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| The Halo Movie Conundrum *LONG* | |
| Posted By: Louis Wu <halo@bungie.org> | Date: 3/10/05 3:41 p.m. |
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For over three years, HBO has been a leader in the promotion of Halo-related videos; we've hosted hundreds of films from hundreds of people and groups. Music videos, machinima, tricks and glitches, digitized Halo-related broadcasts... we've served up hundreds of terabytes worth of footage to an ever-growing audience, and inspired hundreds of budding filmmakers to try their own hand at creation. This, by itself is really cool. One of the strengths of this website is the synergy between the content creators and the content consumers - and our ability to facilitate this interaction. As the community has grown in size, we've increased our resources; luckily, the cost of bandwidth has dropped over time at a rate that has allowed us to increase the number of files we host (or help host) as both the number of movies and the number of fans watching the movies have grown. Unfortunately, one side of the equation IS growing much, much faster than the other side: the number of folks making movies has grown exponentially since the release of Halo 2. And this means that some hard decisions have to get made - and made often. HistoryThis isn't the first time I've written something like this. Back in June, 2002, I wrote HBO's Movie Posting Guidelines - an attempt to explain that bandwidth wasn't infinite, and that movies would have to meet some basic guidelines before we'd consider hosting them. (Reading over that document now, I find the numbers amusing; less than three years ago, Mythica was providing 500 GB of bandwidth to the cause - that number has increased by an order of magnitude (to over 5 terabytes/month), with another 5 terabytes provided by bungie.org, plus myriad smaller mirrors... and it's STILL not enough.) This time... it's different. It's clear that almost nobody is actually READING those guidelines - I look in our uploads folder, and there are more and more and more submissions... and lots of them (not all, by any stretch, but LOTS) are files that should never have left their owners' hard drives. I know that sounds harsh, and the LAST thing I want to do is stifle creativity... but I'm at a loss for what to do. The sheer number of submissions have overwhelmed my abilities to process them; there's not even time to WATCH them all, much less decide what's worth presenting to the world and what's not. The ProblemDozens of people are creating montage videos. Montages can be really fun; good gameplay, put to decent music and cut nicely, is pretty enjoyable to watch. When a dozen appear every week, though, many from the same moviemakers making movie after movie, it gets difficult to tell what hasn't been seen before, and what's just more of the same. There's ALWAYS a market for these; when a game has sold 7 million copies, and 20% of these are actually playing online regularly, finding a few hundred (or a few thousand) interested in watching your montage really isn't any difficult task. And for a while, I was able to pass on montage submissions without feeling too guilty, because several other sites - mlgpro.com, combovideos.com, halo-pro.com, among others - were handling the distribution and promotion of this type of video. As time went on, though, some of those sites began to send us reports of the montage videos they were hosting, wanting us to help promote them... and I was right back where I started. An incredible number of machinima projects have started up. In 2002, there was exactly one Halo-based machinima series - Red vs Blue. Time went on, and other groups appeared - first FTC, then groups like Sidewinder Saga, Salmon vs Teal, Black vs White, and others. However, since Halo 2 came out, the number of groups creating machinima has exploded - and while some of the work is fantastic, some of it... isn't. Folks are submitting recreations of existing footage (movie scenes, advertisements, comedy sketches) - this isn't new, but the volume is great enough now that it's hard to keep up... and worse than that, many people are recreating footage that isn't commonly known in the first place. Where early pioneers remade Budweiser commercials in the Halo engine, now we're getting reproductions of web cartoons, commercials that simply don't translate easily to the Halo gameworld, movie scenes that make no sense at all with heavily armored (and armed) characters. I'm stuck. I don't want to tell people to stop making movies - you'll never get better if you don't practice. I don't want to tell people that there isn't an audience for their work, no matter how raw or unfinished it is - my experience is that there is always someone willing to watch a particular vid. But I simply CANNOT continue to be the primary broker for this material - there's just too much of it. I'm happy - eager, even - to continue to help serve the good stuff... but the problem is GETTING to the good stuff. (I suppose a secondary problem is DEFINING the good stuff; with both the resource pool and the audience growing so quickly, it hardly makes sense for one person to attempt to decide what's good and what's not.) SuggestionsI suppose what I'd like to do is to set out a few suggestions for moviemakers - and to use these suggestions to justify some of the decisions we have to make about what we can and cannot host. It's not really going to stop people from submitting the same old thing, over and over and over again... but at least I'll have something to point to when folks yell at me for ignoring their masterpiece. I understand that everyone has to start somewhere, and that some really impressive contributors in this community began with frankly mediocre material... but geez. If you can't be bothered to make the dialogue audible, or your idea of a funny video is a bunch of spartans standing around telling fart jokes... do the world a favor and save your vids. Release to the public only when you've got something that EVERYONE wants to watch. (How do you KNOW what everyone wants to watch? There are plenty of decent examples now. Red vs Blue is a fine start - but emulate the PRODUCTION VALUES, not the package. Look at some of the releases that have garnered kudos recently - Biohazard, The Codex, Saving Private Cyan are a few that come to mind immediately, though they're not by any means the only good ones out there - see what people are doing with plot, with camerawork, with music integration. See the care they're taking with audio quality - it can make the difference between a run-of-the-mill piece and a classic.) If you're creating a reproduction of an existing piece of film (movie, ad, whatever) - make sure you can provide a pointer to the original clip, so people can see the work in context. Remember that our audience is international, and not all movies or ads are shown worldwide. If you just got your hands on a movie editing program, the likelihood that that footage you slapped together in two hours is worth adding to the montage pool is slim enough that you're better off buying a lottery ticket. Take your time; use that first creation to build on. Make a second vid - and a third. Don't release those, either. Work on your editing skills, tie the music closely to the gameplay. Make another one. Show it to your friends. Make them be honest with you. Make some more. THEN release. If you want to break into the machinima scene, but you don't have a story to tell... DON'T DO IT. Just because you CAN make a Halo movie, doesn't mean you SHOULD. Take your time, get the footage right. If you're not sure that your actors can handle the lines the first time through, have them be SILENT when filming, then add the voice tracks later. (That way, you get all the ambient noise right.) There are no lips visible on Halo Spartans... so there's nothing stopping you from getting it right AFTER the fact. I can't tell you how depressing it is to open a readme and see 'I know this isn't good, but I thought I'd send it to you anyway.' Do me (and everyone who reads this fansite) a favor - wait until you have something you're proud of before you write to us. Oh, yeah, one other thing: make the content king. If your movie is 2 minutes long, and the first 30 seconds are a spinning logo, and the last minute are credits... go back and film some more. Folks aren't watching this for the credits - they're watching it for the content. If the content is good, they'll notice your name. If it's not... don't waste their time. I know that nothing I've written here will change the pattern of submissions one iota. I know that we'll continue to see dozens of montages, huge numbers of machinima pieces - some great, some lousy - mountains of recreations and static image compilations set to music and all the rest. What I HOPE is that this might spark a discussion - folks here will brainstorm about ways to weed the wheat from the chaff, to get the best stuff out to the public without overwhelming those handling the distribution. I'm open to all suggestions - though I do not promise to implement ANY of them. If you have a good idea, post away; it'll get read. If it makes life easier here, or increases the chance that good content will reach our audience - it'll be given real consideration. And above all... thanks for getting to the bottom. I'm guessing that the number of folks reading this line is about 1/5 of the number of folks who read the first line. Sad... but true. | |
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