Well, alright: ONE giant Nazi robot. But there may also be other giant robots of differing ideologies in this movie. I don’t want to tip my hand.
Found via Dan’s Data — he’s got links to the original, full-resolution version. It’s an amateur effort put together by a group of Italian CG artists (hence the occasionally laughable voice-acting).
Mostly this is just awesome. But I can’t resist the opportunity to use a giant Nazi robot as a pretense for pontification — namely, about the capacity for entertainment produced by hobbyists to compete directly with the stuff made by professionals. I’ve argued this point in the past, but have generally met with some skepticism about its capacity to apply to movies. I like to cite the fan-produced movie Star Wars: Revelations when I make this case. It’s undeniably impressive from a technical perspective, but its lousy acting is an admitted sticking point for my larger argument.
This clip (“Code Guardian”) suffers from the same problems as SW:R — it looks pretty good, but the voice acting is lousy and the script, to the extent that there is one, couldn’t be called remarkable. Still, I think this is a temporary problem. Perhaps it’s my own prejudices showing, but I think there’s a higher barrier to producing passable CG work than there is to producing a passable action/adventure screenplay or voiceover. Becoming adept at any of these tasks requires a lot of practice and/or talent, but only one discipline requires specialized tools and training. So in a way it’s surprising to see the more technical disciplines become the first to succeed at producing high-quality hobbyist entertainment. But in another way it isn’t surprising at all.
People participate in free software endeavors for a lot of reasons, but prestige and social interaction surely rank high on the list. The nature of the internet facilitates the free exchange of information, and the nature of technical disciplines results in heavy internet use by those who practice them. That makes the net a good place to for CG artists to compete for prestige and participate in communities like Worth1000. Other, less wired professions — like, say, voiceover actors — haven’t started generating and giving away online content in the same way.
But I think that’s just a temporary problem — nerdiness is not a prerequisite for participation in these communities. Bands are an obvious example of a creative class that’s thoroughly adopted the internet despite not making a living by sitting in front of a computer. The net’s power as a promotional tool brought musicians online, and now there’s a ton of free, professional-quality music available from non-professionals — and not all of it is being used as a promotional mechanism (look at Song Fight for a good, community-inspired example of music creation). Similarly, the graphics, documentation and internationalization of the average medium-to-large open source project are hugely better than they were just a few years ago. Or look at Wikipedia, where a prestige economy has led a swarm of hobbyist writers and editors to competitively product encyclopedia articles, of all things.
The actors and screenwriters haven’t yet arrived in force, but I think they will. The net’s simply too good of a promotional tool for them not to. When they do they’ll build communities, and before you know it they’ll be contributing to just-for-fun projects, too. I have a hard time imagining that as the accessibility of technology and the prestige of online interaction inevitably increase, the gap between professional and hobbyist endeavors won’t continue to shrink.
UPDATE: One of Matt’s commenters brought up Red Vs. Blue. Of course! It’s a perfect example of the other side of the coin: writers in search of technologists. In this case, they had a script but no CG geeks. They got around the problem by using the Halo engine to make machinima (and, as the series progressed, grew in their own technical sophistication). If people like the RvB writers teamed up with people like the Code Guardian creators, they might end up with a pretty impressive product.
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