Post-Mortem

By Sherwin

It seems an opportune time to look back and dissect a particular aspect of our latest movie effort "Death in Venice". One decision that I personally believe to be crucial in setting the tone and mood was made about halfway - a month into production. At this time we had completed the first half of the movie, each scene separately filmed and connected to each other only in our minds. It was time to string these scenes together and see what beast we had created.

Our earlier mindset with the 10-20 minutes machinima "shorts" had been that the story had to be as efficient as possible. Kate crafted this script in 2006 which was lean and mean, in the sense that the information was fed to the viewer regularly and at an accelerated pace when compared to regular feature films. We were indeed cramming a lot of background information in a short period of time (e.g., five flashbacks within ten minutes), and expecting the viewers to keep up. Would this approach work?

In some movies in the past we plead to being guilty of information overload and expecting much from viewers. This is not a decision we've made casually, and it is one that we have debated and sometimes reverted. In case of "Death in Venice", we ended up slowing the pace for the first half of the movie to give the viewers a chance to breathe and catch up. The background information is necessary but it can be tasking. After all, this is the fragile point at which the viewer is still developing a connection with the characters and an understanding of the plot. Did our efforts fall short? It depends on who is watching and the attention they are granting the movie. It depends on the environment it is consumed in - low-end speakers or headphones, full screen or not, the bandwidth of the stream (or whether it is a download), the display monitor. These factors are out of our control, but we have to strive for balance and make a serious attempt at pleasing most viewers. The truth is, I cannot tell whether we succeeded or not, as I cannot watch this movie unspoiled as if for the first time. But I am glad we made the attempt.

Making a movie that doesn't connect to viewers can be a self-absorbed exercise in narcisism. At the same time, a 20-minutes drama machinima is not yet an established medium, one that some people still doubt even exists. I think of this movie making experience as an iterative and incremental experiment in which audience and filmmakers consciously or subconsciously adjust to each other, and meet in the middle where expectations are met and a connection is finally realized. "Death in Venice" was hopefully a step in the right direction for us.

Death in Venice soundtrack

I finally gathered all the Death in Venice original music files and sent it to TMOA. You can listen to it here as well (find the widget on the right side). :)

It is really fun to compose the music for the movie that you are helping to direct. We deliberately extended a few seconds here and there when we felt an extra little musical phrase would help. And of course there were long discussions on whether music is necessary at all in certain places.

There are a few recognizable recurring themes used throughout. One of them is a short motif from Verdi's La Forza overture which I found to be handy - this overture is the music you hear at the opening intro with the mask and that church on the other side of the Piazza San Marco - what's the name of that? There is also a 'revenge' theme, associated with Sebastian, and a 'love' theme - prominently played near the end of the movie.

Death in Venice Released

How do I feel now that it’s done?

I’m still a bit shaky I guess, from all the happenings of today. First, we were on the Ken and Roger Show, and then Death in Venice was premiered at the TMU theater. I was very nervous the whole time.

Well, the interview didn't go well. Ken lured me into discussions based on some of my blog entries, and I just fell right into that trap, forgetting the fact that I cannot talk and think at the same time. What can I say? Unfortunately, writing is my true mode of thought. :P Despite the stress and all the wrong things I said, it was very nice to be able to chat with these two nice gentlemen.

TMU Theatre is such a wonderful institution that enables people from anywhere to gather together and watch a movie (that is streaming on web a browser), chatting with each other in near real time. Having your movie premiered there is just an incredible experience and a true privilege. We thank D. L. Watson, a.k.a. Moonlight Pictures, for bringing such a wonderful gift to machinima makers.

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the premiere today, please find the movie on the right column.

Death in Venice

I guess my days of posing as a blogger are over! :) It has been a long time since I posted anything here. For the last few weeks, S and I have been working hard on our first MovieStorm machinima, Death in Venice.

Working together with your spouse on a creative project is an experience to have. Now that our joint efforts of last two months are about to come to fruition, I am excited and sad at the same time. I will certainly miss those countless late night discussions and dinner table debates.

The production process of this movie in particular was such a rich experience of creative collaboration, not only between S and I, but also with the initial involvement of NeoNoir, who was originally set to direct this movie. Even though he ended up dropping out of the project, he left a lot of his footprints in this. More than three years ago, he expressed his own interest in incorporating the motif of masks into a hit man movie after hearing a bunch of stories I pitched to him (including what became Death in Venice), and I subsequently wrote the mask motif into the script for him. Some of the mask-related parts are gone now, but the theme left its permanent mark on a deep place of the story. (Watch the movie, and you’ll see.) NeoNoir’s suggestion that we bring some spectacle to the movie by having the climax take place in a “piazza” (as well as his mentioning of “Venetian masks”) sealed the destination of Marc and Julia as well. When he brought up the possibility of having our first killing in a concert hall, Verdi's "Rigoletto" came to haunt the story and never left even after the concert hall turned into a restaurant.

After three years of hibernation and many week's intense labor, the story will be released at TMU Theater on October 4th (7:10 Eastern, 4:10 Pacific).

Machinima?

by Kate

I’m relatively new to “machinima.” Before my two-year break, I mainly stayed inside the tight-knit community of The Movies Online, and hardly ever called what I was doing machinima. Now my partner (and husband) and I make movies with MovieStorm. Here are some of my thoughts after suddenly finding myself being in “machinima.” (I am not discussing “anymation”* here to focus on the case of machinima production involving single non-game-based engines.)

Let me begin with some popular definitions of Mahchinima:

“Machinima is making films with computer games” (Hancock & Ingram, 2007, p.14).

“Machinima is the art of making animated films within a real time virtual 3D environment” (Kelland, Morris, & Lloyd, 2005, p. 10).

The second definition is slightly broader and more inclusive than the first, and as of mid 2009, this is pretty much the meaning of “machinima” heralded everywhere from Wikipedia to Machinima.com, to various machinima festival sites, and to the blogsphere. “3D environment” and “real time” have been established as the defining features of machinima production.

This, in my opinion, excludes movies made with software such as MovieStorm or iClone, as “real-time” is not the filming process in these platforms. The users of MovieStorm and iClone pause time in their virtual set to build the action piece by piece, and move back and forth along the timeline to make corrections and add subtleties. Yet, in practice, many individuals and various organizations/competitions consider MovieStorm and iClone production as machinima.

So here we are with a wide-spread definition of machinima that excludes a particular kind of non-conventional animation on one hand, and the common usage of the term that defies this definition on the other. My question then is, is this the time to redefine machinima? Or do we need another term for non-game-based movies that were created with the animation tools targeted for mass market?

There are some good reasons for keeping the old definition in peace and coin a new term for the instances that do not fit it. The production process in MovieStorm and iCone (and other similar platforms) is significantly different from the traditional machinima production, and there seems to be some existing resistance among old-school machinima circles to accepting non-game-based animation as machinima. Beside, a new term might actually help us break loose from the old baggage of certain machinima mentality and claim ourselves as -- excuse me if this sounds pompous but this honestly is the best words I can think of --artists, as opposed to, say, ingenuous hackers.

On the other hand, it is convenient to have one handy umbrella term for all the animated movies created with nontraditional techniques. In addition to the fact that it is a convention in formation , there are reasons for keeping what are currently called machinima categorized together under the one single label. Certain game engines are highly machinima-friendly and offer ample contents and functionality targeted for machinima production, blurring the boundary between game-based and non-game-based engines. In addition, the term machinima has been comfortably accommodating various potentially ambiguous cases such as the movies made in Second Life. The truth is, in spite of the existing sectarian disputes, there seems to be such a thing as a larger machinima community, that share the same love, enthusiasm and vision, directed to all sorts of alternative animation that allows common people like you and me make movies with micro budget.

But by applying the term machinima to certain movies, aren't we in fact changing its definition? Then, should we try to popularize this more inclusive definition, instead of copying and spreading the traditional narrower definition over and over again? Should we go ahead and edit Wikipedia? Or is the time not ripe yet?

Addendum:

I think the problem is that the term “real time” is used in many different ways. In animation, as I understand, the term “realtime” is often used in relation to “realtime rendering environment” which allows the animators to see their work in the rendered speed in the animating stage. In machinima circles, however, “real time” seems to have been used in various ways. In one extreme, the term requires capturing the action as it unfolds in front of your eyes even without any editing. In the other extreme, the aforementioned animator’s technical definition of “realtime” appears to be adopted. Between these two, there are various grades of “real time.” As such, I think it would be helpful if the term “real time” (preferably “realtime”) is further explicated when used to define machinima.

That said, I wonder if 3D animation in general will one day move to realtime rendering environments and the current definition of machinima (even with the word “realtime” with clarification) will be challenged once more. Or will the boundary be broken completely in the future, leaving only the distinction between high-budget, independent, nano-budget animations?

Work Cited

Handcock, H. & Ingram, J. (2007). Machinima for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Kelland, M, Morris, D., & Lloyd, D. (2005). Machinima. Boston, MA: Thompson.

*For “anymation,” see this page by Phil “Overman” Rice, or this Urban Dictionary entry by Tom Jantol, who coined the term according to Overman’s comment on this web page.

Anatomy of Empathy – Part 1 (or a Hopelessly Self-indulgent Musing)

By Kate

A little robot, Wall-E, spent hundreds of years in solitude processing garbage in the empty planet, until one day, when he meets EVA. She becomes his girl-friend and sole friend. When she turns inactive for a reason he doesn't understand, he takes care of her, dressing her up and bringing her to picnic.

Satine, a beautiful courtesan of Moulin Rouge who wants to be a real actress, is in love with a struggling writer. She is about to be raped by the duke who has been their sponsor. She announces that today is the day her life ends.

At the end of a picture-perfect love story in which a young couple overcome their obstacles, the young man watches the love of his life lie in a hospital bed dying of leukemia.

It might be too shameful for you to admit that you felt something in those moments. It is for me. But that does not change the fact that we felt for these characters. Empathy. Identification. These are the words often used to label what happened to us. They say we empathized with those characters. But what does that mean?

As it turns out, philosophers have spent much brain power to resolve the “paradox” of empathizing with fictional characters. Susan Feagin, for example, contends that “empathy” is feeling exactly what the other person feels and “for the right reasons.” According to Feagin, in empathizing with a real person, we have to believe that we adopted the beliefs and desires of the person in question. (Otherwise, it would be sympathy, not empathy.) In empathizing with a fictional character however, we can't hold such a belief. In fact, we don’t even believe that the person exists at all. So how is it possible that we empathize with a fictional character? Feagin’s solution to this paradox is to say that we imagine having the fictional character’s beliefs and desires, rather than believing that we do. This sounds like saying that the empathy we feel for a real person is categorically different from the empathy we feel for a fictional character. The former is based on the second order belief (the belief that we adopted the other person’s beliefs) and the latter based on imagination.

A more convoluted proposal comes from Gregory Currie, who says we don’t imagine believing the same thing as a non-existing person in empathizing with him, but we (lo and behold) “believe-I” and "desire-I" the contents of his beliefs and desires to simulate his mental states. (Here, the special “I-states” denote real mental states that bear some sort of systematic resemblance to the mental states of the target person.) Moreover, he says that what we do is to simulate “a hypothetical reader of fact” who empathizes with the fictional character in question. So Currie’s solution to the paradox seems to be making up this new mental state (“I-state”) as well as insert an intermediary between us and the fictional character. (It appears to me that the “hypothetical reader of fact” is an unnecessary entity, although some may find it useful for solving what Currie calls the “personality problem,” the fact that we empathize with the kind of fictional characters we wouldn’t empathized with in real life.)

One of the problems I have with these views is their assumption that we really do adopt the beliefs and desires of others in empathizing with real people. How can this be possible? We have no access to other people’s beliefs and desires. We can never truly know them, much less adopt them. Most of time, we only theorize about them. When we attempt to “simulate” them, imagining is the only possible way. Therefore, in my opinion, we always depend on our imagination when empathizing with somebody -- real or fictional.

Another problem is the notion of putting ourselves in the other person’s shoes and identifying with them. Do we really put ourselves in the shoe of Wall-E, or the beautiful 19th century Parisian courtesan, or the lover of the dying young woman? Do we imagine adopting their beliefs and desires (or “believe-I” and “desire-I” them)? I think what really happens is something more complicated. Here is what I think happens when we "empathize" with movie characters (and with real people to a certain degree):

• I suspect unconscious activation of one’s own emotional memories in response to the event on screen is often confused with (or constitutes) what we call empathy. (Oatley, a leading figure in cognitive science of fiction and stories, also lists emotional memories as one of the five processes through which fiction evokes emotions, but for him this is a process separate from “identification.”)
• In some cases, we may become emotional imagining the events in the film happening to us even without simulating the beliefs and desires of the character.
• Once we form an alliance or attachment with a character, our own desire not to see bad things happen to the people we like may be at play.
• Automatic arousal in response to emotional expressions at display on screen, should also constitute our “empathy” experience.
• Furthermore, we sometimes seem to react to the abstract “truth” the event on the screen distills. (e.g., Wall-E’s situation shows us our hopeless bondage to the blind yearning for attachment; Satine’s moment in Moulin Rouge! says that happiness does not last and sometimes you have to pay a horrible price; The end of Love Story reminds us how helpless we are in the face of certain fates.)

My suspicion is that empathy is not a single-process, but an amalgam of different processes that are bundled as one in our subjective experience. When we watch a film, multiple processes -- wonderfully diverse and complex -- may interact with each other, enhancing each other, to create the feeling in us of connecting with the character and feeling for them. This realization (or is this just a misconception?) opens a door to a whole new way of thinking about story-telling for me.

Works cited:

Feagin, S. (1997). Imagining emotions and appreciating fiction. In M. Hjort & S. Laver (Eds.), Emotion and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Currie, G. (1997). The paradox of caring: Fiction and the philosophy of mind. In M. Hjort & S. Laver (Eds.), Emotion and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Oatley, K. & Gholamain, M. (1997). Emotion and identification: Connections between readers and fiction. In M. Hjort & S. Laver (Eds.), Emotion and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Other references:

Davies, D. (2007). Aesthetics and Literature. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Tan, E. S. (1996). Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

My thanks to the members of TMU forms who participated in this discussion thread.

The Economics of Interest

by Kate

How can we make our movies more interesting ? Today, I search for an answer to this question in the book mentioned in my previous blog (Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine by Ed S. Tan, 1996), as well as a few examples of machinima pieces. Tan's book offers so much food for thoughts that I can see it inspiring a few more blogs.

Tan compares interest to investment. Being interested means investing time and energy to explore the stimulus at hand. The return includes the satisfaction of being confirmed of one's expectations or that “ah-ha” experience. Like any investment, “[i]nterest is determined by the prospect of return.”

According to Tan, the prospect of return is partly determined by the past return. Just like you will not keep investing on a losing stock, the viewer will not continue watching a movie that does not reward him/her. If this is true, small revelations and emotionally satisfying moments, scattered throughout the story, will help keep the viewer interested. Intervention by Overman offers an excellent example of how this may works. (Disclaimer: I'm not attempting to guess Overman's intention. I'm merely describing what the movie was experienced by this particular viewer.)

Intervention from Phil Rice on Vimeo.

At the beginning, we see a man holding onto a buoy in the middle of the ocean. Even stranger is the way he gets away from the buoy. This clearly demands an inspection. Quite soon, you figure out what it is. The man is swimming backwards. This movie plays backwards! (A small reward was granted in the form of this little ah-ha moment.) You follow the man running backwards for a while, and soon receive a new clue. He is hiding from police vehicles. He must have been running from the law. (Another piece of reward.) This way, you follow the backward-running man till the end, while picking up morsels of returns to your investment, until the very end when you finally learn the whole truth, including the meaning of the title and the song, in a one single mind blowing rush of Eureka!

According to Tan, interest is a self-enhancing emotion. Once the viewer gets sufficiently interested, and spends enough time and energy in figuring out the story and character, they are more likely to be deeply involved in the story, as well as develop a stronger desire to find a closure or a stronger expectation for a particular end-state. They will have more at stake now. They cannot leave. Past investments lead to more future investments. In this light, what we story-tellers want to do is get our audience sufficiently invested in the story from early on, and keep them invested by withholding the biggest reward until near the end.

Intervention illustrates the self-enhancing nature of interest very well. As we explore the unfolding story for a prolonged period of time, our involvement with the protagonist gets stronger, and so does our desire to learn how he got into all this mess. We also have made, consciously and unconsciously, inferences and predictions that need to confirmed. With time, our desire to see things through only grows.

Another good example of the previous investment leading to even more investment is The Snow Witch by Britannica Dreams.

The Snow Witch by Britannica Dreams

Toward the end of this story, near the climax, we have developed a strong suspicion of the truth about Yuki-onna. In fact, we’re almost sure of what is coming. But instead of turning it off, we are transfixed in our seat, wanting to witness our anticipation being realized on the screen and curious to see how it happens. It is as if we worked toward this moment, and now we have to see it materialized.

Intervention and The Snow Witch also reveal another aspect of "interest" in movie watching. The streets of Intervention are relatively novel to me, and they look fantastic. Had they been exactly the same streets I watched many times before, or if they were shot with poor cinematography, would my interest have stayed at the same level? If the world of The Snow Witch were not as heartbreakingly beautiful as it is, would I have been equally motivated to explore that world? In these movies, the style and technique serve the story by helping to keep the viewer engaged. The quality of the artifact surely seduces the viewer. Possibly even more important is that it gives the viewer the sense of being at the hands of an able story-teller. It makes her feel safe about her investment.

We, story-driven machinima makers, have an obligation to our viewers to make our stories more interesting and rewarding for them. The viewer experience deserves more attention, and can be improved by better story design as well as other means -- such as pleasing dialogue and visuals. It would be mere laziness, or in some cases, sheer arrogance and conceit, not to try harder.