The Dark of Night

The Dark of Night was a machinima movie that I created using Lionhead's game/tool The Movies. It's a ten minute schlock-horror flick set in the Old West with all the prerequisites of the genre: death, love, death, violence, death, mist, and the eventual wittling down of the cast to the point where the 'twist' revelation of the killer's identity is prematurely robbed of all impact by the process of elimination. Get the film.

Genesis

'The Movies' is a game that promised to combine the Theme Park-style game of managing a quirky business of tiny computer people with a fully developed set of tools allowing the user to write, direct and export a 3D movie using a wide range of props, scenes, actions and actors. Like many internet users, I'd watched development with some interest - I could take or leave the people-management portion, but I'd previously spent hours mucking around with the Nickelodeon 3D Movie Maker when I was younger, despite having no idea who any of the characters were, creating short clips that made little sense.

Once the game was released I duly tracked down a copy and fired it up, editing one of the .ini files as per instructions I found online to unlock all of the props and scenes (which in theory require playing the game itself, something I wasn't particually interested in). I mucked around a bit, and decided that I might as well try creating a real film to get to grips with the system. The Dark of Night is the film I created - it ended up a little longer than I expected, but I wanted to try for a something with actual plot and that made some sort of sense.

Shooting the Film

While some friends of mine at school were very into making indie films, I have no more than a passing acquaintance with the art. I was also somewhat limited by the sets made available with the game, each of which has little room for customisation. I settled on a Wild West setting, since the actions associated with the Western sets were fun, and it'd let me use almost any other set excluding the modern-day cityscapes and the sci-fi ones. I made it a horror film because the genre is suited to silent movies (without a microphone I was limited to subtitles), and it's a relatively simple formula.

The actual process of creation was simultanously straight-forward and frustrating. 'The Movies' did what it was written to do well, aside from the occasionally slightly odd design choice in the user interface. But I was constantly having to adjust my ideas to fit the predefined scenes and actions, and wishing I had a little more control or some specific animation or other. In some ways it was interesting - the improvisations gave me new ideas and some interesting shots. But in other, much more prominent ways, it was frustrating as hell. Still, it was a limitation built into the framework of the program, and anything beyond that would have been massive overkill for what was still, essentially, a game of managing people in a film studio.

Most aggravating of all, I discovered a bug that meant if you reopened a movie the timing of the subtitles shifted, fractionally at first, but progressively so that it was apparent after a few minutes and by ten minutes they were completely out of whack, so everytime I closed and reopened the game I had to move all my subtitles around into their original places. In the end though I had things sorted out to my satisfaction, though I'd often resorted to heavy cutting and odd camera angles to get some of the animations I needed, and I uploaded the movie to the Lionhead website as well as exporting it.

The Movie

The final version of the film suffers from some limitations - I had no control over its encoding, hence the size is only 384x216, and even with that the compression's pretty heavy to the point where compression artifacts are quite obvious (though that does all keep the size down to about a meg a minute). I also discovered at the end there was no option to film in black and white, which was irritating, so if you could just pretend you're watching a version that was colourised by some philistine of a TV executive during the 80s, then thank you.

There's also the odd problem that's my fault. Some of the subtitles are tricky to read (I used a different font for each speaker, and a few are hard to make out given the compression and size), and in at least one place the subtitle is missing due to my failing to correct for the aformentioned timing bug. Oh, and a horse is visible in the fog halfway through the movie - you could consider it a clever homage to some cult horror flick long forgotten by all but movie directors and those with degrees in film studies, but in truth it came as default with the scene and I forgot to remove it.

Overall I was happy with it, particually as a first try. On the Lionhead website it's accrued 4.5 stars, and at one point rose as high as #5 in the chart of Best Horror Films. I planned to try a series of short comedies, but I wanted to use audio, and didn't have a decent microphone (the lack of flexibility I had experienced was also off-putting). Apparently there's now a flourishing mod community providing new scenes, props and costumes, and a patch to fix various bugs, so I might try my hand again at some point.