are also limited in terms of what you can do with those assets.  Even Blizzard have gone backwards now with their license, which is one of the reasons why you are not seeing Death Knight Love Story 2 coming out on WOW (I’ll have a blog post about this soon).  Some of the indie game developers are being a bit more enlightened about how they let people use their game for machinima and a number of the big companies are letting people use their engines for machinima that is put up on YouTube. But, anyone who can work a spreadsheet and do some basic addition, can tell that YouTube is a terrible terrible route to monetising anything video based, particularly if you have a massive IP incumbent, meaning, for example that if Netflix turn around to you, like they did with video game High School and say, hey you there, can we license your series, which is the normal exit for most web series, if you’re a machinima creator you’ve got to go ‘yeah, no, no we can’t’.  So, unfortunately, game based machinima its not dead but its wicked limited and certainly I doubt I will do any more game based machinima. Which is a real pity. Having said that, procedural content generation is coming on leaps and bounds and the growth of the independent gaming scene means there are enormous libraries of 3D content being made available on a commercial basis because, unlike web series creators, machinima creators, independent game developers tend to want to get paid.  So I think there is a parallel route for it and that’s the route I’m going down.  [Fragmentation of gaming sector probably works in your favour on this…] yes – triple A stuff is probably going to be out of our reach forever but it is becoming increasingly irrelevant anyway.

What barriers or difficulties have you overcome to create machinima?

Many, many legal hurdles.  Mostly its been the same sort of barriers that film makers in general face.  Honestly the biggest barrier I’ve faced is learning how to tell stories and learning how to make films, which is an ongoing process and not one I expect to complete any time soon.  Obviously there are continual technical problems and continual technical challenges and its only really in the last couple of years that I’ve started taking the technical challenges really seriously and examining pipeline optimizing, building tools ourselves in much the same way as all of the big production houses do and just…one of the biggest challenges I faced, for many, many years, it’s the old thing about ‘machinima is really fast and lets you create films quickly’ is actually making machinima quick enough to use – that’s something that I’ve been focusing on for the last few years and the really big challenge is, just because machinima is mostly an art form which uses a whole bunch of other art forms, tools and kind of scrunches them together and then hammers on the bits that don’t fit, you tend to end up with production processes that are a bloody nightmare, that slows everything down, and that’s why Blood Spell took 5 years and Death Love Story took 5 years and so that has been a big concern.  And obviously the legal aspects have been a big concern.  Obviously I’ve had less problems with it that other people, which is a combination of having a certain natural talent for law and being paranoid as hell about anything involving the phrase ‘the following definition shall apply through the course of this contract’.  [how have you dealt with that?] by a combination of actually reading the EULA, occasionally ignoring the EULA and then working on the premise that if its being featured on Boing Boing then no one wants the bad press from killing it.  Occasionally phoning up the rather surprised games developer’s legal department.  Yes, negotiation gets you a long way, it always does, and one of the things that people never do as a general rule is just phone people up and say ‘hi, I know your license says this but can it please say something else’ so that got us quite a long way in the early days. Just choosing games companies who I was reasonably sure weren’t going to be complete dicks was a fairly significant approach and, in the case of Death Knight Love Story, choosing a game that actually had a machinima license, albeit that one maybe didn’t work out so well in the end. [what happened?] Last November, just before Death Knight Love Story came out, Blizzard altered the terms of their video license agreement to say that essentially they can remove this license at any time they want for business reasons.  Which essentially boils down to, it’s a great big license, you definitely have a license for your machinima unless we say you don’t.  That’s helpful.  [to my knowledge, there still hasn’t been a machinimator that’s been taken through the courts yet, has there?] No. Unless the machinimator is making a considerable amount of money out of his machinima, or her machinima, there would be absolutely no point in doing it.  Rule 1 of litigation, don’t sue poor people… [but how have you dealt with autocensorship?] yes there have been a couple.  There was one a few years ago where Blizzard took down Not Another Love Story… there’s also been a more chilling effect in that any time a machinima project gets successful is, what always happens, it’s the Hollywood dream, it gets picked up and the next thing you know they are directing Star Trek 3 or something, except with machinima what happens is someone makes a great film, someone attempts to pick it up, like Larry King, no, Jay Lenno, for Phil Rice and says hey, this is an amazing film, I want to show it on my TV show and Phil says, ah well you’ll have to contact Electronic Arts and they say ‘what, wait, no’ and the entire Hollywood dream kind of hits a wall and collapses.  The same with one of my favourite machinima films made in WoW, brilliant film, the guys who made it got approached by multiple TV companies I believe who wanted to turn it into an animated series…. That’s how its meant to work.  They were really excited, they went to Blizzard and said is this going to be a problem and Blizzard says yes, you can’t do it.  [so, if they’d have just done it would Blizzard have fallen on them?] oh yes. They would have destroyed them and the TV company they were working for – that is certainly Blizzard’s pattern with anyone else who they don’t like legally.  Blizzard is very litigious – but I respect them a lot.  One of the guys I know now works down at Blizzard and has only good things to say about them, because he did get hired as a cinematics designer for their games.  The other guy, don’t actually know what he’s doing any more although he’s not working on machinima any more.  The only exit for machinimators, aside from Red Vs Blue and myself and what we both have in common is that we are both pretty serious about the deal making side of things, and frankly have been willing to do bizarre things with machinima stuff to get things working, but for most people the exit has been ‘you’re quite good at making cinematics for computer games, lets hire you to make cinematics for computer games’.  Bioware obviously hired a load of people, Blizzard hired a load of people… its still happening – I saw an ad for more machinima guys from Blizzard a little while a go.  It works out for people who want to get into the games industry – I find it upsetting on a personal level because quite a lot of the good machinima people, who I wanted to see more machinima films by, …. and its never going to happen any time soon.  [what’s your view of the non-game machinima engines, like Moviestorm or Muvizu] well I’m not using them, which tells you something.  The one that I might at some point try again is iClone.  Moviestorm is great in many respects and I consulted on it in the early days so I would say that, so I think it enables a lot of people to make some very cool stuff in a very user friendly way.  For, certainly anything that is attempting to compete with commercial TV or Hollywood, which one might argue is not the most sensible place to compete with given their budgets, but hey its what I’m into, the visual quality is not high enough and that’s the usual problem with all of the machinima specific engines – because they don’t have a AAA budget and the don’t have a AAA renderer.  That may change in the very near future because of the indie games developer scene – I know that Moviestorm has been flirting with Unity engine 4, AAA quality.  Personally I’m using Autodesk products these days, just using a mélange of Autodesk, experimental software and a whole bunch of slightly confused Python scripts but most of it is based it on conventional 3D technology, as used by Sony Dreamworks, being used in a way that was never intended. 

Thinking about your personal network and community now, what challenges have you faced in working with colleagues in producing machinima?

Mostly the usual ones found in any creative field, the occasional creative difference, the phrase ‘its alright we’ll worry about the contracts later’, you know, finding investment, a thing I have solved by just getting good at making money… I wouldn’t say anything in particular.  In terms of working as a team, machinima has nothing but advantages.  Compared to conventional film making any actor working with me doing mo-cap spends a hell of a lot more time acting than drinking tea, which they would normally do on a conventional film set.  It means I can collaborate with people all over the world because at the end of the day we can all screen share.  Yes, its got nothing but advantages.

Given that you do often work across countries, how do you develop group values for a machinima production?

I have never, and probably will never, do any kind of collaborative project without a director, where we are all just adding our ideas to the pot.  I am extremely old school about my film making – it is the product of a lot of people’s effort but there is one person who holds the vision and is the creative lead and has the final say on everything – and that’s me, usually.  I think this is the best way to work with a distributed team – its very clear to all, one guy says it looks good and if that’s the case then its in and if not then we shoot again… particularly if you’re doing massively outsourced production like I am, for example one day I’m working with a modeler in India, the next day Iceland, the next day a team in China, you just have to have a single point of policy control.  In terms of local teams I’m working with, I just employ standard good management software, Peopleware, Getting to Yes… a film project is a startup, so if you follow standard start up practice, then it should work out.

How do you use a broader social network of followers, or community of practitioners in your work?

Badly!  I am not the guru of social media that a lot of people I know in social media are – particularly, I met and stayed in touch the guys that did I Am Sky and man that guy can operate a social network – I don’t know how he does it. I put stuff out, one of the things I do a lot is use group critiques and use my social network for focus groups although increasingly I am a fan of anonymous user testing as well… so I tend to badger my friends and colleagues on a fairly regular basis.  So, just this week I was working on a new horror series and so I chucked out on FB that I need some ideas for a face which is pretty horrific and immediately recognizable as human and could not easily be done using conventional makeup and I got something like 40 responses.  The thing is, with a lot of this stuff, there are a lot of people out there who want to be creative but most people don’t get the opportunity very often and certainly not the opportunity to be involved in the film making world and so there is a lot of appetite out there to help with feedback and help with suggestions and so forth.  So, provided you have the appropriate legal framework in place that caters for using detailed suggestions, and provided you have the appropriate skills at filtering the helpful feedback from the less helpful feedback, that’s tremendously useful.  The other way I use my social networks is in terms of promotion but social networking is not my strength on the promotional front.

Is the community more important to you than the machinima production for you now?

No, not even slightly.

Thinking about the audience aspect, has your work ever been picked up beyond the immediate community of interest (machinimators)?

Yes, I tend to regard any piece that has not been picked up beyond the immediate community as an abject failure.  Last one I did got featured in Forbes, The Guardian, Scotsman, etc., etc.; Bloodspell got featured, Forbidden Planet got featured on Today, BBC, Channel 4, etc., etc.; even short films I’ve done, you remember I did the adaptation of Lord Byron’s When We Two Parted, that ended up on the front page of YouTube.  No, for me the machinima community is tiny, absolutely tiny, and given that I am professional machinima creator, anything I do is aimed towards what I admit is a long game – the machinima community, if the entire community likes it, you’ll get 2000 views, and of them, you’ll get maybe 200 who are really enthusiastic.  The other issue for me personally is that the style of film making I am in to is not ‘art house’.  Its not very avant guard and alternative – I like avant guard and alternative but I’m a storyteller.  I’m interested in telling stories in roughly the same way as commercial TV series like True Detective, Game of Thrones, whatever, and the machinima community as a whole tends to be interested in more experimental and more artistic works these days…. unless you go the Minecraft route (which I have)… in which case there is a hell of a lot of people making it.  Even the biggest game though, you are still looking at a comparatively small subset of people, niche, it would be enough to fund making an ebook, for example, you could make a moderately profitable ebook about Minecraft but in order to make a breakout TV series about Minecraft you would have to be Red Vs Blue scale – and even they only succeeded when they were outside the Halo niche and appealed to a wider audience. 

From your perspective, how do you know when the audience values the work you have produced?

For the products I’ve done already would be through comments, shares, how much they share it, how much talk there is about it online, plus getting people to sign up to a list, which I did for Death Knight Love Story (‘if you like this and you want to see more of this, then sign up here’ – a very reliable way of telling how many people liked it because they ain’t putting their name and address down unless they actually liked it).  Obviously views to a certain extent, but you can get views very easily.  For example, if we’re talking Attention Interest Desire Action, then getting views requires AI – I’m more interested in DA… that shows that they really liked it, got something out of it, and want to see more of the same.  In the future one of the advantages of moving away from games engines machinima is that I can take Stephen King’s approach to telling whether people enjoyed the artistic work, which is to look for the number of pieces of paper with the phrase ‘pay bearer to the value of’! 

Do you find that you put limitations on your creativity to meet your audience’s needs at all?

Depends what you mean… there’s nothing more paralyzing than a blank canvas and the phrase ‘do anything you like’.  I marry the two things – I’m more and more these days a marketer by trade as well as a film maker.  That feeds in because I’m trying to build a business here.  One has to make films that you think there is a decent chance that a decent number of people will want to pay money for.  On the other hand, I don’t make anything that I’m not personally interested in.  So, I think that one of the things is that I am not the type of artist that has a singular story that I want to tell.  There are one or two themes that are very close to my heart and will get around to doing at some point, but frankly one of them I’m not good enough to do yet, but other than that I like telling stories and if you give me 20 mins I can come up with at least 20 stories of which at least 5 will be commercially viable.  So, at that point, choosing one that looks solid for an audience and that people will want to see if more a useful way of cutting down the enormous number of possibilities. 

Are you aware of any impacts of you work on society at large?

I know that several of my adaptations of romantic poems have crept into the syllabus for English Literature courses around the world, which is quite nice.  I know that Bloodspell had a significant contribution towards the ongoing discussion about Creative Commons – it did a fair amount towards legitimizing it in the early days, not over-stating but it was quite high profile.  The major way I’ve changed the world is introducing this strange new word that sounds a bit like a form of Japanese bondage <machinima>!

What do you think is machinima’s relationship with the wider sphere of social media, where would machinima be without YouTube?

It was doing fine before YT and will do fine after YT.  Obviously it is, actually I despise the phrase UGC because its ghettoizing low budget production, but it is not studio created and it is not, by and large, created by people who are comfortable going to a distributor and saying ‘hello, I’ve got this 36 part series would you like to show it?’. So, if all of the self-distribution channels disappeared over night and bandwidth became exponentially more expensive say by the FCC doing something stupid in 120 days time, then I think machinima would suffer quite a lot.  Having said that, there is always a way.  I think it falls into the wider sphere of ultra-low budget film making, the same sphere as ‘lets play’ and all these other things that have been enabled by the fact that you can make a film and show it to thousands of people and not spending thousands of dollars on it.

Are you making money from machinima?

I make money indirectly from machinima at the moment – a situation I am intending to correct in the very near future.  I mostly make money from consultancy and being asked to do related projects.  I also make money from the skills I’ve developed via machinima – I became quite good at getting people to look at things online and it turns out that if you can get people to look at machinima films online then you can also get them to look at other things online and some of those things are owned by companies with large bank balances who wish to get more people looking at their things.  The reason I make money out of that rather than film making is because there are a vast number of people trying to make money out of film making who have a very poor appreciation of their value of time and therefore making money out of film making unless you are at the level of a Hollywood director or similar is a bit of a mugs game.  But, in the very near future, I’m intending to be making money out of direct sales ie., before the end of year.  Its well overdue – I think I made a gigantic Joss Weedon and Fox error by going for a machinima with another games engine for Death Knight Love story and I made another error by not sticking to the original remit of ‘this is a test project in mo-cap’. There’s a blog post coming on why DKLS was a bit of a screw-up <laughs>.

Have you been headhunted because of your machinimating skills?

Yes. Repeatedly.

How do these employers value the skills you have?

Generally, there are actually 2 reasons why I don’t do so much machinima any more… there’s a side note – its also got me into VR production, Oculus Rift.  I’m getting a lot of interest in this at the moment.  One of the reasons is that people are primarily interested in hiring a technical person with technical skills – I do machinima for the creative side, so if I’m doing a machinima purely on a technical basis then we run into problem number 2: there are an awful lot of starving film makers who have decided to make ends meet by attempting to use their machinimating skills in whatever way they can.  As a result, people tend to massively under value film making ability and technical ability and therefore machinima contracting doesn’t pay that well.  Additionally, machinima is seen as a lower cost, lower production value way of making corporate videos.  While I can perfectly happily make these, the fact is I also have online marketing skills which are paid at a significant multiple level of the price I can get for my machinima.  I consult on machinima if I’m interested is my view these days.

What has been your investment in the process of producing machinima eg., resources?

Vastly more than anyone else in the medium that I know of – 18 years of work, shelves of books, reams of courses, an awful lot of time spent noting down the shot sequences of favourite films and TV shows, investment at apprx the same level that you would invest in any other business in which you’re serious.  Software and hardware – motion capture systems have been our most expensive acquisitions (plural). 

Have you paid others to work on your productions?

Oh yes.  Absolutely.  I have worked with people who work for free but I also work with people who charge me money. It very much depends on whether or not they are people who are looking to develop skills… but only then on non-profit productions. For profit productions I work with people on a profit sharing basis – it depends.  But, yes, if you’re a professional intending to work with other professionals then by the very definition of the term professional there’s going to be some cash changing hands somewhere along the line.

Something other folks have said, is the relative economic value of the assets being lower than in the real world.  Do you find that machinima related assets are cheaper?

Depends what you’re buying – lower polygon models are often cheaper than higher polygon models but mostly when you are hiring an artist what you are paying for how good they are.  Also, where in the world they are… I work with quite a lot of Indian artists because of relative purchasing power and a two-and-half thousand year history of sculpting.

OTHER ASPECTS…

Machinima.com is a curatorial proposition.  Whilst Philip and co have changed the focus of the videos they curate, they are still about curating. 

The role of machinima in games development… its used and misused.  Used primarily for delivering/forcing down the users throat, a story.  Its very effective when its used, as it very rarely is, the Final Fantasy games did this particularly well, after a certain amount of time you got to access to a new level and when you got there it showed you a piece of machinima with you in it, a really effective use of a machinima set up.  Also there is the partial machinima approach, which I would argue is not really machinima at all, completely different medium, having characters telling story and enacting dialogue whilst you are still in control of your (eg., Half Life 2, people are talking around you and delivering plot) – it’s a really interesting medium and the Oculus Rift is going to put a hell of a lot more attention of that way of telling stories, but it ain’t machinima.  Its close to machinima but it’s not a static linear form, its not an Einsteinien cut techniques or a film grammar.  Cut scenes are definitely conventional machinima and for a lot of people are pretty ineffective as a story telling medium in most games because they are linear, they take control away from the user, a bad thing for a game to do, also because they are often quite badly written and badly shot.  They have gotten a lot better written and shot over the years but they are still not changing the fact that a lot of people hate them, kind of including me.  If you look at all the really big hitting games over the years, a lot of them you will notice have very few cut scenes – Minecraft, Warcraft, Skyrim, etc., etc., Half Life 2, rather than the original, none of these take control out of the hands of the user. 

In what ways do machinimators add value to the games development process these days?

The main thing is if you are going to have cut scenes in the game then it would probably be better to have them done by someone who knows what they are doing. A wider example of adding value is Paul Marino – what Paul does is a really good example… he has undeniable skills with story, narrative, original and new ideas that make a game better and that’s a border area where machinimators can help games development.  A machinimator will help by definition because they are a story teller.  So, its an important part of games development these days.  Blizzard on the other hand have their machinima team constructing cinematics, standard sort of take the control away and show them what’s happening cinematics (cut scene).

Do you see negatives arising from machinima?

Yes, there are huge negatives. Don’t put machinima in the game for God’s sake, would be my summary!  Cut scenes are useful to a very limited extent.  They are sometimes a very powerful tool for showing what is happening in the game, however, over using them is something that almost everyone does – it’s a terrible idea.  I mentioned WoW as not having them, but actually that’s not true, what it does have is very few cinematics and those it does have do not involve the actual player.  I’m of the opinion, and far from alone in this, that 99.95% of the time you are better off telling the story through an in-game mechanism.  Dark Souls is one of the big stand out successes of the last few years in computer games and that tells its story mostly on the loading screen actually, but does not use, actually no it uses them very briefly to show a particular part of play but not involving the player. Any time you have a cut scene where control is taken over from the character and the character wanders around doing things you would not do or saying things you would not say is highly risky. It has worked for some famous games, eg., Mass Effect, but I would say that the future of games lies in no cut scenes rather than loads of them.

How do machinimators influence as games developer’s supply base?

Middleware developers, coders, artists and so forth…. Machinimators influence probably only in the way they can be hired to make cut scenes.

What’s been your curatorial role with machinima?

Primarily was when I ran Machinima.com which was specifically set up to showcase and make stars out of machinima creators and so we would watch every machinima we could get our hands on, we would make sure it was accessible for download online, irrespective of quality because I’m a firm believer in the theory that I’m not the ultimate arbiter of quality. We would showcase stuff that was good – I’m also a firm believer in my ability to spot something that isn’t terrible! We would run interviews with creators and so forth. 

Did you ever invest in developing machinimators?

No – that’s actually something I’m considering doing now.  Once I have done proof of concept with my production model and more importantly business model, there is every chance that I will move towards being HBO than Joss Weedon.

What are your new thoughts about the new investments in machinima.com?

Warner Bros, new CEO… another funding round.  They had a $75M investment at one point.  I sit and watch interestedly any time there is mention of a buy out – I’m a minority shareholder.

Do you see there has been a growth in demand for cultural artefacts of machinima type in arts and galleries, festivals world?

No, I don’t think there has been.  I think there is a general massive increase in supply of video based artefacts and I think the noise from that makes it hard to tell what the demand for machinima is at this point.  Film, everything that involves pictures going past at 25-30 frames per second, is currently suffering from the fact that there ain’t no business model any more for anyone except for the biggest studios and so no I wouldn’t have said there is a massive increase.  Not one I can tell from statistical knowledge.

Close of interview