Valve hands over its own movie-making tools to gamers

http://www.gizmag.com/valve-source-filmmaker/23180/

by yitchelle • 14 years ago

96 28 14 years ago

gizmag.com

pgrote• 14 years ago

The site:

http://sourcefilmmaker.com/

Wiki discussing the how tos:

http://sourcefilmmaker.wikia.com/wiki/Source_Filmmaker_Wiki

charliebrown• 14 years ago

meet THE pyro, not "a pyro".

zacharypinter• 14 years ago

This is the sort of thing I was thinking of when reading the Kill Hollywood RFS (http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html).

Who says you need a huge budget to bring a great science fiction story to life? Who says you have to dumb down the story to recoup that budget through a wider audience?

Once you can make movies, complete with special effects, on a home computer with a small team and a small budget, the variety and depth of content is bound to explode. I can't wait to watch all the interesting new stories that emerge from this type of technology.

vibrunazo2• 14 years ago

Shameless plug, not only I perfectly agree. But I've been working on exactly that in the last few months :)

I can't think of a better "take the moral highroad" solution to the problems created by the MAFIAA and IP in general than to simply create our own content, independent of their little bubble of crap. And the awesome news is that there's a lot of room for improvement in current content creation tools. There's just so much we can do to reduce cost and time to produce multimedia content. We have so many technology that are barely being touched by current tools. Because they're stuck in their incumbent sluggish giant position.

And that's where startups come into play! We have no ties to old incumbent technologies. We're free to innovate and completely re-imagine how content is created. Look at what wordpress made for publishing websites. Today any random non tech person can say "hey, I just had an idea, let me make a website about it". Imagine if you could say the same for movies "hey, I just had an idea, let me just make a full AAA movie about it really quick". The Valve filmmaker is incredibly in the right direction. But it's not even at 1% of where we can go.

Do you want to kill Hollywood? Then build awesome tools that allows anyone to build their own content!

EwanG2• 14 years ago

The one tool that I've been looking for the last few years has been a decent text-to-voice tool. I did do one series using some of the tools out there as of a couple years ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oZ6TxrkrqE as one example), but the results were less than wonderful.

ks• 14 years ago

I have always hoped that marketplaces such as iTunes, Google Play, Steam etc. are something that will only be necessary until consumers get used to buying stuff online.

A better future is one where each content producer would just publish meta data in an open format that others could redistribute. In the meta data there would be a link to a web service using a standard format for buying/downloading the content.

Publishers could provide affiliate programs as an incentive for creating innovative ways of distributing the content. There would still be room for iTunes as an aggregator or a service for payment/downloading, but we would not rely on a few gatekeepers for our content. By providing the meta data in an open format it will enable anyone to distribute content. We could have a "Hacker Movies" where people submit movies and vote them up or other possibilities that would be up to others to imagine.

thenomad3• 14 years ago

It's worth noting that currently, the technology doesn't even exist to say "hey, I just had an idea, let me just write a full novel about it really quick". And making a feature film is orders of magnitude harder, and encompasses many, many more tasks, than writing a book. (I've done both.)

Having been working in this space for 15 years now, it's definitely a hard problem, and one encompassing multiple other hard problems within it. Even designing a tool allowing a person without experience to come up with camera angles and sequences - just cameras, nothing else - in a manner comparable to a Hollywood feature is very, very hard - I've seen multiple research projects fail at it.

None of which, incidentally, is intended to say anyone shouldn't work at it! If we can create a tool that gets anywhere near to that ideal, it'll be a fantastic advance for humanity as a whole.

rhinosix• 14 years ago

It's going to be a bright future for creators and audiences when the physical and political barriers to entry come down.

I’m imagining a digital version of the entire Hollywood/ gaming worlds: online planning and development, digital movie/ game locations, acted in, tested, filmed all at the same time. Then films/ games can be distributed, and artists, developers, screenwriters, etc. can receive a passive income when a product containing their work is sold.

In the beginning we're going to see some amateur work, like the beginnings of the physical film and game industries. But as it starts to mature we'll have new specialists in direction, acting, writing and world design.

Think about what can do with elements of massively multiplayer online collaboration, LEAP, home motion/ model capture (Kinect 2.0).

lmm• 14 years ago

Does it work? I clicked the link, filled in the survey, and don't seem to have an invite.

philo23• 14 years ago

You have to first be accepted into their beta.

Next time you open Steam once they accept you, you'll see a message in the deals popup that comes up from time to time.

Bjartr• 14 years ago

Sign puts you on a list to get an invite eventually.

Buzaga• 14 years ago

anyone else thinks they'll be building a market around this too?

buying/selling models, scenarios, props... seems like another jackpot for Valve

rjsamson• 14 years ago

That's definitely where I see this going. A market like that can make Valve a ton of money, but also help support a new generation of indie film makers.

easp• 14 years ago

Yeah, I expect so, but I think the real payoff for Valve will be facilitating monetization of the finished films.

SwellJoe• 14 years ago

Yep, they're a mass-market company, selling millions of units at sub-$50 prices. The bestselling resources will probably sell a few thousand copies, and most will probably only sell hundreds. It may be more cost-effective for them to focus entirely on the mass-market side, where they've proven they're extremely competent (among the best in their industry), and let others figure out the smaller volume stuff. But, maybe a marketplace would be cool/profitable. They have begun to move in that direction for third party game add-ons, though I think they're all free, so far, there's nothing stopping them from adding them to the store.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

They already do. Tradable clothes, hats, guns are already part of the TF2 economy. You can bet that this has just inflated the prices of items that'll look good in one of these movies.

batterseapower• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can use the tradeable assets in your films without owning them. You only need to have them in your inventory if you want to use them in the game proper.

jhuckestein• 14 years ago

If I were Valve I'd distribute the films on Steam and take a small, transparent cut. I vaguely recall some movie being delivered via Steam already. It makes a lot of sense and I can't wait to see what comes out of it.

Groxx• 14 years ago

That would be Indie Game: The Movie http://buy.indiegamethemovie.com/

thenomad3• 14 years ago

See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4168283 , where Source Filmmaker was also discussed.

Valve hands over its own movie-making tools to gamers

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