John Gaeta, Academy Award winning visual effects guru, recently spoke to BoingBoing about his upcoming Ninja Assassin project. Along they way, he offers some insight into “hybrid entertainment”, and how he believes video games and movies will soon merge into a new interactive media.
They will become “content simulation engines ” which is something that we re already beginning to see in limited “sand box” games like GRAND THEFT AUTO IV and FALLOUT 3. He suggests that average kids will be able to use these engines to generate reasonably good movies which again is already happening with original machinma films created almost entirely with digital assets found within games like WORLD OF WARCRAFT and HALO.
Something like this has been long predicted, ever since people first began making Machinima videos with the original Quake engine, and groups like Rooster Teeth have proven it viable with the success of their Red vs Blue series. But doing so requires ongoing improvements in Realtime graphics rendering used in engines, and probably a collaboration with realtime graphics hardware companies to optimize performance.
So in the end, all us Vis Scientists and Gamers win either way 🙂
via ‘Matrix’ visual effects supervisor John Gaeta on ‘Ninja Assassin’ and the future of interactive digital media.
What John Gaeta is talking about is no less then a medium format revolution in the making. Maybe as big as the invention of cinema or video games themselves.
Machinima is like the first baby step.
He seems to be connecting dots between what he has learned about with total performance and image capture in the Matrix Trilogy(which is basically vr shot to film), and focusing it into interactive gaming platforms. He is talking about making common universe settings in game and film and making them the exact same in quality and visual presentation with “trapdoors” between… and if I am reading it correctly, he is talking about layering “filmed” or digitized? 2d or 3d performances of real humans/actors and placing them into some form of hybrid scenery that you can also play inside.
That’s mind blowing in it’s implications and at the same time absolutely a common sense idea. Sounds like the film industry should jump on this now while they still have a young audience to steer.
As for Ninja .. if these 87/11 guys were part of making Matrix martial arts super “moments”, like Gaeta, and under the teachings of legendary kung fu director Woo Ping, they must be America’s best.
– ms. gmr / nyc crew