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BloodSpell: A Feature Length Machinima Film Profile by Jay Watamaniuk
Where is your site?What have you been up to recently?Well, obviously the big one has been finally releasing the first episodes of BloodSpell, which we've been working on for nearly three years now. There's so much that goes into a release above and beyond the obvious - things like setting up download sites, writing web code, rendering off credits, previews, trailers - that we've only just started catching up on the backlog now, over a month after release!
Was the release of the first segment of BloodSpell a little nerve-wracking?Yeah, maybe just a tiny little bit.... It was a big, big deal for us, of course, having worked on BloodSpell for so long, and finally pushing our baby out into the wild. I think everyone in the team was on serious tenterhooks for about the week beforehand. I know I was so tense that I could barely think about anything else! For me, one of the problems with working on an internal project (and I'm sure lots of modders, and probably the BioWare team too will be nodding their heads on this one) is knowing just when is the right time to finally say, "OK, it's done, let's release."
As it turned out, we didn't get a single comment about the issue we were so worried about (Carrie's dress, for those of you who have been following the blog). Instead, we got a lot of comments we weren't expecting! How have fans reacted to your work?It's been very interesting. BloodSpell is, I think it's safe to say, genuinely quite controversial at the moment. Quite a few people really don't like it. They're surprised we didn't use a newer engine, they don't like the fact we're using punk music rather than LOTR-style orchestral, they're unfond of the Buffy-esque writing style. But many, many other people love it. We've had amazingly positive comments from some of the most experienced Machinima producers in the world; we've been favorably reviewed on sites like BoingBoing; and we see hundreds of people who aren't just casually following the series, but are looking forward to each episode.
The other interesting point about the reactions we've been seeing is what we're being compared against. Phil Rice, our stunningly capable sound designer, nailed this one on the head from Day 1 of the release. We were taking some pretty heavy criticism then, and starting to get a bit depressed - until Phil noted that all the critics were criticizing because they were comparing BloodSpell, not to fan-movies or amateur work, but to Hollywood and mainstream TV standards. It seems like, whether because of how we've described ourselves or the sheer scale of the project, we've managed to put BloodSpell in the larger arena of entertainment as a whole, in terms of how a lot of people are viewing it. We're so pleased with that as an outcome it's hard to even articulate it. If Strange Company is being considered up against Hollywood creators like Joss Whedon and J J Abrams in the creativity stakes, sure, we're in for a bit of a kicking, but it's a huge compliment that our viewers even think we're in the same game! Fans of Neverwinter Nights are pretty aware of what is possible in terms of animation, yet you seem take the engine even further. How do you accomplish that?A lot of it is refusing to recognize the implicit "rules" the engine offers in terms of animation and art in general, and realizing where something might be impossible in a game but easy for a movie.
We were having a real problem with this, until we realized we could easily add the hill into the set by breaking one of the editing "rules" that no tile can be more than 1000 units across. If we were making a module, that would probably be disastrous - walkmeshes on the tile wouldn't work properly, and so on. However, we didn't need to see the back of the hill. We didn't need to be able to walk on it. Hence, we could put a huge hill on a single tile and fool NWN into displaying a much larger map than it normally can. Obviously, our facial animation tool, TOGLFaces, was created the same way. NWN doesn't have features that would allow us to do lipsynching, and I'm sure the BioWare programmers would be relieved to hear we didn't feel up to reverse-engineering the source code of the entire game! However, it occurred to us that NWN is only one part of the process that gets the facial textures to our monitors. Hence, we jumped in on another part of the process, the OpenGL system, and wrote a program that substitutes facial textures, allowing us to perform lipsynch and facial expressions. Sometimes, of course, there are no rules to check or avoid. A lot of the great animation in BloodSpell was done the hard way - by our lead animator, Justin Hall, who puts in days of work on individual animations like Carrie and Jered on the altar. I remember the first time we saw that animation in the game. I think the awe-struck shrieking from the SC offices was audible across half of Edinburgh. How much work do you have left to produce on BloodSpell?
What is the toughest part of creating a work of this scope?Currently, I'd say it's just keeping going, and keeping all the balls in the air at once. Because we're releasing a series, we're doing the equivalent of creating 15 short films over six months. At any point we're not just concentrating on one task, we're working on releasing one episode at the same time as recording another, filming a third, and doing sound on a fourth. That schedule is unrelenting. Two weeks is a much shorter time than it sounds! If something falls behind it could potentially throw the whole series off. I've got to be constantly alert to that, and I spend a lot of time looking at schedules, making lists of tasks, and generally checking everything's working as planned. It's hard work, sure, but it's an awesome challenge, and damn good fun, too. ~
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We've been on the radio, talking to press - all that good stuff - and also continuing to work on developing the latest episodes of BloodSpell. To give you an idea, whilst you're just about to see Episode 4, as I write this, we're working on recording the video for Episode 8 and the voice for Episode 12, which will be released around September!
It's so hard not to just keep trying to polish and polish, tweak things, and so on. In our case, we had a big panic over something that came up in our preview showing and spent about a week trying to correct it - even though it would have meant a *ton* of reworking - before we decided to just go ahead and release.
For me, I'd say that's mission accomplished. I'd much rather make a series that some people love than one that everyone thinks is okay. I'm enjoying the controversy: people are arguing about our work, they're discussing it, they're thinking about it! That's just fantastic.
For example, there's a rule in NWN that no map can be over 32x32 tiles (I think). Obviously, for the steps to the Cathedral in Episode 2, that presented a problem for us. The city and steps alone take up virtually all of a 32-square map, and the hill the Cathedral sits on is about three times that size. (Trivia fact: the hill's exactly the same height, relative to a human, as Edinburgh Castle is to ground level.)
We're a little under half-way through production right now. Obviously, in terms of releasing episodes, we've still got a long way to go. Jered's story has barely even started, with 11 episodes still to go. However, in terms of production work, we've shot almost through to half-way, and we're just doing voice recording for the latter stages of the film.
