To produce animated content for Microsoft Visual Studio’s “Defy All Challenges” campaign, Exopolis, a Los Angeles production studio, used machinima, a new game-based filmmaking technique that is taking animation, and potentially broadband video advertising, in a new direction. The campaign, which was created by McCann-Erickson/San Francisco, features a series of humorous videos, starring video game characters, who appeal to the Visual Studio market, which is game developers. Daniel Arcana, a founder and partner at Exopolis, explains the machinima technique and how it was used in the Microsoft Visual Studio campaign.
iSPOT: Please provide background on Exopolis.
Arcana: We started the company about seven years ago doing print design for the music industry, album covers and band posters. That got us into bigger projects for record companies such as websites for artists, which then led us to movie sites for studios that put us on the map in the entertainment space. We started a motion division and started working for cable networks. Ultimately we got on the radar of ad agencies and they started tapping us for broadcast work and in the last couple of years our interactive division has taken off. At this point it’s mostly cable networks, ad agencies and calls from consumer brands to do brand marketing.
iSPOT: You used machinima animation for the recent Microsoft Visual Studio’s “Defy All Challenges” campaign, so could you start by explaining what machinima is.
Arcana: Machinima is to video games what DJs and remixing are to music. A lot of gamers got it into their heads that they could pull captures and sample video games while they were playing them and take the video clips and remix them to create their own narrative animations. You have guys sampling stuff from World of Warcraft and any big game you can think of and making their own narrative films. It’s a new genre of independent filmmaking that has come out of the gaming community. It’s a very egalitarian genre of animation and indie filmmaking.
iSPOT: Why is it game based?
Arcana: You are in an animated environment already when you’re capturing that footage into video clips, what you’re getting is mini sequences. It saves the independent filmmaker time, you don’t have to develop your own characters and environments, you pull them ready made out of video games.
iSPOT: How can machinima be used in advertising, as opposed to some gamers having fun with it, like you just talked about?
Arcana: The reason people are interested in it is the gaming community is so huge and reaches a broad demographic so it appeals to advertisers. Live action is the platform of choice. Animation is a niche thing in advertising and machinima appeals to advertisers because of the demographic.
iSPOT: Does machinima advertising have to relate to games?
Arcana: No, it’s really just a stylistic thing. You can write your script the same way as if it were live action.
iSPOT: For the Microsoft job, it was game oriented because the defyallchallenges.com site the videos play on is designed like a game.
Arcana: The Visual Studio product is a software package geared to game developers and hard core back end coders, those are the only guys who use the software, so it’s a no brainer. If your product is for that group, then machinima is an obvious way to speak with them because it’s their own language. That was the kernel of the idea for McCann. We talked with them about using this stylistic choice because it will resonate with the audience, it was a smart thing to do.
iSPOT: There are eight animated videos in this campaign?
Arcana: Actually, we’ve done a total of 14 short films at this point. We did phase one and phase two. Eight play at one time and they refresh it with new content.
iSPOT: How did you make them?
Arcana: We never did anything like it before. We came up with a custom process. In traditional machinima you play the video game and pull captures out of the games and assemble them into a narrative story. They could have just given us a bunch of Xbox games which is obvious since it’s Microsoft. But we said you’re not going to be able to execute your scripts the way they’re written because you’re limited to what you can do within this gaming environment. If we build our own game we will have control of the code and we can write it how we want to create our own environment and characters. We can get them to do whatever we want within this gaming environment and more truly execute your scripts. We started by working with Steven Schkolne, a professor from California Institute of the Arts as a technical advisor. He taught us the production pipeline and we assembled a team who developed the game engine, characters and backgrounds. We approached it like the development of a TV show with a huge library of backgrounds and characters. Once it was built we could create the characters and execute the scripts. Once the game was developed we had a team of people playing the game so we could capture the sequences we needed for the scripts. The game development and game capture led to an editorial bay where we pulled the capture sequences into the edit suite and cut the spots. McCann got an improv team to do voiceovers so we had funny people involved.
iSPOT: When you watch the videos, they don’t look like a game.
Arcana: It’s not technically a game but what the agency and client wanted was to stylistically mimic the look and feel of games like Halo. A lot of the characters look like Halo characters.
iSPOT: Do you do other kinds of animation?
Arcana: We’re more of a traditional motion graphics company so we do 2D animation and sometimes 3D but no big full 3D environments like cartoon animation, it’s straight forward motion.
iSPOT: How does machinima compare with the other styles and why was it used for this campaign?
Arcana: Other guys who were bidding the job presented a very traditional pipeline, we’ll build your spots as one-off stand alone pieces in 2D or 3D. The difference between that approach and the one we took is we invested in the front end to build a game environment and library of characters. We were looking down the road and saying if you invest this money in the front end, we can keep doing more short films, we won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time because we’ll have it rebuilt and the cost of production will go down, which is exactly what happened. The reason we were able to do 14 videos is because of that pipeline. If we did each one separately, we could have done maybe six of them.
iSPOT: Isn’t it more economical to do machinima because of the way it uses existing game footage?
Arcana: Yes, we proved that on this job.
Copyright © 2008 DCA Business Media LLC. All rights reserved. All text, photos, graphics, artwork, and other material on the SHOOTonline.com site are copyrighted. All copying, reposting or reproduction, especially for commercial publicity use or resale in any manner, form, or medium, requires explicit, prior, permission from the publisher. If you have any questions regarding copyright or use of the materials on this site, are interested in article linking, reposting, pdf creation, or any form of rticle re-distribution contact permissions@shootonline.com, we will try to address your needs and concerns. SHOOTonline.com may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, terminate the accounts of users who infringe the intellectual property rights of others.
