Lucasfilm Talks Machinima, sort of

The main machinima related newsy thing around these days is the Director's Cut of the game F.E.A.R. And as many have heard Rooster Teeth (Red vs Blue, Strangerhood) have done some machinima work for this edition. I hope I get a chance to check out their finished product. If you want to get a better idea of what this 'Director's Cut' is all about, view the MOV via this torrent. It doesn't mention the machinima part, but you'll get the idea.

I also came across this article at VFXWorld that is an interview with LucasFilm CTO Cliff Plumer. The most interesting part is his talk of LucasArts and ILM now being under one roof. Thats a top film/VFX company and a top game company together, what obviously should follow? According to Mr. Plumer:

Now that we’re all under one roof, ILM can take advantage of their game engine, and LucasArts artists have access to things we take for granted. Look at something like crowd simulations. They have been big in effects for the last few years, but have been used in games for a long time. We can take advantage of their AI engines, their game engines and integrate them into the visual pipeline.

The big win for ILM, though, is in previsualization. A visual effects supervisor can sit with the director and have a synthetic scene move around in realtime. The director can block in a scene and do a camera move with a virtual camera. It feeds the whole post process.

Wow, thats very cool Mr. Plumer. So will you be using this 'machinima' technique for full production?

No. Only during early stages in previs. At this stage, the game engine can’t hold as complex a scene as we need for film effects. To get the complexity we need, we’d be compromising the realtime performance.

Ahh yes, understandable. But lets keep our eyes to the future. The short term future I expect. ;)