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Email Interview with co-author Johnnie Ingram
(Listen to the audio interview with co-author Hugh Hancock here) When Wiley approached you for the book, what was your reaction? How did you decide on what to include? Hugh went over how you set up who did what, was there a section you were particularly pleased with how it turned out? Any section you weren't as pleased with? I was terrified and excited in equal measure! I love writing, and I've written a lot about Machinima, but this was a huge project. It's also a bit arrogant to think that I'm the best qualified person in the world to write about Machinima, and to teach others about it. There are plenty of people in the community who've been going a lot longer than I have, and who have more knowledge about specific engines or techniques. I know a lot more now than I did when we started writing – I had to do a lot of “on the job learning†while we were writing. I'm very pleased with the whole book. It turned out far better than I'd hoped it would. Personally, I'm particularly pleased with the chapters on sound and publicity. I think they're both pretty comprehensive. There's no chapter that we feel is particularly weak – our editors wouldn't let us sleep if we submitted a chapter that was sub-standard! The thing that's slightly disappointing, if inevitable, is the speed at which current information changes. The book has only been published a few weeks, and already we've both Microsoft and Blizzard release Content Creation guidelines, as well as a new release of Garry's Mod with lots of extra Machinima bits in and a first stab at an open-source Second Life server. It's hard work keeping up with all of that! What did you leave out of the book? Hugh mentioned the first draft was around 500 pages and Wiley had you cut almost a hundred. How did you do that? With great difficulty! With tears, tantrums, sulks and fistfights. We panicked at first; we honestly didn't think that there was anything that could be cut. We managed it, though. We're both quite verbose writers, so tightening up our self-indulgently flowing prose cut about twenty pages all by itself! As well as that, we cut a lot of gags, and a few bits and pieces that we felt would only be of use to one or two people. There were a few big segments that had to go to (a section on working with actors, for example). You can expect most of that content to find its way on to www.Machinimafordummies.com eventually. Decision on what engines to include: easy or hard? Any engines included that surprised you with their flexibility? Hard, painfully so. We changed our minds several times. Both Half-Life 2 and Second Life were in the running for a long time. The only engine that was a definite was Moviestorm: as soon as we saw it, we knew it had to be in the book. World Of Warcraft surprised me, not particularly with its flexibility but with its ease of use. There's really very little hacking involved, and you can produce almost anything with a combination of the Map Viewer and the Model Viewer (and clever chroma-keying). Strange Company's FairGame (WoW) video, for example, took about three days to make, including taking time to teach ourselves most of the techniques required as we went along. Illustrations for the book: how were they created and how much input did you have in decided how many and where they were positioned? We did 'em all. All the screenshots were grabbed from 'Nomad', Hugh's main production machinine (the same box that did almost all the filming for BloodSpell, hardware fans). Even the front cover is the work of my own two hands and one Photoshop. We included a couple of hand-drawn sketches to demonstrate storyboarding and camera plotting. Originally, we'd submitted some of the genuine back-of-a-beermat sketches that we'd produced during production on BloodSpell. We wanted to show that these diagrams don't have to be pretty or elegant as long as they do the job. Unfortunately, Wiley rejected them because nobody in the entire building could make head nor tail of them! I had to redraw them with slightly more care and attention to detail! The only illustrations that we didn't do were the 5th Wave cartoons that open each section. Rich Tennant, who supplies the cartoons for all the Dummies books, did five awesome cartoons for us. As life-long geeks, that was a pretty big deal for us! Any chapters too short or long? Story chapter felt a bit short, but Hugh mentioned it was extremely difficult to cut. Did you work on this section or edit it at all? Too short? Are you kidding me? It's about 200 pages! Actually, the story chapter is probably the chapter that's had the most attention. It's mostly Hugh's work, but we both knew that it was a crucial chapter to get right, so we slaved over every word. Storytelling is such a personal and subjective thing, too, so we had plenty of fights over it. Even our early proof-readers started to bicker amongst themselves over small aspects of it. I think the final version is awesome, though. It's amazingly definitive, and that's mainly thanks to Hugh's obsession with storytelling as both and art and a science. He's had ten or fifteen years to think about it, so he knew what he wanted to say. Engine comparisons -- great, great idea; how did this come about? Lots of hard work to put it together, I'd bet. Yeah, it took some effort, but it was in the very pitch for the book that we submitted to Wiley. There are so many Machinima-capable engines and tools that we knew we wouldn't be able to give most of them more than a cursory glance in the book. Even so, we wanted to make sure that people could choose the best tool for the job – that's why we have a breakdown of the pros and cons of each engine, and the sort of projects for which it might prove suitable. It was either that, or write a chapter on each, we would have produced a book that weighed more than both its authors combined. The book seemed to lack a conclusion or summing up. Hugh said the "Machinima and the future" piece was cut and that the website is now the conclusion. What's your take? That's true. There was never an intention to include a “concluding†chapter as such. For Dummies books generally don't have them, and I don't think it's needed. The book is not particularly meant to be read in order from cover to cover. It's also very true to say that the project isn't finished yet. We'll be updating content on the MfD website for quite some time to come. How did the idea for the website come about? How do you plan on using it in the future? Originally, we wanted to blog our progress on the book, because neither of us had written a book before, and we'd become used to blogging our progress during BloodSpell. It's a good publicity tool, as long as you're providing interesting content, and it keep the project in the public mind. It quickly became apparent, though, that we'd need somewhere online to keep the most up-to-date information on the stuff we were writing about, which seemed to change on a daily basis. What started as a simple blog quickly mutated into something more. Didn't seem like you and Hugh mentioned Paul's or Matt's book very much. Hugh mentioned that the book was written in a "vacuum". Were these books you just didn't want to be influenced by? We're heavily influenced by both! Both books are superb, and very different from each other. We tried very hard not to compare our work to theirs, though. The book we wanted to write wasn't really like either Paul's or Matt and Dave's. I have a copy of both on my bookshelf, but I don't think I opened them once while we were writing MfD. Last question: What was the most difficult part of putting the book together for you? How did you manage to get through the difficulty? The sheer amount of knowledge and effort required. When you combine my Machinima knowledge with Hugh's, we cover a lot, but there were stills things about which neither of us had any real knowledge. The Sims 2 chapter, for example, would have been far inferior without the help of Michelle Pettit-Mee and Phil Rice! We also weren't really allowed an “off dayâ€. We had deadlines to hit, and we had to hit them even if it meant staying up all night thumping keyboards. It was hard going, and impacted on both our personal lives quite heavily. When we first got the contract for the book, Paul Marino offered his congratulations and told us he didn't envy us at all. I laughed it off at the time, but I think I know what he meant now!
 Strange Company is the world's oldest pro 'Machinima' production company, making films in 3D virtual worlds to tell stories that couldn't be told any other way. (More...)     Additional information: Ricky Grove's
Machinima for Dummies review More information about Machinima can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima 
Ricky Grove
[gToon], Contributing Columnist with the Renderosity Front Page
News. Ricky Grove is a bookstore clerk at the best bookstore in Los
Angeles, the Iliad Bookshop. He's also an actor and
machinima filmmaker. He lives with author, Lisa Morton, and three
very individual cats. Ricky is into Hong Kong films, FPS shooters,
experimental anything and reading, reading, reading. You can catch
his blog here. |
October 30, 2007
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