CS 6964 Machinima - Short Film
The Passion of the McCain
For our second main project we were to create a short machinima film, using Half Life 2, Hammer, Face Poser, and whatever other tricks we could muster. Bob Kessler, the class professor, suggested using the 2008 Presidential Campaign as material for a film. I formulated a general storyline involving John McCain and Hillary Clinton, and using recorded and captured audio from presidential nomination debates (from sources like CNN and the excellent debate transcript application from The New York Times) I identified likely lines of dialog to use, edit, and form into a story. If you actually read all the debate transcripts, you quickly note that all the candidates have a set script that they answer questions from, and do little to deviate from this script from question to question and debate to debate. However, there was enough material to use. Senator Clinton's performance during the South Carolina debates was particularly fruitful.
Once the audio track was completed, I generated the facial lip syncs and animations in Face Poser, and brought them together in Hammer. I modeled a drab apartment, fitting for the limited action. As I was planning on working in black and white from the beginning, I was able to plan shots around contrasting elements rather than color. This foresight was also useful when skinning (texturing) the characters. The Monk character was an easy match for Senator McCain, being the only model that could somewhat support McCain's jowls. Hillary was a less easy match. I textured several models, and eventually settled on the Mossman model. Video games have a distinct lack of normal looking characters (women especially), so she is perhaps a little more trim in the film than in real life.
Most of the shots were completed in Hammer, although some elements, like the cigarette smoke, were rendered in Maya and added in post. Some additional image correction and the transition to black and white completed the film.
The film was well received, and several versions of the film are doing modestly on YouTube. The film was included in a keynote address on "The Ethics of Game Design" by John Nordlinger during Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education conference. I did not attend, so no word as to what he said and whether the film conformed to ethical standards. I, of course, have my own opinion. The film was also included in a press release about the Machinima class, which was picked up as a news blurb on local television.
UPDATE 1: "The Passion of the McCain" was picked up by Machinima.com, and played the front page of their website, as well as being linked to their YouTube page. Other postings of note include Salt Lake City Weekly blog and the Minnesota Monitor, which had this to say:
Unlike 99+ percent of the user-created or -manipulated politics video at YouTube, it has no discernible political point. It's an unspeakably strange little 2-minute noir in which a pair of on-the-lam lovers who speak in soundbites clipped from the public words of John McCain and Hillary Clinton plot their next move. It's machinima -- narrative video that's animated on a gaming platform. It was created by a University of Utah computer sciences grad student named Zach Gildersleeve, but it plays like the sort of dream Philip K. Dick might be having now if he were still around.
UPDATE 2: "The Passion of the McCain" was invited to screen at the 2008 Cambridge Film Festival as part of a special program on Machinima. It screened on September 23 to, what I can figure, mostly positive reviews. One such reviewer said, in the Festival Daily:
... the simple yet amusing THE PASSION OF THE MCCAIN, which spliced together pieces of speech by the Presidential candidate and former potential rival Hilary Clinton to create a bizarre short love story.
Most of the comments on YouTube and elsewhere tend to be 'wtf' or some incarnation. All publicity is good publicity. Between YouTube and Machinima.com, the film has somewhere in the ballpark of 61,000 views. Not bad. To celebrate, I've included a comment about the video on my photography and design blog.