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The Making of Stolen Life By Director Peter Rasmussen

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Introduction by Randy Sluganski

A few years ago, I received an email from Peter Rasmussen, an accomplished Australian film director/writer who has worked as writer on the films  In the Winter Dark and Mad Bomber in Love & wrote and directed The Picture Woman .   His  machinima movies are Killer Robot and his newest effort Stolen Life (which is the subject of his article).  Peter was searching for Chris Jones - known to the adventure community as the co-creator of the Tex Murphy computer game series – to play a role in his newest film.   I later received the following email from Peter:

"Some months ago you helped me track down Chris Jones. I thought you and Just Adventure readers might like to know the project has advanced now to the point where the Australian director Jackie Turnure will be flying to Salt Lake City to do a voice record with Chris Jones in late November."

To be honest, at that time I didn’t have a clue as to what a machinima movie was and I was just secretly hoping that I had not led some lunatic to Chris’ doorstep!

Machinima movies are a new form of filmmaking that utilize computer technology – most commonly first-person shooter engines – to shoot films in the virtual reality of a game engine.  These films are produced using the tools – camera angles, level editors, etc. - and resources – backgrounds, characters, skins, etc. - available in a game.  In many ways, machinima movies could be compared to Independently Developed adventure games – they are made on a limited budget with a small, but talented and devoted, staff.  They are also a glimpse into the future of filmmaking.

As Just Adventure has had a long relationship with both Peter and Chris we thought this article would be of interest to our readers.

Stolen Life has already received six nominations and won one award at the Machinima film festival in New York.

Watch a trailer from Stolen Life here.

The Making of Stolen Life

The making of Stolen Life really starts in the midst of my previous movie Killer Robot. My feet never touched the ground. I took advantage of the momentum I had going with Killer Robot and just kept going into Stolen Life.

Killer Robot had taken me two years from blank page to online DVD sales. Stolen Life was more ambitious.  Killer Robot is a 70min Machinima Movie. It’s about a construction robot on Mars driven mad by guilt.  It uses synthetic voices so I was able to do it entirely solo. I built up a good foundation for the systems I would go on to use in Stolen Life.

I managed to sustain a routine where I spent the first hour of every day developing the script for Stolen Life. When Killer Robot was finished I had the first draft of Stolen Life completed. This regime worked incredibly well. Just getting all the stuff of the story out is a major part of the process for me. Once I have it on the page, even if it’s messy you have something to work with and rearrange. When the only thing you are doing is writing the work is in danger of becoming self-conscious and overwrought.  Having animation of Killer Robot as the main goal of the day took the pressure off.  It didn’t matter if I did a little or a lot just as long as the writing had been advanced.

Jackie Turnure had followed the progress of Killer Robot very closely.  She was very supportive and insightful.  Jackie and I had worked very well on a previous script “Bots”.  So I asked her if she would like to direct and Co-produce Stolen Life.  She has an extensive background in interactive media and film. We seem to share the same sense of humour.

I tend to write very lean. It’s easy for me to forget that the audience doesn’t know the story as well as I do.

I actually think this is a better way to come at it. I think it can be a real waste of a good story when a movie explains absolutely everything and doesn’t leave any room for interpretation.

But you have to have the right balance so Jackie would say, “Why is this character doing that?” I would look back and see that the scene just needed more context.

Technically speaking we should have finished the script before going on to build the universe it plays out in. The draft we had was pretty solid in the basic elements. I was fairly sure even then that any improvements would not involve drastic changes to the characters or the world they moved in. Even if something had to be changed the machinima process is so quick it was easy enough to make changes.

Even though logic says you create the characters first and build the locations to suit them, I don’t like working in a void. So I build the locations first.

My particular kind of machinima uses a conventional 3D graphics program where the animation is key-framed.  From there it is sent to a game engine where the action is played back instantly.  For all my machinima projects the game engine has always been 3Dgamestudio.

Before starting out on Stolen Life I made some tentative enquires with the leading game engine makers.  At that time they had no licensing arrangements set up for commercial machinima projects. I would have had to shell out the cash for a standard game licence.  For that much money we could have financed two projects.

3DGameStudio have a very simple copyright arrangement.  With the version I bought I show their logo up front and that’s copyright taken care of.  I’m the only machinima maker using 3DGameStudio that I am aware of.  GameStudio has its limitations but if you’re cunning you can get some spectacular results with it.  The famous French stills photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson had a very simple camera, effectively just a box with a lens and shutter.  All the bells and whistles in the world aren’t going to save you if you don’t know how to frame the shot.

The key framing for Killer Robot was done using low-end 3D graphic software called TrueSpace.  For Stolen Life this was done in Maya. I can highly recommend TrueSpace, especially for people just starting out. It’s so well layed out you can do a lot of experimentation before you need to go anywhere near the user’s guide.

But if TrueSpace is like a single engine Cessna Maya is like a Northrop Grumman Airbus. The cockpit can be a bit daunting at first. The trick is to just stop looking at all those dials and leavers. You only need a handful of them to do amazing things and transport your audience.

I love working with Maya because the scripting language it uses is the code that runs the whole program.  If you want to know the code for a particular action just click the relevant button and the code appears in the Maya scripting window, like candy out of a vending machine.  Put this in a loop and you can automate the action instead of having to do the same repeated actions every time.  Why don’t all professional programs do this?  It’s much more powerful than macros.  And I’d suggest maybe even easier.

Game studio is game authoring software.  It has a lot of code already written for base elements of popular video games like shooters.  It is very open and versatile but has no tools set up for creating machinima.  So one of the biggest jobs was getting Maya and GameStudio to talk to each other.  I kept this as simple as possible.  The scenes are key-framed in Maya.  I send all the xyz and pan tilt roll coordinates for each frame to a text file. This is then read by GameStudio.  Typically I would start with the basic choreography of the characters in the scene.  In GameStudio I can unlock the camera and watch the “dance” of the action run back and fourth with dialogue in real time rendered, as it will appear in the final film.  No waiting.  No guess work required. It’s like using video editing software except that you can go into the picture and look at it from anywhere.

This seems so simple, but it’s this that is at the heart of what makes machinima so powerful. I have my hands directly on the “clay” of the scene.  I can tweak and look tweak and look until it’s right.

There were many times when I would start out on a scene that at first seemed like it was only going to be a bridge between the one before and after. But unsatisfied I would keep walking that camera around and working the elements because I knew there was more.  Toward the end of the day I would make an adjustment and then carefully make one final adjustment. Suddenly it would all click.  And I would have a scene that worked so well I would look forward to seeing it again and again on future run throughs.

It sounds terribly mundane but one of the things that struck me about a project like this is file management.  As anyone who has done a large project knows they produce an insane quantity of computer files.  It’s so easy for this side of things to burn up a lot of vital creative energy.  So I spent a lot of time writing time saving computer code routines for processes I knew would be repeated daily over the years.

In animation it doesn’t seem to matter how well thought out the production system is there is always an exception.  There is always something that needs to have a special set up and has to be worked through manually.

While working with Hugh Handcock on the distribution of Killer Robot Hugh asked if I knew anyone famous who would like to write a supportive quote for the cover of The Killer Robot DVD.  I don’t know anyone famous.

I am a great fan of the Tex Murphy interactive adventures (Link). I wondered if Chris Jones would like to say something nice about Killer Robot.  Tex Murphy is an innovative story in an innovative format.  Chris Jones was the first developer to put a five CD game on DVD ROM.  So I thought he might be supportive of a project that was trying to do something original.

While turning this over in my mind I realise Chris was the perfect performer to play the lead in Stolen Life. I had a hell of a time tracking him down. I finally stumbled over an e-mail address for a director that Chris had worked with on one of the Tex Murphy adventures.  I finally got a short reply back from Chris. I sent him the script and the Killer Robot DVD.  He liked what he saw and we started negotiations.

Emboldened by Chris’s response to the project I started to think about who should play opposite him.  I thought in terms of who would be perfect for the part rather than who would be available.

I remembered seeing Claudia Black in Farscape. She has a wonderful ability to be feminine and playful and in the same moment powerful and dangerous. We sent a brief presentation to Claudia Black’s agent describing the project and the machinima process. We got a very quick reply. Claudia liked the project. We started negotiations. That was a great day.

In an interview during the voice recording Claudia said she was attracted to the project because of the quality of the script and because she was thrilled at the opportunity to be involved in a production that uses this new medium of machinima.

The local government funding bodies have been very good to me in the past on more conventional projects but this one was a bit too unusual for them so rather than loosing time hustling for alternative funding we decided to bankroll it ourselves.

Claudia was very busy on Stargate at the time. We drew up a number of plans to fly either Claudia to Salt Lake or Chris to Canada or both of them to Sydney. Whatever we did it had to be within our “back pocket” budget. Whatever we did we could not get them in the same place at the same time.

We ended up recording Claudia with the rest of the cast in Sydney and recording Chris in Salt Lake at a later stage.

I had animated as many “MOS” scenes as I could to make best use of the time leading up to the record. MOS is Hollywood jargon that comes from some of the old German directors “Mit out sound”.

There was about a week of idle time where I had done as much as I could do and was just waiting to get my hands on the yet to be recorded dialogue tracks.

I regret not having a dedicated making of video and stills photographer during the record. From pre-publicity to the DVD extras everyone wants pictures of the cast and the process and also because it was a great bunch of days.

The Beamo Music studio is an up market sound recording studio whose bread and butter is sound production for glossy commercials.

George Turnure our sound designer has done a lot of work there so they gave us a day rate that was equivalent to their usual hourly rate. They also wanted a chance to move into features and saw involvement in Stolen Life as a positive step.

I pride myself on being quick to pick up subtle details. The first thing I noticed about Claudia on seeing her in person was that she was very very pregnant.

She was so relaxed and witty and charming but focused like a laser on the work when the record button was hit. She came with a fully formed idea of what her character and the scene needed but energetically applied herself to alternative ways of working the script. With some actors if you ask them for an adjustment to what they did on the first take they will go to the other extreme. With Claudia she hits the mark exactly.

Jackie Turnure created a relaxed and very social atmosphere at the recording.

At the same time she had a fierce grip on whatever it took to make sure we had everything we needed in the can before the record was over.

When you’re in the middle of voice recording for an 80min movie and you’ve done seven takes of the same phrase it can be easy to delude yourself that what you want must be in there somewhere. But if you didn’t hear it you don’t have it.

Occasionally I would feel that we were in danger of letting some detail slip through the cracks. I would move to speak. Before I had uttered a word Jackie would give the direction for the element that was giving me concern and we would have it. 

Marty Murphy has amazing skill with voices. He found the voice for Doc straight away. The assistant took a little longer. Jackie and he worked through the qualities the assistant had to have. He achieved that seemingly contradictory balance of the flat personaless machine voice but could fill it with attitude or pathos when the scene called for it.

On the last day of the record I noticed the traffic was a bit slow on the way to the studio. Apparently some underground excavations had collapsed under part of the main road I was coming in on. I arrived an hour late. But by this time we were in the swing of things so we got back to business and got everything we needed.

Local film journalist Marc Fennell was doing a series on new media. For his episode on machinima we invited him to the last day of our record.

I didn’t realise how tired I was until his interview.  I found myself drying up in mid sentence.  He was very good about it and said he had plenty of material for his piece.

Jackie flew to Salt Lake City to record Chris Jones.

I listened to the record via Skype from Sydney. For me the record started at 3am. I was more jet lagged than Jackie. We had cut together a guide track from the Sydney record leaving gaps for Chris’s lines.

Jackie was impressed to discover Chris has never had formal training as an actor. He’s a natural. In my opinion he’s got more discipline and pure talent than many actors who have had a long career in the business. Being a creator in his own right he has a nuanced understanding for what a scene needs in the context of the overarching story.

Very early in the production we were contacted by Denise Gideon who runs a Farscape fan site called SEScapers.  Denise’s seemingly endless enthusiasm for our project was a great source of energy for Jackie and I.  She pushed for a screening of the trailer at Dragoncon in Atlanta Georgia

By pure coincidence Jackie was going to a games conference in Texas the week after so her boss Peter Giles very kindly arranged it so she could go a week early to attend the Dragoncon screening. This led to a television interview and a number of podcasts and articles. We regularly receive enthusiastic e-mails from dedicated fans of Chris Jones and Claudia Black.

I knew Stolen Life would take longer than Killer Robot even with a team of skilled professionals moving things along. The quality improves but keeping everyone focused on the same project takes a lot of careful communication and time. With people working for deferred wages we had to be versatile enough to let people take paid work when it came up.

Even though most of the cast and crew is located in Sydney most of the making of Stolen Life was by correspondence. This was mostly because of time constraints. We were often prevented from getting together because of people’s paid work commitments. But it still went pretty smoothly and some element of the production was always being advanced in one way or another.

So finally we have the beautiful performances and the character models and locations. Now it has to move all together like one thing. The animation process took nine or ten months

The backbone of the process is the sound track. Each frame is advanced in GameStudio depending on where we are in the sound. I would carefully go through each take for a scene and edit them together using the actor’s delivery to guide the timing. Once I had a dialogue track that sounded right I would keyframe the choreography of the action in Maya and then watch it play out in GameStudio.

No matter how many times I had to play the scenes through over the months I never got tired of hearing those performances. Claudia got things out of a scene I didn’t realise were there. Chris has a great sense of humour. He can put a witty twist on a line without losing any of the drama or tension. I remember accidentally starting up one of Chris’s lines for an upcoming scene. The way he delivered the line was so playfully smug I laughed out loud. Even before I had checked I knew that would be the take I would use.

George Turnure only had three weeks to create the entire sound design for this 80min sound track. He delivered an astonishing level of detail. Even so we could manage to find changes.  We asked him for a couple of sound effects.  He had to go straight on to a cash gig.  The next day he delivered more than we had asked for.

This being a detective story I would have been content with a music score in the style of a forties “B” grade movie.

Phillip Johnston the composer had the amazing ability to deliver music that evoked the noir mood while at the same time making it utterly science fiction.

Phillip complemented Jackie and I on being very articulate on what we wanted for each part of the film.

I might have a general idea of what would work for a scene.

Phillip would often offer something quite different but absolutely perfect in a totally unexpected way.

He uses a magnificently haunting piece at an important point late in the film. I was so captivated by this piece I asked if a variation could be used to open and close the film. The opening music in the trailer was what was originally intended. The version now at the end of the film is a very sparse “dance” of two saxophones. Philip explained that the piece has no musical centre. The way I understand that is that the silences be come so rich because you are kept anticipating the next note. I can’t resist comparing it to a binary star system where two suns revolve around each other.

Seeing the animation with the music was like experiencing the film for the first time all over again. The glass wall between you and the story is broken and you walk in.

Lucas Bone the sound mixer is a true artist. It’s so amazing what happens in the sound mix. It’s like suddenly every element of the production is pulled into focus.

Each element has to be loud enough to touch the audience but not so loud that it’s overwhelming. But it’s not just a matter of being able to hear everything. It’s in the balance between the music and effects and dialogue. It’s in the relationship created between them.

In some scenes there can be a lot going on and you never loose track of what is being said. In other scenes it all has to be driven by the music. It’s a thing that has to be discovered scene by scene.

Time for the Machinima Film Festival in New York.

In 2006 it was a two-day festival. With so many entries we could only submit seven minutes of Stolen Life. This actually worked out quite well because the mix was not finished.

We received six nominations. One of them was for visual style witch surprised me because I haven’t had that much experience with 3D art. Oh well. Phillip won for Best Music. And so he should.

Finally the film was locked off.

So now we are in uncharted territory. We have to find the right distributor and the right deal. Once we have that we can promote it over what is now called the “long tail”. The old model uses a big splash cinema release to draw as much attention to the film as possible in one big blast. The success of the movie is measured by how sharp or gradual the drop off in interest is after the first week. This approach requires truckloads of money and if you get it wrong there are no second chances.

Now with the Internet once a title is available to buy online you can keep pushing the project as long as you have energy for it with viral campaigns and word of mouth and blogs and forums and what ever else you can think of. It’s all about the right kind of energy applied in the right way. Bring it on.

The reason for the success of this project so far was clear at our wrap party. It was a great bunch of people at one regular sized table.

Peter Rasmussen
Nanoflix Productions
http://www.Nanoflix.net