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 Features
Meet The Machinimakers: The 2006 Machinima
Festival Report
 Trash
Talk's Matt Dominianni
GS: How and why did you choose to do a talk show like
Trash Talk in machinima?
Matt Dominianni: In 1998, myself and the other guys in Ill Clan
wanted to get involved with video games. We were also filmmakers.
But
at
that
time, making
movies was nothing like what it’s like today. There was no
such thing as getting a Mac with iMovie. Video editing was very
expensive, and there was no way to do simple animation. We were
Quake players together and we decided, why not give it
a try and see if we can use [Quake] to make a movie.
And this was 1998, where one or two other people had made a machinima
movie before us. We made a movie called Apartment
Hunting (.mov), and
ever since we’ve been continuing with that. We took the character
in Quake who, if he’s not holding a gun is holding
an axe, and we made him look like a lumberjack. So our characters
were
Larry and Lenny lumberjack. And basically the show was they walked
around one of the Quake maps and talked about how they
were getting an apartment there. It went over really well; it’s
still on Wired’s Animation Express. Since then we’ve
continued with it. We now we do it a little bit more professionally.
We do some commercials and things like that, and we perform live
in front of an audience.
GS: How do you make Trash Talk? What kind of software
and technical constraints you have?
MD: Unlike other machinima filmmakers, we don’t use existing
game assets. We create all our own assets and do all our own programming.
We’ve created our own virtual television studio with a camera
that can teleport to one location to another, and characters can
be controlled in real-time. They have facial animation and other
gestures, and we actually control them like puppets, and interact
with the audience. We’re one of the few
people who do Machinima that way.
GS: What software do you use?
MD: We use the Torque game engine by Garage Games. It’s
one of the few game engines where, for 100 bucks, you can down
get into the
source code and change whatever you want. Whereas with some of
the other games, you can only make mods. We used to use Quake and Quake
2, but now we use Torque because you can really get in
and change things.
GS: Are there copyright issues with Torque?
MD: Basically with Torque, it’s not a game. It’s just
a game engine, and every asset we made ourselves. Ill Will is a
character we made just for this show. We did that with intellectual
property in mind. We don’t want to turn around one day when
it’s time to sell DVDs, or time to move on, and suddenly
Microsoft owns our characters.
GS: What are the most popular episodes of Trash talk?
MD: We did an episode in which Ill Will takes a vacation in Second
Life. That was a funny one because we got to see that crazy
sex, S&M, bondage stuff that goes on in Second Life.
So that went over well! And our most popular episode was the
music video (.mov) we
did for Jonathon Colton’s Code Monkey’s song. And that
song is up for best original music today.
GS: Who is your audience? Does Trash Talk crossover to non-gamers?
MD: That is a damn good question. I have no idea who my audience
is. We have a place you can make comments on our website. We found
because we do a talk show on games, a lot of times what will happen
is fans of that game will come and comment. Of course, what happens
is that the Counterstrike players come, and they’re all a
bunch of 13 year olds, who don’t have anything good to say.
But then we did an episode on Red Orchestra, a WWII game.
I think most of the players of that game are a lot older, and their
comments
were written in proper English. They seemed to enjoy the humor.
I think we've got a bit of gamer crowd, but it’s an older
gamer crowd. And we’re crossing over. The last episode wasn’t
on games at all; it was about Youtube. We’re trying to branch
out from having it be a gaming talk show to having it be an Internet
culture talk show. It just happens to be hosted by a video game
character.
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