8 Baller's "Infinite Dark" Movie Trailer

Machini-wha?

Machinima. It's a strange word that is defined by dictionary.com as "...a collection of associated production techniques whereby computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rendered using real-time, interactive 3-d engines instead of professional 3d animation software.". In short, it's a movie made using real-time rendering, such as a game engine.

Having a background in both radio/television/film and gaming, machinima is something I've always thought of experimenting with but never really had the time or proper motivation. That is, until Game Trailers and Toyota, along with City of Heroes, announced the Matrix Machinima contest. That was enough incentive for me. The task was to create a machinima movie, 2-4 minutes in length, primarily using the City of Heroes game engine with the overall theme of "Getting in Touch With Your Dark Side".

Why 8 Baller?

Oddly enough, the decision to use 8 Baller as my primary character in the movie came fairly easily. Of all my heroes, which all have pretty detailed histories, 8's was the most established. After winning the City of Heroes comic contest telling 8 Baller's story I frequently have people ask me in-game when I'm going to continue the story. All I needed to do was figure out what the next chapter in his saga was. As far as format goes, what can I say, I've always loved movie trailers. It seemed like a good way to tell a larger story in a little amount of time. So the basics were set, an 8 Baller movie trailer.

The Story

Even though it was going to be just a trailer, I wanted to make sure it felt as if behind the 4 minutes there was a larger story. Epic if possible. So I got to outlining the full 2 hour movie. The story was to pick up after the events of the first 3 comics (even though only 1.5 have been put to paper so far). To summarize, 8 Baller returns from an alternate dimension and saves Paragon City from Archnos invasion. Only when he returns some city officials believe he was working WITH Arachnos the entire time. He's stripped of his 'hero' status while the investigation takes place. Even worse, he's unaware that his arch nemisis 8 Brawler followed him back from the alternate dimension and is now stuck in this dimension. Before everything is said and done 8 Baller will have to team up with 8 Brawler to fight off a god-like super villain named Omega that is set on destroying not only Paragon City, but the entire world.

Now that an online of the entire movie is set, how to bring it together in City of Heroes?

Places...Action

City of Heroes has a relatively little known feature called "demo record", which is a way to record long sequences of action and play them back for review later. These 'demos' are recorded as text files, and as such can be edited or entirely created with any basic text editor.

I'd played around with demo editing when I created 8 Baller's comic, but didn't have to worry about animation or any camera movements. So, this was a little different.

The problem is creating demos is a pretty slow process, and creating animations is even worse. Also, I wanted to create some effects that couldn't realistically (in a timely manner) be demo recorded. The movie outline also called for damage on a more epic scale that what was going to be doable straight inside City of Heroes.

My first thought, was creating all the demos by hand...uh...no...not if I was going to finish this year. Second try, writing an application in Flash that could generate 2d motion paths. That was a little more realistic, but then I'd be limited to 2D paths...not what I was hoping for. The answer was, use another 3d engine...Maya. Using Maya's scripting language I was able to write scripts that exported Maya's camera coordinates to the City of Heroes demo edit format. Super. Now I can path a camera in Maya and export that motion to CoH. So all I have to do now is get the CoH world inside Maya.

Using a little math and a lot of trial and error I was able to make a base template inside Maya in terms of scale. Then I'd hop into CoH, scout the locations I needed for the shots, then note the exact x,y,z locations of certain things in the scene, like a street corner, a car, a lamp post. Then I'd head back to Maya and place reference objects inside Maya so I know where the camera was supposed to be.

Now that I've got my course laid out I animate the camera movements in Maya and export the information using the scripts.

Special Effects

There were numerous other special effects that were created using Maya, Particle Illusion, and After Effects. I even played around with a 3rd party machinima software called MovieStorm. It was very easy to use and it enabled lipsyncing and an array of other animations that weren't included in City of Heroes. Unfortunately, in trying to get all the legal clearance I needed to use the software for the contest time was ticking away and I had to move on. By the time I had the necessary approval from the software company I had already created the same shot inside CoH so I decided to stick with what I had.

There were a couple of other shots that I didn't get a chance to use, either because I was short on time, or I never found just the right spot in the movie for them.

One shot that remained on the cutting room floor had a shot of sky scrappers with a series of all the windows being blown out from some high impact explosion. Another, one that I just ran short on time, had all of Atlas Park being nuked. Bright flash, buildings being blasted apart etc. I simply ran out of time to complete the shot.

In the End

About a month and a half later of all my after hours time, weekends and more than one sleepless night, it was done. A month or so later, the winners were announced on GameTrailers TV show (at around midnight) and I was thrilled beyond words when 8 Baller's movie was announced the grand prize winner.

You'd think that was the end of the story...little did I know, it was just the beginning.

to be continued...