In this episode, Ben reviews the notable machinima films made in the early years of the Quake II engine, including skits, a talk show, music videos and some hard hitting documentaries. This ep also reviews the first real-time live performance of a machinima by The ILL Clan at the Florida Film Festival (2003), which was based on their earlier created characters of Cook Carl and Lenny & Larry Lumberjack.
YouTube Version of this Episode
Show Notes & Links
0:36 Hardly Workin’ by The ILL Clan, released 22 August 2000
In this episode, Ben reminds us where the story of machinima originated in those early Quake movies which have become classic game-based films. He talks us through the most notable contributions by the pioneers using the Quake 1 engine. Tune in next month when Ben concludes the history of Quake with reviews of notables in Quake 2 and 3. You can find links to the films on our blog and some in our YouTube playlist for History of Machinima.
YouTube Version of Episode
Show Notes & Links
Ben reviews classic Quake 1 films from the machinima archives –
Ben reviews some of the major happenings during the month of January in the early days of machinima. Starting with 1997 there’s Operation Bay-Shield. 1998 has the First Quake 2 movie – The Mad Bomber. Rematic, a machinima tool by Anthony Bailey is released in 1999. Also in this year Phil Rice released his notable film, Father Frags Best – a machinima classic. 2000 sees Machinima.com founded and Quad God film was released along with several other notable films. 2002 saw the Reel-Time Challenge contest along with Psyk’s Popcorn Jungle retiring (a big machinima review site). 2003 Anachronox the Movie Part 1 was released. 2004 Red vs Blue second season launched. In 2005 the first noveletta about machinima was written by Mike Hoefflinger called Moving Pictures. In 2006, Hugh Hancock, founder of Machinima.com stepped away from the site to focus on his filmmaking.
Rebel Vs Thug (2003) by Ken “3DFilmmaker” Thain – a commercial project with Public Enemy’s Chuck D side project
The Gamer’s Benchmark (2003) by Futuremark released a teaser movies for 3DMark03 – the link is to the full movie after release
Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts (17 Jan to 4 April 2004) and The Game Scenes exhibition was created by Stanford Humanities Laboratory and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University presented on ‘the pervasive influence of computer game culture’, curated by Galen Davis and Henry Lowood.
Lenny and Larry Lumberjack (2004) by The ILL Clan – a video of excerpts from their premiere performance of On The Campaign Trail at Void in New York City
“Moving Pictures” (2005), a novelette by Mike Hoefflinger, published by Packet Switched Press – the novel is about a group of people who start their own machinima production with the desire to make it to the big time!
I Surrender (2005) by Tristan Pope is mentioned on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft main website page
The Los Angeles Machinima Collective (LAMC) announces their first machinima production William Shakespear’s Mechbeth – the film was never produced! Ricky was here?!
Ricky Was Here!
Epic Games’ winners of the Grand Finals of the Make Something Unreal Contest (MSUC) for the Non-Interactive Movie Category 2005 –
– The Journey, 1st Place ($25,000)
– Bot, 2nd Place ($15,000)
– Sparked Memory, 3rd Place ($5,000)
– Scrap, 4th Place ($3,000)
– Damnation, 5th Place ($1,500)
Adventures in Dating, first episode (PG13 series) entitled Frustration (2005) by Decorgal
In this episode of the podcast, Ben recalls some more of the great all time classics that got this whole movement rolling, events all taking place in December (1993 to 2005 inclusive).
Fountainhead Entertainment’s Katherine Anna Kang announces Sidrial. Slated to be the first Machinima film to be put on the big-screen as a commercial venture https://archive.org/details/sidrial_promo even made a total conversion mod for Quake 3 Arena (2000)
Anthony Bailey releases a patch for integration into Quake 1 engine code bases to enable capture of AVIs (audio/video, any resolution, frame rate and codec) on Win32 GL platforms http://quakecapture.sourceforge.net/ (2002)
Canadian live-action/animated kids TV series ‘Zixx Level One’ is the first show for broadcast to contain animation created by a game engine, made using the Lithtech engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtwhiFHOPQs (2003)
Epic Games revealed the winners of Phase 4 Real-Time Non-Interactive Movie contest (2004)
1st Place: Bot (Eggman)
2nd Place: Journey (Fitz)
3rd Place: Infiltrators
4th Place: Sparked Memory (CSWAT)
5th Place: The Editor Has You (Angel_Mapper)
ATI and Crytek, creators of Far Cry, made a real-time interactive CGI movie called The Project, that harnessed the capabilities of the ATI RADEON® X800 XT and PLATINUM EDITION for Hollywood style machinima, demonstrating photorealistic cinematic computing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Uxc5rqbBI (2004)
Ben reviews some of the major happenings during November in the early days of machinima, including Phil and Damien’s first contributions; release of legendary machinima games Halo 2, HalfLife 2, World of Warcraft & GTA San Andreas. Red vs Blue Season 1 went gold and Second Life’s release of copyright statement are highlighted during this month, plus Hugh Hancock and Paul Marino made it to British TV Channel 4’s ‘The Toon Commandments’. Also a notable mention to Nvidia, whose GeForce FX series of graphics cards was launched in November 2002, signaling the dawn of cinematic computing. Listen up and follow the links on our blog post.
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Machinima Gold: Strange Company (L-R: Sally Brewer, James Payne, Hugh Hancock, Steve Wallace, a descendant of William Wallace (Braveheart), and Gordon McDonald) & Paul Marino on Channel 4’s The Toon Commandments (2000)
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