So I’m looking for an individual or group that is interested in taking over the archive, blog and activities of Machiniplex. If you have any interest you can post here as a reply or contact me directly at rgrove@iliadbooks.com

Machiniplex was the brain-child of Jason Choi who came up with the idea of an archive for “quality machinima”. Phil, Ingrid, Damien and I spent a lot of time expanding the site/idea to include meetings, tutorials and a blog. There are some remarkable films archived at Machiniplex.  Just take a look and you’ll see what I mean.

And to the filmmakers who have allowed their films to be archived: if we are unable to find anyone to take over the site, I’ll most likely move the films to a video channel at Vimeo.com. Your comments and/or questions will be answered promptly.

It seems Microsoft is well aware of that potential, at CES last night they announced Avatar Kinect, a virtual world for Xbox 360 users to interact. The idea is each person will be represented by their Xbox Live avatar, which is controlled via Kinect. This will not only include the obvious things like arm and leg gestures but even facial movements. And the best part? Microsoft are including a video recording feature.

Kotaku have posted an article with the video shown last night. It only shows avatars sitting around and talking, which may limit how it can be used but it will be very interesting to see how this turns out.

It should be available in the spring.

The Machiniplex is proud to screen French director Maxime Lebled’s GHOSTS on Sunday, January 9th at 10am Pacific time. We will be using this Machinima Expo web portal address for the show which is at

http://www.machinima-expo.com

Following the screening we will have a Q&A with Maxime, who is a student living in northeastern France. You can learn more about Maxime at her website:

http://maxofs2d.cafegaming.fr/?pages/about

I was immediately impressed with GHOSTS when I first screened it for the Expo this year and have been following Maxime on Twitter and her website for several months now. The film was shot in Half-Life 2, but has a much more cinematic look. The script is very strange and unusual, addressing after-death realities and inter-dimensional travel. The style is unique and the cinematography is among the best I saw at the festival. I’m very excited Maxime has made herself available for this Q&A and look forward in learning more about how she put this remarkable film together.

Again, the screening of GHOSTS will take place on Sunday, January 9th at 10am at our Expo website. You’ll be able to screen the film which is approx 30 minutes long and then meet the director afterwards for a live Q&A. You can ask questions or make comments via text chat.

See you there!

By the end of the nineties, Quake movie making was coming to a head. So many films were being made that the community of filmmakers (who were also the primary audience) were starting to feel it was “getting old”, as Paul Marino put it. At the same time Id (the company that created Quake) released Quake 3 Arena to an eager game/mod/filmmaking community. Unfortunately, because of the rise of mods made for cheating in Quake, Id decided not to release info regarding the network code for the new game. And since “demo” recording (so essential to creating films in Quake) is intimately bound up with the network code, this effectively stopped filmmaking inside of the newest version of Quake. Mod filmmaking tools like “Keygrip” and “LMPC” were not going to be updated to work with Quake 3 Arena. This put the kibosh on Quake movie scene and according to Henry Lowood (noted machinima historian/theorist) filmmaking “threatened to ground to a halt”.

At roughly the same time, Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey were coining the phrase “machinima” which became the term to describe a wider notion of filmmaking inside of games. One not restricted to only Quake, which Hancock’s film “Ozymandias” (1999) so beautifully demonstrated. Hugh registered machinima.com and it quickly became the locus for a community of filmmakers looking for a new direction in game-based filmmaking. Machinima.com featured filmmaking tutorials, interviews articles and a very active forum where members could swap ideas and mod code easily. Hugh also smartly chose to exclusively present the first film shot in the new Quake 3 Arena engine: Quad God.

Quad God, produced by Trintin films and directed by Joe Goss. The Trintin team responded to a contest set up by Katherine Anna Kang at Id software to make the most original work of art using the Quake 3 logo. Trintin was given access to a test engine for the game (before it commercial version was released to the public on Dec 2, 1999). With this new version of Quake, the Trintin team and director Goss created a 33-minute film that impressed the machinima.com community with its smart script, competent cinematography and good acting. But these qualities aren’t what Quad God will be remembered for (although the film still holds up today despite the blocky models and so-so rendering). No, what Trintin films did with Quad God was to record their film using video capture and then release it using a conventional video format rather than a “demo” file which required the game to view. As amazing as it seems today, this common-sense innovation created quite a controversy at the time. One that has become moot since I’d say all machinima is now released on a variety of video formats. However, there are those who plead for the return to the demo format even today (Michael at FreePixel.com in particular).

The move away from a Quake-centric community combined with an effective method of recording video and releasing in on a format that is accessible to a wider audience, plus a brand spankin new name (machinima) and a new hang-out (machinima.com) led to what would become an explosion of animated filmmaking. Although Quad God is a bit of a throwback to earlier game-based storytelling, it was a damn good film at the time. The big difference is a lot more people could see the film without having to have the game it was shot it. This connected the film more to standard film community now online than to just a gaming audience centered around games.

Henry Lowood’s excellent article on the history/technology of early machinima, Found Technology, is a source for much of the information in this short article. Highly recommended reading.

Joe Goss went on to direct several more excellent films. His series Arenas is similar to Quad God, but with much better tech and, I think, sharper story and performances. I’ve included the trailer to the Arenas series at the bottom of this post. You can also find more on the background of the series here.  His youtube channel is a good place to find his work, too.

Screen Cap from Ozymandias

The machinima film Ozymandias was released in 1999 by Strange Company and was unlike any other machinima film that came before. The originality and success of this film (it was praised by main stream film critic Roger Ebert) was due not only to the excellence of the film itself, but because it was the first time anyone had thought to depict a subject outside of gaming and gameplay. Adapted from a classic sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the film managed to capture some of that longing for the past and melancholy of the passing of time. Something that was completely outside the world of muscle-bound soldiers shooting each other or absurd military farce which had characterized machinima up to that point. Coupled with the fact that the Quake video scene was starting to become stale and that the release of Quake III Arena posed technical problems for machinima filmmaking that couldn’t be overcome. “Father Frags Best” had pointed the way to Ozymandias by suggesting that adapting outside story forms like a TV sitcom could result in a new direction for machinima. In fact, the appearance of Ozymandias signaled a huge change in not only how machinima can be used creatively, but in the public’s awareness of machinima as an animation form worth watching.

“We realised right at the start of Strange Company’s development that machinima would need a dedicated production suite if it was going to become a viable filmic medium. User-made tools and game scripting is great, but there’s no way that you’re going to be able to compete in as perfectionist an art-form as film unless you have tools which are as good as the tools available elsewhere in the artform. Hence, one of our major goals when we set up Strange Company was to develop that tool suite”     -Eurogamer Interview w/Hugh Hancock

Another unique aspect of the Ozymandias production was that it was shot on the Lithtech Film Producer (LFP), which was an ambitious attempt by the films director, Hugh Hancock, and the members of Strange Company, to use a major game engine to forge a set of tools specific to machinima filmmaking. Hancock chose the Lithtech game engine, at the time being developed by Monolith Procution, and worked with the company to create the new toolset. Moreover, Hugh and Strange Company helped create the first non-commercial license for machinima filmmaking, the promise of which has not been realized with other game companies for the most part.

Screen Cap from Ozymandias

It’s hard to underestimate the importance of a film like Ozymandias. While it might be something a modern machinima filmmaker could create in a few days, the fact that everything in the film is custom made is remarkable for the time. The choice of the Shelley sonnet is inspired, although I’ve always wondered why the poem was placed after the film instead of using it in some fashion during the film itself (voice over, words on the screen). It really doesn’t matter though as the impact is still present. The sense of scale, which parallels the time difference between the present of the film and the past of the ruins, is really well done and the subtle soundtrack with it’s hint of middle-eastern singing is extremely evocative.

Hugh would go on to create machinima.com the year after Ozymandias was released (2000). Coupled with the need for (as Paul Marino put it) the “community to reinvent itself“, machinima was moving in completely new direction. The community had a focus at machinima.com and could share techniques and ideas. And although the LFP was not as successful as it could have been (Strange Company cancelled development in 2001), the idea of a “production suite” for machinima filmmaking caught hold and led to present-day programs like iClone and Moviestorm. And Machinima.com would facilitate the careers of many, many machinima filmmakers who would expand on the promise of Ozymandias and create/develop the varieties of machinima film techniques we see today.

Next up: Quad God

In December of 1998 and several years before the term “machinima” would be coined, Phil Rice got several of his Quake clan members together to create a film inside of the game using the multiplayer mode. Basically, the guys didn’t know exactly what they were doing, but Phil had everything worked out in his head and ran them through their paces. They’d all laugh at mistakes and have a lot of fine in spite of some of the tedium of waiting around to be told what to do. Phil took the footage and recorded voice overs using members of his family. He then sat down in his Nashville apartment and spent all day editing. Eat, Sleep, Edit, Pee, Eat, Sleep, Pee, Edit, Edit, Edit. That was the rhythm for week after week. Out of these intense editing sessions came “Father Frags Best” (released in early 1999), the first big hit in the early years of machinima.

I say big hit, because several game-related locations on the net picked up the film and raved about it. Bluesnews.com (still a vibrant site) loved the film and gave it a big thumbs up. That pushed the downloads into the thousands. All of the big Quake/Movie related sites loved it and told everyone to download the demo files (still the only way to watch machinima at the time).

Looking back, was all of that praise and attention deserved? You bet your fucking bippy it was.

“Father Frags Best” isn’t a parody of “Father Knows Best” (famous 50′s TV sitcom with the saccharine Robert Young in the lead), but a biting satirical look at the sitcom form itself. Take one nuclear family, through them into the world of Quake, add some fifties cliches and top it off with heavy spices of sex, ultra-violence and moral degeneracy and you have “Father Frags Best”. Sure, the Quake characters look terrible close-up, but who gives a shit? The exaggerated style of the film fits perfectly with the off the hook dialog and at times crude humor. What stands out (and still works, by the way) is the spot on timing of the dialog and cuts. Plus, the voice acting is terrific. Phil Rice plays practically all of the parts (he does the wife, too. Didja notice?) But the daughter (well voiced by Amy Magsig) and the creepy youngest son (a sniggering Joel Magsig) put in sharp performances that compliment Phil’s manic energy as the deranged Father.

Good old Mom. "Gibs" it's whats fer dinner"

But it’s really the details that make this such a funny and slightly scary classic (God, aren’t the end titles great?). The looping Jimi Hendrix track offscreen of the two kids playing outside is strange at first until we discover it’s a Kiss wannabee practicing next door. Of course, we want to blow him away. Which is exactly what the young sneaky son does (to our delight). That’s the first punch. The second punch comes with the son blows away his friend next (with the gun he stole from his dad) and then covers it up blithely when dad comes out to check on him. This very black expressionist comedy that moves so quickly you don’t realize until later how nasty it all is.

More details: wall posters of Kurt Cobain, Stanley Kubrick and the dripping clock of Dali fit snugly into the backgrounds of many shots adding another bizarre element to the block-house look of the indoor scenes. Music is wonderfully placed and artfully edited. “Gibs”, those left over pieces of bodies you’ve blasted into bits in a Quake match, are whats on the dinner table. Cooked in “lava” no less for that extra spicy bite. The smart camera angles and quick editing make you forget the limited animation that the characters have. They bob and shuttle back and forth while crazy dialog spits out of their blank faces. If this ain’t expressionism in machinima, I don’t know what is.

But it’s the story that finally gets you. The crazed father who starts the film by shooting the family dog for barking too much ends up blowing his sweet family away at the dinner table after having a “Strog War” flashback (read Vietnam). Of course, the little rat son is the sole survivor and sniggers away at the end like a deranged Billy Mumy on crack.

Dad's watching TV with Daughter sneaking in her boyfriend

No wonder “Father Frags Best” was such a hit. But more than being entertaining for all of the young men who flocked to see the newest Quake film, it was also the first film to feature women in major roles. The world of the film isn’t the standard pseudo-Quake military acting out a wish-fulfillment fantasy (although the Quake world is present in the back story), but a genuine attempt to integrate a known TV family genre into the truly mad world of Quake. In fact, it’s an implicit criticism of that world (son obsessively playing a “quake-like” game in his room 24/7, etc.) although the crit doesn’t go quite far enough since the characters (and the director) are having too much fun.

And I’l go out on a limb her and say that “Father Frags Best” is the first incarnation of a style of comedy that would be fulfilled in Red vs Blue. I’ll bet if you ask the folks over at Rooster Teeth to name some of the film that they love (or influenced them) “Father Frags Best’ would be high on their list. The absurd comedy, the crazy violent reactions of characters, the sitcom feel: it’s all there in RvB.

Making sure the kid is playing the right way - safely.

So what “Father Frags Best” succeeded in to doing for machinima (and why it is a classic) is to show how machinima could emulate known genres, that paying attention to detail in rhythm and performances (the recording of the voices are the best in machinima up to that time), and probably most importantly, you can entertain and still have ideas in your film. Social criticism that is there if you look for it, but doesn’t take away for an instant the madcap pace and momentum built up by the story. What do you think our little sniggering son is going to grow up to be? Just like his daddy.

“Father Frags Best” was the first big hit in machinima, but it also might be machinima’s first work of art.

-Ricky

PS I had a chance to talk with Phil about the making of “Father Frags Best”. Stupidly, I couldn’t get my voiced questions to record, but Phil’s answers are so good you don’t need the questions. You can listen to the interview here:

Phil_Father_Interview.mp3

You can screen Father Frags Best at Machiniplex/classics.

Screencap from Clan Phantasm's "Devil's Covenant" 1998

Since its earliest days, machinima as a community has been on the lookout for “the movie”… a machinima motion picture which, if you had to choose one to show your non-gamer friends to raise their interest in the artform, “the movie” was the one to show them.

For a good many people in the late nineties, Devil’s Covenant was that movie. A two hour feature-length film, with a solid script, full voice cast, and tons of custom-made content, Covenant made huge ripples at the time it was released.

Its creators, a group of competitive gamers turned moviemakers, called themselves Clan Phantasm. The clan first put themselves on the map with a short film The Artifact in 1997. After that, the clan – which at one time had over thirty contributors – moved on to the production of Devil’s Covenant, helmed by writer/director/designer Eric ‘StarFury’ Bakutis.

The story has echoes of classic science fiction themes as well as themes inherent to id Software‘s games. A group of reluctant heroes encounter a massively powerful force of evil and are forced to try to deal with it. While the story might seem of familiar archetype, what was extraordinary about this film was the tremendous execution of that story in the limiting environment of a video game.

The success of that execution was, in my view, rooted in the vocal performances – most notably those of Bill Benners. When you hear his voice, you will know exactly who I am talking about. You’ll think it’s some kind of pitch change effect – it’s not. That’s Bill’s voice. And he had a tremendous voice cast around him, too.

Devil’s Covenant was machinima’s first feature-length narrative. That in itself is quite a distinction, especially considering the limited production tools available at the time. But it’s quite an achievement story-wise as well, as its narrative did not lean on the world of the video game even a little bit. This was no fan fiction (not uncommon then or now), this was a wholly original sci-fi story which just happened to use Quake for the telling of that story.

Like all machinima of its era, Devil’s Covenant was designed to be played back within the game’s 3d engine itself, and it has proven difficult to get a faithful reproduction of that experience outside into traditional video format. We actually have a full-length video of the movie, which our friend Ben Grussi captured with Fraps, but hosting such a huge file has proven challenging. So for now, we’ll rely on YouTube user LexarVantalis, who was kind enough to upload the entire film in YouTube-friendly chapters.

We’re hosting the entire playlist of those chapters on our Machiniplex Classics page, you can watch the movie in full here:

http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=8

Additionally, here are some links of interest related to Devil’s Covenant:

• Hugh MacDonald’s Everything2 article on Devil’s Covenant from 2001
• Interview: Eric “Starfury” Bakutis – Machinima.com (2000)
• Psyk’s Popcorn Jungle review: Devil’s Covenant
• Download the Quake1 files to playback the movie in the game (Quake 1 game required)
• The Escapist – Hey Kids, Let’s Make a Movie: Machinima by Cat Rambo (2008)

Next Classic Machinima Film: Father Frags Best

Screencap from Clan Undead's "Operation Bayshield" 1997

The third film in our on-going Machinima Classics series is “Operation Bay Shield”, a Quake machinima released as a Quake demo in January of 1997 by Clan Undead. It’s hard to over-estimate the impact this wacky, yet innovative film had on the developing machinima community at the time. Not only did “OpBay” (as it was called then) distinguish itself as the first real non-gameplay narrative film, but it was also the first to use lip-sync and custom skins for it’s characters which was no easy feat at the time.

Henry Lowood describes filmmaking at the time in his excellent article “High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima” :

“Beginning as players, they found that they could transform themselves
into actors, directors and even ‘cameras’ to make these animated movies
inexpensively on the same personal computers used to frag monsters and
friends in Doom or Quake. They recorded their actions,generally in real
time, as game files (logs of keystrokes or other information capable of
being replayed). These files could then be distributed over the Internet
at almost no cost, either in the original game replay files or in an encoded
movie format”

-Henry Lowood

Keep in mind that there was no “automatic lip-sync” for Quake at the time so everything had to be coded in QuakeC using .wav files of individual actors voices and then timed so that changing images of the characters mouth movements would fire at the same time was no simple feat of coding, but required clever and proficient game-play skills. Clan Undead’s attention to character interaction and scene details (including a custom Quake map) make this film an advance over anything that had come before.

“Operation Bay Shield” was created out of a New Year’s idea jam-session amongst Clan Undead members who wanted to create a comedy that was unique and fun. The story of an Army unit who gets word of a planned chemical bomb being held in a Vancouver hotel. The unit goes to the hotel and shoots/bombs the terrorists, but accidentally kills the girlfriend of a hotel guest who sounds a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Big fight insues and the films closes on an extended out-take of one actor trying to deliver a simple line, but keeps failing due to harassment and fits of laughter.

Inspired by “Diary of a Camper” and the burgeoning game-hackers movement, Clan Undead decided to make their film look a lot more like a real film than just simple game-play. Funny credit sequences at the beginning and the end, plus decent use of camera angles, references to contemporary culture (Baywatch TV show) and careful attention to detail in individual scenes (the character avatars shake when they are laughing) made “Operation Bay Shield” at very popular and influential film of it’s time.

A few months after the release of their film, Clan Undead also made available the custom scripts they used in making the film inside of the Quake engine. This further helped subsequent filmmakers learn scripting and also promoted the shared “game hackers” community that was growing up with machinima at the same time.

Screencap of a scene in "Operation Bayshield"

“Apartment Huntin‘”, our previous classic machinima, actually came after “Operation BayShield” and was inspired by it as well. You can see some of the anarchic ad-libbing and sense of wild fun in the dialogue of both films. Other filmmakers like Hugh Hancock have acknowledged being influenced by “OpBay” as well.

It’s interesting to see this film as a pre-911 creation as well. Characterization of the Arab characters is SNL influenced and very, very broad. Today, it would be difficult to put these kinds of characters out there as sensitivity to portrayals of Arab/Middle-Easterners is much more prominent. But both types of characters in “OpBay” (American and Middle-Eastern) are such caricatures that they can’t be taken seriously as the film is part parody.

One thing to keep in mind in watching these classic Machinima films is that machinima grew out of gameplay. You had to know the game backwards and forwards in order to do some of the things that Clan Undead did in “OpBay”. Not only did you have to play well, but you had to know game programming on the same level as the original game creators themselves as there were no real custom toolsets like we have today. Although the rendering in Quake is crude by todays standard, the work that went into making the game engine do what you wanted it to do put Clan Undead in a category all it’s own. These guys were smart.

Note: very good wikipedia entry on “Operation Bay Shield”, but the best source is Lowood’s paper linked above. Full credits for the film are here and at the wiki link. Archive.org has a real media version of the film. You can watch our Machiniplex copy of the film right here:

http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=7

Next Classic Machinima Film: Devil’s Covenant

Screen cap from Apartment Huntin' (1997)

I’ve had the pleasure of doing a lot of interviews over the years. Inevitably, the question arises: how did you get started making machinima, making movies with games, etc. There is one Quake Movie that, every time I’ve been asked over the past ten plus years, gets named as my biggest inspiration to get involved. And that film is our second in this Classics series, Apartment Huntin’.

You can view Apartment Huntin’ on our Machiniplex Classics theater right here:
http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=3

(By the way, you can view last week’s film, Diary of a Camper, here:
http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=6 )

Crafted by a group of comedians calling themselves The Ill Clan, Apartment Huntin’ was truly ahead of its time.  On the surface, it’s a simple sketch-type situation comedy, replete with plenty of physical gags which would easily make Quake players of the era giggle.  Like many films in this early era, this one engaged in a creative repurposing of a familiar area of the game.  It’s innovative use of the highly recognizable first “map” of the Quake game gave it the perfect built-in comfort zone for viewers who were, let’s not forget, likely watching this unnamed phenomenon for the first time.

What set this film apart, what made it highly inspirational to me, and what ultimately contributes to it being an unforgettable classic when so many other movies of the era have been lost in time, was the dialogue.  The intelligence of the humor – rooted in an improv comedy background – was unparalleled in its time.  You just didn’t expect to watch a Quake movie that was referencing classical philosophers and mentioning Michael Dukakis.  You didn’t expect it from the film’s characters either, who in Seinfeldian fashion so effortlessly transitioned between absurd educated references and slapstick physical gags.  If you ask me, it was a perfect blend.

I saw this movie and it was like a whole world of comedy possibilities opened up to me.  I immediately thought, I have GOT to find out how to do this.  The first comedy film I ended up making, Father Frags Best, ended up making this classics list (hooray!) so we’ll get into that later.  I’d likely not conceived of producing anything other than recammed game demos were it not for Apartment Huntin’.

I’ve since managed to suppress (or at least cleverly hide) my fanboyish adoration of the Ill Clan crew such that they didn’t think I was a total lunatic when I first met a number of them in person a mere four years ago.  Their illustrious membership has, at one time, included Paul Marino, Frank Dellario, Paul Jannicola, Kerria Seabrooke, Tom Donnelly, Matt Dominianni, Patrick O’Shaughnessey, and others.

You can read up on their members, filmography, and more at their Wikipedia entry.  In short, they’re one of two machinima production companies (along with Strange Company) to have been around since the earliest of days and have stayed active and together all the way to the present day, when they very recently decided to move in a different direction (details on their home page).

Ill Clan has been a part of many impressive firsts, including production of machinima professionally, production of machinima for television broadcast purposes, performance of live comedy machinima, and more.  And they’ve still found the time to occasionally wow us with more freely available comedy entertainment, with their inimitable writing/performance style and wonderful character voicing.

I know for a fact I’m not the only one out there who found Apartment Huntin’ to be a beacon of inspiration, a herald of what was possible in this medium.  If any of you old fogies like me are out there reading, please leave us a comment and tell us about your Apartment Huntin’ experience!  Same goes for you Ill Clan alumni, we’d love to hear from you!

Next Classic Machinima film:  Operation Bayshield (1997)

As I mentioned over at our Expo blog, we arrived at this list through consulting with Henry Lowood, Ben Grussi, Phil Rice (whose “Father Frags Best” is included in the series), Claus-Dieter Schulz, Friedrich Kirschner, Brian Mayberry (who created one of my all-time favorite machinima films in ‘Fake Science“; included in our classics series), Michael Nitsche and Ben Grussi (archivist extraordinaire).

Certainly deciding upon the 10 most important early machinima films is a subjective enterprise. 8 other individuals would probably come up with a different list. But I’m confident that many of these films would appear on other lists as well. We left out some excellent early films like Avatar and Wendigo’s Blahbalicious (1997) and Strange Company’s “Eschaton: Nightfall” (1999), but we had to make room for a variety of films, plus Ozymandias is a Strange Company film which we think might have had more impact that “Eschaton: Nightfall” even though this film was the first to feature custom character models.

We’ve set the dividing line for “Classic Machinima” at 2002 because we feel the formation of AMAS (Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences)  in 2002 and the steady movement away from demo file distribution of machinima to the present video-capture form ushered in a new era for machinima which was significantly different from previous years.

Screen cap from "Diary of a Camper" 1996

Our first film in the Classics series is “Diary of a Camper“. Released in 1996 by United Ranger films, the film is directed by Matthew Van Sickler and the on-screen texted dialogue was written by Heath Brown. The editor of the film is Eric Fowler. “Diary” was created inside of the Quake engine using the demo recorder, which recorded all movements in 3D for playback. The actor controllers were: Eric Fowler, Heath Brown, Chris Birke and Pyoveli.

Although short (1:36) “Diary” is widely considered to be the first true machinima film. It certainly was the first film to feature a narrative with dialogue typed in (see top of above image). Interestingly, the film was released as a demo file which the viewer then copied to a specific folder in the their own installation of Quake on their computer. You then watched the film inside of Quake as it happened in real time. Advantages if this method of distribution are the small file sizes and the developing Quake community which means that a film shot inside of Quake would most likely appeal to Quake users.

Although an interesting film, it doesn’t quite have the impact it had in 1996. For one thing, people watching the demo saw that it was possible to create a dramatic narrative for machinima which immediately caught game players imaginations. It was also an example of “community filmmaking” inside of a game. Something that no one had every imagined before and suggested that even more advanced forms of story telling were possible.  The mod community (who were also some of machinima’s first filmmakers) would develop specific movie tools for Quake including the Little Movie Processing Center (LMPC) created by Uwe Urlich and the remarkable non-linear editor Keygrip developed by David Wright. Some of these tools will be used to create several of the film on our Classic Machinima list. None of them could have been made without the first effort to tell a dramatic story in “Diary of a Camper”.

Note: some of the information on “Diary of a Camper” was drawn from the excellent wikipedia entry for the film, goblinsrevenge YouTube interview with Chris Birke and Paul Marino’s “Machinima Jukebox“ presentation for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Another excellent source for early machinima (and current ones) is the Machinima Collection at Archive.org. Highly recommended.

Next Classic Machinima film:  Apartment Huntin’ (1997)