Guest Speakers John Wagland from BBFC and Johnnie Ingram on Machinima

Last Wednesday I attended two different talks from two different guest speakers. Below I will recount my experience of listening to the talks, and discuss the issues they raised.

Intro on the British Board of Film Classification Talk

The first talk was from John Wagland one of the examiners from the British Board Film Classification (BBFC), and was about their purpose, methods and how they classify films and video games. The BBFC have been around a very long time, the organisation was set up in 1912 under the original name of the British Board of Film Censors.

The talk focussed mainly on film classification, but did briefly talk about games.

The BBFC is composed of 16 examiners from wide ranging backgrounds. These are split into two separate teams, one team examines films, and the other examines video games.

Film Classification

Near the end of the talk, Wagland showed us clips from various films, and asked us what age rating we would classify them as, based solely on the clip.

One such film clip was from Disney’s Rocketman film, which was aimed at all audiences (U rating). The clip we were shown was the original intro to the film, in this intro a child is pretending to be an astronaut… using a washing machine as a fake spacecraft. The washing machine starts and the child gets slightly knocked around before it opens. His parents seem to think it’s perfectly normal for him to be doing this.

The BBFC felt that this scene could be harmful to children if they copied the actions from the film. Some of the examiners felt it might have been suitable if the parents had reprimanded the child for the behaviour, since children watching would realise it was a “bad” thing to do. Part of the problem then was that the parents treat the incident so normally, barely even commenting on the child’s dangerous behaviour.

The BBFC ordered Disney to remove the footage, in order for the film to be re-assessed and later re-classified as a U rating. I wholeheartedly agree that child safety must come first, but I also think its a shame they had to cut such a humorous scene. Almost every person in the room seemed to be laughing at this particular clip, which shows that the humour did in fact appeal to all ages.

Game Classification

John Wagland also talked about games and how they are classified.

When examiners play through any game, they are given access to cheats/save states that allow them to easily and quickly experience everything the game has to offer. In this way, they do not play through the entire game from start to finish; instead they sample the mechanics of the game being examined.

Wagland admitted that games sometimes seem to receive harsher examination than film. He attributed this to parents being very concerned with the interactive nature of games. He also cited the repetitive nature of games, since this allows the player to freely repeat violent or offensive sections of the game, whereas in a film, a specific violent action will likely only be seen once in a single sitting.

Interestingly, the BBFC will lose their authority and ability to classify games on April 1st 2011. This change was prompted by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, after they ruled in favour of solely using the PEGI (Pan European Game Information) system to rate games and other types of software.

Intro on the Machinima Talk

The second talk was from Johnnie Ingram and focussed on machinima.

The word machinima stems from, machine & cinema. machinima uses games as a tool to tell a story, in this way machinima is essentially the act of making a film within a game world.

Sometimes machinima is created directly within a game engine, with game players acting out different characters in the film in real time. An alternative is for machinima to be created using developer tools such as Half Life 2's model viewer, to view and manipulate character models. A limitation of this method in the case of the HL2 model viewer, is that anyone that has played the game will know all the original HL2 characters being used in the machinima, and so it may feel odd when they see the same character models, acting completely differently to the role they played in HL2.

Brief History of Machinima

The initial machinima videos took the form of recorded instructions within a game, such as a replay. This greatly limited the potential audience for initial machinima, since only those people who owned the game the machinima was made in, could recall the recorded instructions and thus view the film. The very first machinima movie was Diary of a Camper. http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=6

In the present day machinima is usually saved as an ordinary video file such as a AVI file. This allows any computer user to view the file as long as they have downloaded the latest media plug ins for their chosen video playing software.

Examples of Machinima

After explaining what machinima was, Ingram showed us two lengthy examples of it in practise.

Firstly we watched "A Warriors Dream", which according to Ingram, was filmed entirely using in-game footage from World of Warcraft (WOW). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5JuypAbBH8

The films premise is that a WOW warrior character falls asleep and has a dream that they are in fact, a shape shifting shaman character. The shaman travels across the world, shape shifting each time he meets a new enemy. Eventually the dream ends, and the warrior wakes up and continues his day to day business of killing monsters.

The second example we watched was a film called Clockwork, which was created using the HL2 model viewer and HL2 assets. http://machiniplex.net/?id=22

Clockwork was made in the style of old black and white films, this really gave it a film noir vibe. The film focuses on a group of gangsters and how one particular gangster decides to attempt to redeem himself as a human being after sinking so low. To say much more would spoil the plot of this excellent piece of machinima.

Moviestorm

Machinima can also be created using specialist software such ash, Moviestorm, Iclone, Muviu, Voovees, Xtranormal and Zencub3d.

Ingram gave us a quick demo of his Moviestorm software. Firstly he loaded up a basic park-like scene, and then created a quick character to be the 'star' of the film. Next he used a microphone to record a basic sentence for his character to say in the software. When Ingram tested the sentence, he demonstrated that Moviestorm featured automatic lip syncing of recorded voice lines. Next Ingram used the Moviestorm interface to make the character give some simple gestures such as waving. Finally Ingram modified the camera settings to create two shots, the first shot shows the character from a distance, the second shot is a close up and allowed us to see the character speaking.

This brief demo showed us that basic scenes could be created very quickly and easily using Moviestorm.

Career of Johnnie Ingram

The final part of the talk focussed on Ingram's career. By his own admission, Ingram has had a very interesting career path. He began by studying Drama and English, dropped English, and then abandoned drama and decided to study films and media. Eventually he applied to a local company via email, and worked with them for a number of years, before applying to Moviestorm. He joined Moviestorm as a software tester, and ultimately he worked his way up the company to a very senior position. One of his new duties is to give talks about; machinima, his career and Moviestorm to universities and students.

Conclusion

I'm glad I attended both events. Each event offered something different, the BBFC talk taught me a lot of interesting information about movies, games and how and why they are rated.

The machinima talk was also very entertaining. Ingram's method of timekeeping was amusing; since he kept overrunning the set period of time each segment of the talk was supposed to last.

Before attending the talk I knew almost nothing about machinima. I'd watched a few episodes of Red vs. Blue a Halo machinima, and a few other random videos online, but that was my entire experience of it. I left the talk with more knowledge than when I entered it, realising that some videos I've watched in the past were actually machinima without me realising it.

This concludes my recount of both talks. Thanks for reading. :)

Films Referenced

Rocketman (Walt Disney Pictures, Caravan Pictures).

Machninema Referenced

Diary of a Camper (United Ranger Films).
Available online at: http://machiniplex.net/classics.php?id=6

A Warriors Dream (Slashdance).
Available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5JuypAbBH8

Clockwork (Amorphous Blob Productions).
Available online at: http://machiniplex.net/?id=22

Red Vs Blue (Rooster Teeth Productions).
Available online at: http://redvsblue.com/archive/?id=88&v=trending