

Valve hands over its own movie-making tools to gamers - yitchelle
http://www.gizmag.com/valve-source-filmmaker/23180/

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zacharypinter
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.

~~~
vibrunazo
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!

~~~
thenomad
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.

~~~
vibrunazo
> 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".

That's one of the first problems I've ever tried to solve, back when I was
writing chat bots. Fortunately, building a robot that can write human readable
text from structured data, is many order of magnitudes easier than building
robots that does the opposite. Pattern recognition is what's keeping current
chat bots so dumb. But we actually already have some really good bots that
write text reports. You probably already read news/sports reports written by
bots and never noticed.

I believe that's the way for future tools. Users give very basic structured
data (who's the protagonist, what does he do, did he die at the end?). And
robots transform that data into text, movie scripts or whatever.

> Even designing a tool allowing a person without experience to come up with
> camera angles and sequences

You don't need to do that. Bloggers don't need to understand HTML nor CSS. A
good tool would give higher layers of abstractions to choose, which were
designed internally by professionals. And the user shouldn't even need to know
what good angles or lighting is.

~~~
Argorak
The Blogger anology is flawed. Bloggers don't need to know HTML and CSS
because they are judged by the quality of their medium, which is text.
Perspective is essential for a visual medium, you can't abstract it out, you
can only help and support.

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pgrote
The site:

<http://sourcefilmmaker.com/>

Wiki discussing the how tos:

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

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

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

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

~~~
philo23
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.

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

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

~~~
teamonkey
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
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.

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charliebrown
meet THE pyro, not "a pyro".

