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BloodSpell: A Neverwinter Nights Machinima Project Profile by Jay Watamaniuk
Does BloodSpell have a website?Hugh: www.bloodspell.com Back in early August, you helped us through your Neverwinter Nights Machinima Tutorial and slyly introduced us to your huge project, BloodSpell. Can you give us a quick review of what BloodSpell is?Hugh: BloodSpell is a feature-length, machinima action-adventure film made using Neverwinter Nights. We're describing the plotline as a combination of Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and the Sex Pistols.
From there it's a fast-moving adventure as Jered flees the Church for the gladiatorial pits of the Underground, and has to decide who to fight with and who to fight against. Has BloodSpell attracted attention from fans or press during its development?Hugh: Quite a bit, actually! We've been running a production weblog for the past year or so, and that has had quite a bit of attention, most recently getting a mention on CNN and an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper. What are some of the main lessons you have learned working on a project this big?Hugh: Wow, that's a tricky question. We've learned so much. We've learned, I think, that a lot more limitations can be overcome than you expect, particularly if you think laterally as we've done with things like our TOGLFaces tool (which let us do lipsynching, moving eyes, and more, within NWN). We've learned, or rather re-learned, that the only way to make sure you've got a really good story is to keep going over it again and again and again. But, probably the most important revelations I've had have concerned what many people think of as a bad word - management. On a project this size, it's the management, communication, and planning that make the difference between success and failure. Our team has been fantastic in coming together to work out the problems there, and we've really developed a lot in how we organize our projects from the star to now.
Perhaps management isn't exactly the sexiest part of the creation process, but it's probably been the biggest positive change in the entire production. Tell us about the trailer.Hugh: We'll be releasing our "teaser" trailer for BloodSpell some time in the next couple of weeks. It's a minute and a half preview of what you can expect to see in the full film. We're feeling very good about it at the moment. Actually, we just previewed it yesterday at an event with the UK's Channel 4 in Edinburgh, and people really enjoyed it. The trailer will be released in various sizes, from sub-20Mb to DVD quality. We'll be hosting it on the BloodSpell servers, as well as Machinima.com and NWVault. (However, more hosting is always welcome!) Can Neverwinter Nights fans expect to see some of the amazing content featured in BloodSpell to be released at some point?Hugh: Absolutely. We're going to be releasing virtually everything that would be of any use to NWN fans, from our new camera tools that allow us to set up WYSIWYG camerawork in NWN, to all our new content, including dozens of new set and character pieces, to TOGLFace, Anthony Bailey's groundbreaking tool for dynamically altering OpenGL texture streams. Actually, we'll probably be releasing that last one as an Open-Source project for other machinima creators to modify. We're also planning to release music and sound files as MP3, and last but not least, all of the BloodSpell episodes themselves will be released under the Creative Commons license, so that anyone can modify them, make music videos, fan-films, or whatever. You mentioned in the last interview that material on the world of BloodSpell might be coming out as well in pen and paper form. Any updates on that?Hugh: Just about all of the team are P&P roleplayers. We've probably got over a hundred years of roleplaying collected on the team, so we're really enthusiastic about this idea. Having said that, we're going to be madly busy with the release of the film for a while, so it'll be a few months yet. OK, I have to ask, when is BloodSpell coming out?We're now getting to the point where I feel confident answering this one, fortunately! Barring fire, flood, and acts of hard drive, the first episode of BloodSpell will be released before the end of the year. Next week: Hugh and the team reveal more of the nitty-gritty details involved in creating such a monster work and stunning trailer of BloodSpell!~
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It's a story about a world where some people carry magic in their blood, and when it is spilled, the magic comes out, whether as visions of the future or creatures pulled from Hell. These people, the "Blood", are hunted by the Church of the Angels, which considers them an obscenity, and our story starts when one of the Church's monks in training, Jered, discovers that he has the magic in his blood....
We're now using some very sophisticated tools to track and maintain development on the project, like an internal wiki, and a bunch of ideas stolen from the Extreme Programming people, and they've really helped us work fast and efficiently as we come up toward shooting and release.
