It was only yesterday that I was adding a comment to one of Chris Anderson’s “machinima” posts. I’ll just quote my comment here:

Chris wrote: The problem with standard machinima based on first-person-shooter game engines is that you’re painting with an incredibly limited palette, both in terms of the characters and settings and in what you can do with them.

I disagree. It’s not that the tools available in FPS’s like HL2 or Doom3 are more limited, but rather that most users either don’t have the ability to use them at those levels or can’t justify the time to create that content. There’s a reason videogame production costs are going up.

There’s nothing stopping me from taking real CAD geometry and mapping it onto game assets, either as normalmaps or perhaps “relief” maps (link). Nothing stopping people from creating other high-quality assets like character models, animations, and skins; the tools are readily available. So the pallete isn’t limited, it’s just that working at those levels is extremely time-consuming and such an effort is difficult – at present – to justify.

That’s what a product like “The Movies” is really offering: ease of use. It’s paint-by-numbers compared to creating paint from raw materials. Games like Half-Life 2 and Doom3 provide amazing opportunities for indy filmmakers (here’s one example I outlined for some B-movie filmmakers over a year ago: link). Give it time. A few Long Tail niches will be fusing soon enough and when that happens there will be sufficient incentive for creators to put in the effort.

Well, lookie what Wired (of all places) has posted today: an article on a documentary that’s using a game engine to provide visuals. From the story:

The documentaries for the first time will also attempt to portray real World War II veterans as they appeared in the war.

Gearbox took photos of some of the World War II vets interviewed for the show, and re-created them in the game as they looked when they fought in Normandy as young men of 18 and 20 years of age.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!