WoW Insider Interview: Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram from Strange Company

I think the title of "Godfather of Machinima" might already be claimed (by either Tristan Pope or Paul Marino, depending on who you ask), but when the history books are all written on the art of making films with 3D engines, I'll be darned if the folks at Strange Company don't at least get listed as uncles and aunts. They've been making films from games since before it was cool to do so, and both Hugh Hancock, Strange Company's founder, and Johnnie Ingram, have been tireless advocates of the form.

They've collaborated both on a book called Machinima for Dummies (part of the Dummies series-- they're blogging heavily about it at machinimafordummies.com), and on BloodSpell, a machinima feature-length film which is being released officially this weekend at Machinima Europe, a festival in which Hugh will be part of the review panel.

WoW Insider got an exclusive chance to speak with these two Uncles of Machinima before their big premiere this coming weekend about how to make machinima (for dummies, of course), machinima's main "competition," how tough it is to make a living doing what Strange Company does, and what's next for the makers of BloodSpell. Read on for the complete interview. Thanks to Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram for speaking with us, and we with them the best of luck at the festival this weekend!

WoW Insider: So how did you both get started in machinima? At what point in what game were you playing that you said, "this would be a great canvas for a story of mine"?

Hugh Hancock: For me, it all started when I was both playing and writing about Quake (I), back in 1997. Because I was very involved in that scene, I actually saw the very first Machinima films (Quake Movies", as they were called back then) being created. At the time I was also doing a lot of theater and fiction writing, and when some friends of mine started making their own Quake Movie, I offered to help out with the writing.

Projects of mine tend to spiral. I accidentally ended up directing too, and the project turned into Eschaton: Darkening Twilight, the first part of our Eschaton series, and the first Machinima film I made.

It was a revelation. For the first time, technology existed that let me tell the kinds of stories I want to tell as films without spending millions of dollars.

And so, it was whilst preparing for the second part of that series (whilst in my first year of University) that I decided that Machinima was so significant, and so powerful, that I was going to quit Uni to found a company making and promoting it: Strange Company.

Ten years later, I've written a book (Machinima for Dummies), made a feature film (BloodSpell), and traveled all over the world as a result of that decision. So, you know, yay.

Johnnie Ingram: Actually, my early experiences of machinima were from a fan's standpoint, rather than that of a creator. I watched the machinima scene with fascination for several years before I even tried to make anything. I was excited by the potential of machinima as a storytelling tool, as evidenced by several early machinima pieces (Anna, Ozymandias, Apartment Huntin'). It was only when I moved to Scotland and joined Strange Company that I really started to work seriously as a machinima creator (my earliest machinima attempts sit in disgrace on an old hard-drive somewhere in my attic, and will never been seen by anyone, ever).

Machinima's main "competition", so to speak, seems to be animation. And certainly with more and more advanced CGI, they're growing closer and closer together. So what exactly separates "machinima" from "animation", or are they just two parts of the same thing? What makes machinima machinima? Does it have to be a game?

HH: Actually, I'd say that in many ways Machinima's "competition" is digital video. Animation might look similar to Machinima, but in terms of capabilities they're miles apart.

The official definition of Machinima, according to the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences is "filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies". I like that definition - however, it does miss out one important aspect.

Basically, Machinima is to 3D CGI what puppetry, like The Muppets, is to stop-motion animation like Wallace and Gromit. Where an animator will painstakingly craft the movement of his characters, we "puppet" them using higher-level controls, in real-time, to create something that looks similar, but is much faster to make.

Sometimes we're doing that live on an actual game set, as Tristan Pope did with his Converse commercial. Sometimes we're running animations from a list, like most WoW Machinima creators do with the Model Viewer. And sometimes we're writing task lists for the computer to run for us, as filmmakers like Friedrich Kirschner do.

Machinima doesn't have to use a game - in fact, there are significant advantages to not using a game, like the lack of commercial restrictions. That's one reason why a lot of serious Machinima creators are moving to working in Second Life, iClone, Moviestorm, or other commercial Machinima tools these days (yes, there are commercial Machinima tools - Moviestorm is in many ways the most advanced, although Second Life is very popular too).

But of course there are big advantages to working in a game too - like the range of characters, sets and props you get from something like WoW.

JI: We're also not trying to compete with animation on direct level (although opinions on this vary across the machinima community!). The great thing about machinima – the "Unique Selling Point," if you will – is the speed and ease at which anyone can tell a story. One person with one computer and one game can tell virtually any story they like. With the development of dedicated tools like the (free) machinima platform Moviestorm, you don't even need the game!

The obvious drawback to Machinima is that, in many cases, you're putting your own story in someone else's world. So what makes a good machinima engine? World of Warcraft is a very stylized, identifiable world, but lots of great machinima has come out of it. On the other hand, a place like Second Life is very open-ended and customizable, but I haven't seen nearly as much work come out of there. What makes a virtual world a good place to shoot a movie?

JI: There are a number of factors at work there. WoW is a great engine for machinima in many ways, although most work is actually done offline, using a combination of the WoW Model Viewer and the WoW Map Viewer. WoW is good for pulp, slightly cartoon-like fantasy, and not a lot else without some serious effort. The main reason that so much machinima is made in WoW is sheer strength of numbers. It's by far the most popular computer game in the entire history of the multiverse. You can't spit without hitting another WoW player nowadays.

At the risk of setting off the Shameless Plug Alarm, we have an entire chapter in Machinima For Dummies in which we discuss the pros and cons of over a dozen potential machinima creation platforms. There's no perfect engine – you're choice is always going to depend on what story you want to tell and the way in which you want to tell it.

HH: That depends on what movie you want to shoot.

World of Warcraft is a kick-ass engine if you want to make slightly stylised, cartoony fantasy movies. It's got all the assets - you can just lock and go. On the other hand, it sucks a bit more if you want to go for a more realistic style - if you're looking to make an adaptation of George R R Martin's Game of Thrones, for example, Lord of the Rings Online or Oblivion might be better.

And if you want to make a story about a young New York lawyer making it big in the city, well, it's just going to suck.

(We go into this in some depth in Machinima for Dummies, including a section purely on writing for WoW).

There are really three things that make a game engine more or less useful for Machinima: the art, the technology and the restrictions.

WoW, for example, has awesome art for a fantasy movie. If you want to make a fantasy movie, great. If not, you'll either have to make all your own art, or (as in WoW's case) you just won't be able to make your film.

The technology's obviously important. Half-Life 2 is currently leading in this area, in terms of graphics, physics, and so on. But there's an easily-overlooked aspect to that, which is ease of use - WoW filmmaking is comparatively very quick, easy, and fun, whereas filmmaking in other engines can be like pulling teeth.

Finally, the restrictions are very important. Are you even technically allowed to make Machinima? (According to a close reading of the EULA for WoW, you weren't until very recently). Are there tough restrictions on what you can do with Machinima in the engine? Can you sell your movies (important if you're making a big film that will take years of your life, or require you to work full-time)? Can you add or remove content from the game?

You can't really just choose one engine and say "that's it, that's the engine I use" - at least, not unless you want to work on similar movies forever, or unless you have a pro-level budget for art. At Strange Company, we choose each engine based on the project that we're currently developing - and then tailor the writing of that project to the engine we're working in.

Your book is called Machinima for Dummies. Let's say (this is all hypothetical of course) that I'm a dummy in terms of machinima, and I see something like Big Blue Dress, and I think: I could totally do that! Where should I start? Should I start writing and then try to film something, or just punch out a short movie on my own to learn the software? What's the easiest and best way for people who've never done this stuff to start doing it?

JI: You'd be right to think "I could totally do that." You totally could – the machinima aspect of it at least. What makes Big Blue Dress so good is the song. Without it, you'd be watching nothing more than a moderately interesting gameplay video. That's why Story is so important, why you should never just start filming with no idea of what you want to achieve. You'll quickly become stagnated, frustrated and disappointed.

WoW machinima is very easy to get the hang of. You'll need the Map Viewer and Model Viewer, the CameraPlus addon, and a copy of FRAPS. You could do a lot worse than have a copy of Machinima For Dummies on your desk, too – we have a big section all about WoW. Sorry – there goes that alarm again.

HH: At first, I'd say just play around. You might want to acquire a guide to filmmaking in WoW, or whatever engine you want to use, but basically, grab the tools (FRAPS, the Model Viewer, the Map Viewer, and a video editor, in the case of WoW), and have a play.

Once you've got some sense of how you work and what you want to make, then it's time to plan - and I'd definitely recommend starting by writing a script or storyboard for your movie. Comedy or music are definitely two good ways to start - either are quite popular, and it can be fairly simple to achieve a result that people will like.

Above all else, though, make sure your first film is *short*. That'll mean that you can finish it before you lose the will to live, and will also help you persuade other people to watch it before they do the same.

How many machinima films have you made at this point? Walk us, step-by-step, through your process of making, for example, BloodSpell. Do you write a script, storyboard and record the audio before you went in the Neverwinter Nights engine, or did you mess around with the engine first to see what was possible and write your story based on that? And how has your technique changed from when you first began making machinima until now?

HH: I've made - erm - lots of Machinima films. About 16 released, I think, and a bunch more (including another two feature projects) that were either abandoned or are still being developed. Mind you, I've been doing this full-time for a decade.

The way we make films now is very closely modelled on the way that Hollywood, in particular, makes its films and TV shows. We start with an approximate idea of the story we want to tell - sometimes that's a more-or-less developed first-draft script. Sometimes, as in BloodSpell's case, it's a bit more vague.

Then we'll choose an engine and work with it a bit, so that we can get an idea of what it does well and badly. In BloodSpell's case, that was Neverwinter Nights. Great lighting, sucky trees. What we learned about the engine influenced how we then wrote the story.

Then I design the story - and I'd like to point out that's very different from writing a script. I get in a big room with other writers connected with Strange Company, and we "break" the story, from major themes, down to acts, down to scenes. We don't write a word of script here – it's all about the events of the story.

(These days, I'm a big fan of writers' rooms. If you want to know more about how the process for writing a TV script, for example, works, I'd recommend some of the particularly fantastic writers' blogs out there, like Jane Espenson's blog or John Rogers' "Kung Fu Monkey" )

Then I write the script - at least, it's usually me. In theory we might work with other writers at some point, but I'm a control freak, so... For BloodSpell, that took a couple of months - it's a huge false economy to rush your script development.

I could write about scriptwriting and storytelling for hours - in fact, I nearly had to be forcibly removed for the keyboard when I wrote about it in the book - so I'll keep that bit brief here. Script happen. Script good.

Then we'll start working on pre-production for the movie - which could be anything from location scouting in WoW to building entire sets and characters for BloodSpell - whilst at the same time casting our actors.

Voice actors are HUGELY important to a Machinima film. If you look at the most successful Machinima movies, whether WoW or otherwise, you'll see that they all either don't have voice, or have tremendously gifted voice actors (think "The Return", for example, with Ezra Fergusson's fantastic performance).

We rehearse and record our actors just as you would in a normal animation or radio play. Top-quality recording kit is really cheap these days. During the rehearsal, the script - which in BloodSpell's case had already gone through four drafts - is refined and improved as we find the bits that, well, suck when the actors play them.

(I'll quote Harrison Ford here - "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it.")

At the same time, we'll also be iterating through and improving the sets and character designs. We'll be making custom props, if we need them, making new textures, and so on.

Obviously, how long this takes depends on the size of the film. For BloodSpell, it was 2 years, near enough. For our Fair Trade videos, it was more like 12 hours ("Hey, let's shoot in Oggrimar!" "Cool." "Right, let me fake up this quest text" "Cool.")

Having done all that, we actually shoot the damn thing. How we shoot depends very much on what engine we're using - in WoW, we'd shoot backgrounds and any other shots we could take in-game first, then move to the Model Viewer and Map Viewer and iterate through the rest of the shots.

Many directors will create "storyboards" - drawn images for each and every shot in the film - before they shoot. I tried that the conventional way, and it took too damn long (nearly a year for BloodSpell). Nowadays, I'll rough out storyboards a dozen shots at a time as we're shooting, and then use the fact that this is Machinima, dammit, to just re-create any shots that don't work later, in editing.

Then we'll move into editing the film. Initially, we'll assemble a rough edit, which is basically just all the footage slammed together and more or less cut into order. If we were doing a WoW film or something else where we're green-screening a lot of stuff together (like Modelviewer footage and game footage, for example), we'll do a rough assembly of all the green-screening, but boy will it be rough. Green edged Orcs ahoy.

(We edit on Final Cut Pro, for the ten of you who are interested! It kicks ass, and I can't recommend it highly enough.)

Then, we'll watch it, cringe, and commence re-cutting, re-ordering, removing the crap bits, re-shooting shots we didn't realise we needed, and so on. And then we'll watch it again. And cut more stuff. And fix bloopers ("oops, forgot to move the cursor out of shot there!"). And add more footage.

When we're finally happy, and are absolutely goddamn certain that what we've got would make Scorsese and Scott green with envy (as opposed to dodgy greenscreening), we'll take it and show it to a small group of people who haven't been involved in the film, at which point we will promptly realise just how far we have to go before we've got something that's actually good, as they pleasantly and politely tear it to shreds. Back to the editing suite. Cut, shoot, re-edit, blah.

After all that, we'll tidy up the greenscreen and video effects, add in subtle special effects using something like After Effects or Motion, run through and colour-correct the entire thing (game engines have a nasty tendancy to output desaturated or low-contrast footage, and you can really improve your work by tweaking the colour settings), and finally output it, upload it, and start on the process of shouting to the entire internet "Hey, look what we've done!"

You guys are fairly unique in that you run Strange Company, a for-profit company that makes professional machinima. What's the biggest challenge you've faced in trying to make a living off of machinima? I assume your biggest profits come from commercial work, not from "films" like BloodSpell – is that the case? Do you think that, in late 2007, it's possible to have a machinima-only film production company? Will it be possible in the future?

HH: Well, first of all, I'd challenge your quotation marks around the word "films". BloodSpell is a film (a feature film, to be precise). I'm a filmmaker. So is everyone else working in Machinima, to greater or lesser degrees of seriousness (or insanity, which is more or less the same thing). It looks different to 35mm or digital video, but you can tell a story in it, and that's what makes it a film.

Strange Company has been a full-time Machinima-only production company for a decade now, so it's certainly possible. (There are other pro Machinima companies, too, notably the Ill Clan in New York and Rooster Teeth in Texas). It's still a pretty hard way to make a living, though – the pickings can be slim.

These days, I make money by consulting on Machinima projects all over the world, as well as speaking at film festivals, games conferences, and even odder places. Sometimes we do commercial production work, but these days we have quite high standards for the work we accept – I've done my days in the salt-mines of commercial production, and I ain't going back.

BloodSpell, on the other hand, quite deliberately isn't a money-making project. That was a decision that we took four years ago when we started it - there were and are too many trade-offs involved in making it able to potentially generate cash.

Not being a money-maker is something that BloodSpell has in common with 99% of all first feature films. This is the reason we decided not to jump through all the hoops to make it potentially profitable - we knew that the odds of making enough money to even break even. Given that even people like Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers) didn't make money on their first film, we figured that we might as well plan to make the movie to get our names known, rather than to make cash, from the outset, and just keep costs low.

Of course, working in Machinima is a great way to do that.

JI: It's Hugh's company – I just work for them. In fact, a lot of the work that I've done for Strange Company (i.e., all my work on BloodSpell) has been entirely voluntary and unpaid. It is possible to make money from machinima, but it's far from easy. Until very recently, a significant proportion of my income came from my work as an independent web development contractor. Since the publication of Machinima For Dummies, I've been lucky enough to join the team at Moviestorm, so I now get paid to make, document and comment on machinima. Not everybody's that lucky though- it's a hard business road to walk down. I'd recommend anybody who'd contemplating it think long and hard before committing themselves.

And what could happen to make that easier? Festivals like Machinima Europe seem to be an excellent place for people to show off the stuff they're working on – will we ever see a machinima movie showing at Sundance or Cannes? Are the studios, or the networks, or any other content providers interested in showing this stuff? If not, what will it take for them to be?

HH: We've already seen Machinima movies at Sundance, Tribeca, and Annecy, not to mention MTV and the BBC.
HBO just aquired a Second Life Machinima film for a six-figure sum. I've done work for the BBC, Scottish Screen, and BAFTA. The last Machinima Film Festival was sponsored by the Independent Film Channel. I was talking to a TV company a couple of weeks ago about putting together a regular Machinima spot.

The funny thing here is that it's a general perception, particularly in the games world, that Machinima is this niche thing that hasn't attracted serious interest from "real" filmmakers. That couldn't be less true. The film and TV world are well on board with Machinima at this point - there have been articles about Machinima in Variety, in the Hollywood Reporter, in Entertainment Weekly. It's all happening – the film world is very excited about Machinima just now.

JI: I'd love to see a machinima movie at Cannes. I don't know that it's going to happen any time soon, but I'm not too worried if it doesn't.

Matt Hanson (the head honcho of the Swarm Of Angels project, and a great friend to the machinima community) insists that "cinema is dead". For the past few years, he's been advocating the advance of the new wave of content creators and online distributors, which he's dubbed "Cinema 2.0". I see no reason why the two can't happily co-exist. We're living through a revolution at the moment, one of the most important that has ever been. Remember all this – YouTube, Podcasting, blogging – your grandkids are going to ask you about it one day.

Or is that all necessary at all? Can machinima survive without going mainstream, or is it inevitable that at some point, all this great content will get noticed by people who don't even play games? Tools like Halo 3's Forge and Saved Films mean that machinima is easier to make than ever, which means there will be a lot more of it. Will it stay underground, like zines did in print media, or will the sheer flood of it mean that eventually, we'll see a Red vs. Blue series on NBC after The Office?

HH It's a good question.

I'm not convinced that a Machinima maker - or any filmmaker, for that matter - needs to give a rat's ass about TV or the cinema in order to succeed. It's well known, for example, that cinema distribution deals screw the filmmakers (like Neil Marshall, for example, who hasn't seen a penny of profits on his film "Dog Soldiers" despite £2.5m revenues at the box office) and that cinema releases tend to lose money (in 2003, 32 of the 70-odd films released at the UK box office sold less than 10,000 tickets).

By contrast, Red vs Blue was reported in the Wall Street Journal as having a turnover of more than $100,000. You do the math!

If you deliver your work direct to the public, through the internet, you get to keep 100% of the profits, as opposed to (at best) 1 or 2% of the profits from a distribution deal. Obviously, you don't have all the advantages someone being distributed by Miramax would have - but you can break even a lot sooner, and have a HELL of a lot more control.

That's the path we're taking right now with our work. We'll see how it goes.

As for whether we need to be "mainstream" - well, what do we mean by that?

On primetime TV? Well, Battlestar Galactica and Firefly were both there, and I think that the person in the street wouldn't say they were "mainstream".

On cinema screens? We're seeing subtitled anime getting wide release in the cinema now, and let's face it, Joe Q Public ain't going to see that. There really isn't a mainstream there any more either. It's all about niches of various sizes, and if you find the right niche, you can compete with the big media companies on their own terms – millions of viewers and serious revenue.

What's some of your favorite machinima that you haven't made?

JI: You're determined to set that alarm off again, aren't you? One of the chapters of Machinima For Dummies (awooga! awooga!) is entitled "Ten Machinima Films You Must Watch". We're doing a short presentation based on that list at the European Machinima Festival in a couple of weeks time [[adjust this depending on when the interview goes live, obviously]]. My own personal list of favourites changes all the time, but at the moment it includes films like Anna, The Return, The French Democracy, Male Restroom Etiquette and Ozymandias. (I know that last one is a Strange Company film, but it was released before I came to work for the company, so I can still pick it!)

HH If you want to see the list of films that Johnnie mentions (but without the oh-so-insightful commentary that you'd get in the dead-tree editing), you can see our top 10 over here.

However, my top three WoW Machinima, for example, would definitely include:

The Return: Rufus Cubed's brilliant story in WoW really put Warcraft filmmaking on the map for a lot of Machinima creators. Fantastic story, great acting, a rare drama that works.

Edge of Remorse: Jason Choi's fantastic Kurosawa-in-WoW styled piece is one of the poster children for Machinima right now, as far as I'm concerned, and I can't believe it hasn't gotten more press.


Hardware Store: Just because it's very, very, very funny. I notice it's now number 3 on Google searches for "Hardware store", too, which must annoy Home Depot... Fantastic compositing and a great sense of humour combining WoW and the song - I particularly like the tooltip for the Automatic Circumcisor.

Ed: Hardware Store is definitely one of my favorites, as well.

There are dozens of fantastic Machinima productions in WoW. I love Snacky's Journal, for example, as well as quite a bit of Oxhorn's work, everything Rufus Cubed have done, "The Internet Is For Porn" by Evilhoof and Flayed, Big Blue Dress, Nhym's videos (although more for the rapping than the Machinima), the various winners of the Ataris contest... Tons of cool stuff.

As for the videos that WoW people should watch in other engines?

Male Restroom Etiquette: Talk about breaking into the mainstream. 4.5 million views, rave reviews from conventional film and animation media, this is the Machinima film to show non-Machinima creators. http://z-studios.com/films/mre/

Still Seeing Breen: And again with the mainstream. Paul Marino made this film as a quick test of Half-Life 2. It ended up being picked up by MTV. Just amazing work - brilliant editing and lipsynch work. Talented git that he is.

A Mermaid's Tale: OK, so I'm a soppy old romantic. But this video, by premiere Sims 2 Machinima creators Kheri and Michelle, is still one of my favourites - and again, one of the best Machinima films ever to show to non-Machinima people.

Again, there are so many good Machinima creators out there. Check out www.mprem.com for more, or these days I'd also recommend the highlights over at www.machinima.com.

Tell us about what you did with BloodSpell. It's a series of episodes created in Neverwinter Nights, correct? Are you're premièring them all together at the Festival this weekend? Are the scenes all just put together into one feature-length movie, or are there separate titles within? What did you choose to do it this way rather than make a feature-length movie from the start?

HH: It's actually the other way around. BloodSpell is a feature film - a punk fantasy, to be exact, about a world where people are infected with magic in their blood, and are hunted by the dark Church of the Angels - which we initially released chopped up into episodes.

But we got so many requests for a full-length feature cut that we decided to spend an extra six months or so recutting it back to a feature - and at the same time, reshooting a lot of scenes that we'd learned how to do better.

So it's now a completely changed and polished feature film that tells the story of the Blooded and the Church from start to finish.

We've also taken the opportunity to remaster the audio for the entire movie, improving and polishing, as well as punching up a couple of the pieces of the punk soundtrack (which people seem to either love or hate).

We're going to be premiering it at the Machinima Europe festival this weekend, and then releasing it online on the 19th of October, less than a week later, at www.bloodspell.com. We're also planning an online premiere event with www.machiniplex.com, with interviews, chat and more.

A DVD is planned, right? What's the word on that – any release date? Any special features that you're thinking about including in the package?

JI: The word is Go. I'm not allowed to talk release dates – Hugh gets upset when I do – but I think I can officially say, Real Soon Now. The DVD is going to be released as a downloadable ISO, and will be jammed full of as many Pointless Extras (TM) as we can fit, including full drunken cast and crew commentaries, the original animatic storyboard and maybe even a soundtrack album.

HH: In an ideal world, which this may or may not turn out to be, the DVD will come out at the same time as the online release. It'll have commentaries from me and the writing team, Johnnie and the filming team, the cast and the post-production guys, as well as a bunch of documentaries detailing how we made the film from start to finish, and possibly some other fun stuff.

And what's next for Strange Company? Do you have another film in mind? What engines are you looking forward to working with – either games that are released now or games that are coming out soon?

JI: Well, a lot of my work for the foreseeable future will be tied up with Moviestorm, but you can expect to see my sticky fingerprints on whatever the heck Hugh decides to do next, too. There are quite a few engines that I have my eye on at the moment, but the ones I'm really interested in are the ones that put the power back into the hands of the users.

The recent open-sourcing of a big chunk of the Second Life codebase is going to produce some interesting stuff, as is the new version of Garrys Mod (for Half Life 2). I've got to say Moviestorm too – not just because I work for them, but because there's some serious potential there. I've been praising Moviestorm since long before they offered me a job, and I'll continue to do so. The cell-shader that's just been added to the Moviestorm beta is amazing.

HH: Next for me is a two-month break. I've been working pretty much flat-out all year, and I'm ready to spend some time in a darkened, heavily-padded room.

After that, it's looking suspiciously like the next project might be a non-Machinima cooking show! But Machinima-wise, I'm developing a few projects - I've got a couple of people interested in funding some of our work, and I'm talking to them, as well as developing ideas for another independent project, either series or feature film.

Top of the list at the moment are Steelwight, about swashbuckling Victorian swordsmen trapped in a city so bad it was sentenced to Hell, and Industrial, a series about sex, drums, mathematics and magic.

As far as engines – well, whatever major project I do next will be commercial, so it'll be one of the commercial Machinima platforms – probably Moviestorm or Motionbuilder. But I'll be keeping my hand in with smaller pieces, too, and quite a lot of that's likely to be WoW filmmaking. I've got a short series idea called "Apprentice of Cheese" that I'm working on – kinda a film noir in WoW – and I'm also interested in doing some hacking on the Modelviewer to make it a better Machinima tool.

What's going on at the Machinima Europe festival at the weekend, aside from the BloodSpell premiere?

It's going to be an exciting weekend, actually. There are a whole bunch of films showing, including some very cool WoW stuff. There'll be have panels on every aspect of Machinima, as well as some live performance
from the Red vs Blue guys. And of course there are the awards, when we get to find out who is going to be crowned king of this year's Machinima.

Plus, we're signing the book and talking about and showing some of our favourite films, and we plan to spend a lot of time in the bar, getting sloshed with European Machinima's finest.

Anything else you'd like to tell us?

JI: When I was twelve years old, I had a kitten that died because ... oh, I see. Something relevant. Well, we're blogging heavily over at www.machinimafordummies.com, releasing new (free) content, as well as news, tips and tricks. We'll be at Machinima Europe, so if you see us come say hi. We both suffer from a pathological condition that means we never get tired of talking about machinima.

HH: What he said. Except I didn't have a kitten. Awww.

I had a kitten, but it didn't die-- it's still alive and well and shedding all over the place. Thanks for speaking with us!