Phil Rice, also known as Overman, is a machinima maker. He's the head of his machinima group,
Zarathustra Studios. He's been in the machinima world for roughly ten years, back when they were even called "Quake Movies."
Forum member "
mm3guy" has interviewed him, check it out below:
mm3guy: Hi! Thanks for being here today! So, how long would you say you have been in the machinima world?
Phil: I did my first "machinima" work (it was just called Quake Movies back then) in October of 1998, so a little over ten years. I wasn't very active in creating stuff between 2000-2005, so it's technically not a decade of work, but that's when I first got started.
mm3guy: One of the things you've done since starting 10 years ago was adopt a concept called "Anymation." The technique where you can composite footage from almost any source (e.g. other video games, special effects done in a video editor, etc.) to create a finished work. Can you tell me a little bit about Anymation?
Phil: I can remember a conversation years ago, I was discussing some film ideas with a fellow director, and at one point after having described a really "out there" idea, my friend said, "It's too bad there's no game that can pull that off."
That was the mindset then; in fact, it is often the mindset now. Someone who makes films in World of Warcraft tends to automatically (and sometimes dramatically) limit one's story ideas based on what is possible in that game. If it's not possible within the game, then the default decision is to change / reduce the idea in some way so it fits the capabilities of the game. Sometimes people even write their story wholly within the confines of a particular game, from the very beginning.
I know the same thing goes on in Garry's Mod machinima, just as it does in The Sims machinima, Battlefield machinima, and so on. Whatever I have within or can bring into the real-time environment of the game I'm working with, that defines the boundaries into which I must squeeze my story idea, even if it means shaving off considerable pieces to make it fit.
Male Restroom Etiquette, made with SimCity 4 and The Sims
There's nothing necessarily wrong with this mindset; machinima is all about working within certain limitations, and sometimes those limits can inspire amazing creativity. And there are some absolutely wonderful machinima films which were conceived entirely within these limits. But over time, it started to trouble me personally, those losses that story would sometimes sustain by way of this "fitting it to the game" process / mindset.
It was around that time that a really smart and creative director I know (Tom Jantol) introduced me to a concept he called Anymation. The philosophy was merely an acknowledgement of the obvious: that no matter what footage is used - be it real-time from a game or from another platform like iClone, or still photographs, or live action footage, or traditional 3D (CGI) footage - ultimately everything gets reduced down to a two dimensional moving image on a screen. His argument was, why obsess over where the footage comes from? Compositing tools make combining footage from multiple sources not only possible, but robust. So if it works, if you can make it fit together... then use it.
The key being that instead of starting with the game and then malforming one's story idea to fit into its confines, one should stay true to the story idea and make the choices about where to get footage become secondary. Suddenly, one doesn't necessarily have to limit one's story based on what some game or game mod can do. Instead, one's only limitation becomes: What am I (and my collaborators) capable of doing and/or learning how to do? And with the vast amount of knowledge freely distributed over the internet on how to do this and that with regard to computer graphics, if a person is willing to learn and work hard there are almost no skills that are inaccessible.
So in short, Anymation means putting story first, everything else (tools, medium) second. And it means gradually losing one's regard for the answer to questions like "How do we define 'machinima'?" Our audience - the wider audience outside our fellow machinima creators - doesn't care at ALL about the answer to that question. So, other than with regard to festivals and their categories, is there any good reason we should spend much time caring about it?
mm3guy: So with the boundaries of what's possible in a game engine removed, Anymation opened a whole new world of what's possible for storytelling. With this all in mind, do you have a favorite game in particular to work with, or do you choose a game based on what basic features it has that'd help with what the project will be about?
Phil: I tend to favor games (for machinima) that allow me to get a lot of the work done in solitude, with NPC actors for the most part, controlled by scripts of some kind rather than by other players. So a game like The Sims 2 is one of my favorites at least for certain kinds of stories, and I'll certainly be paying attention to The Sims 3 when it comes out. I'm really jazzed about GTA4 right now, I think if the mods continue to develop (and if Rockstar can manage to not quash modding altogether in their efforts to control cheating) there's some really amazing potential for machinima in that game. I've got several projects I'd like to do in GTA4, but with new game patches regularly breaking user mods it's a bit unstable right now, so I'm exercising some caution there.
I've done some work using the Second Life virtual world, which I think is probably machinima's best kept secret to those who haven't looked at it. Some seriously powerful scripting / building power there, I've really only scratched the surface but I've got a short film in production there right now where I'm learning as I go.
My ultimate favorite right now is actually not a game, but an independently developed machinima tool called Moviestorm. It feels like it was designed with my brain in mind, everything clicks. It's still a young tool, and can't do everything I'd want it to do yet - and like Half-Life 2, it's terribly difficult to import a custom rigged character model which will respond to all the tools - but it's one that I think could eventually rival Hammer+Faceposer in terms of power and control, though that's probably a couple years away.
I've made a point to acquaint myself with many of the machinima-friendly games, firstly so I could talk somewhat intelligently about them on my blog and podcast, but also because I wanted to be as versatile as possible. So I've done experimental work in Unreal Tournament, Half-Life 2 (Faceposer), Lionhead's The Movies, and even some stuff with Mass Effect - though M.E. really only supports machinima of the mashup variety, not any kind of serious control. And I've played around with every major "indie" machinima tool including iClone, Antics3d, and VirtualStage.
Overman starring in his Mass Effect machinima,
So I Ran Over A Monkey (SIROAM)
Sadly, my only GMod experience so far is wacky fun with the gravity gun. Xanatos has been regularly encouraging me to dig into it deeper. I feel like it's a pretty significant hole in my experience, so I'll be remedying that before too long I hope.
mm3guy: Well, it would be cool to see you do stuff with Garry's Mod, as people have been doing Anymation with it ever since it first came out. One of the recent things I've found interesting that you've done with your Anymation skills is the OneSharedVision project, a collaboration you helped put together to honor the Child's Play charity. Where did you get the inspiration to do that? Did you come up with the idea on your own, or did someone else's suggestion get that ball rolling?
Phil: The Child's Play (
OneSharedVision) thing was the brainchild of Zach Scott (
Lit Fuse Films). Somewhere along the way, Zach got really busy at Bioware and he needed some help, so I stepped in and helped organize it from there forward.
Yeah, the short film I did for that project, called "
Gift Horse," was a lot of fun to make. It brought together footage from Moviestorm, The Sims 2, and Second Life. (Second Life was used for the "motion graphics" promo section of the film). Plus I got to do some voice acting with my good friend Ricky Grove, we had a blast. Those laughs at the end of the film are unscripted / unplanned, Ricky is great fun to work with.
mm3guy: What was your favorite film to work on?
Phil: I think my favorite was "
What I Love About Xmas" (2007). There was something about that production process that was particularly entertaining to work on. I'd written the narration first, and then keyed all the mixed media visuals off that narration, which meant I was jumping all around between different settings. There was a great deal of variety in the work for that film, so there was never a chance to get the least bit bored. The fact that it was comedy didn't hurt either; I've always felt most at home when I'm at least trying to be funny.
mm3guy: And being funny is what you do best. Well, thanks for being here with us! Is there anything else you'd like to add before the interview wraps up?
Phil: This is probably where I should have a "shameless plug" ready for my new project or something... but I don't. It doesn't mean there's not some pretty major stuff I'm working on, I'm just not prepared to be anything more than ridiculously ambiguous about them yet.
Thanks for talking to me, it was a real pleasure. I hope I didn't ramble too much.
Some links:
[...]
