Approved by the liberty city department of sanitation

January 15, 2011 1:08 PM

The trashmaster (single link dailymotion) - a 1h20mn machinima movie made with gta IV
posted by motdiem2 (23 comments total)

(My pledge: I am never going to watch any online video that starts with a 30 sec. advertisement, no matter how great the video is supposed to be)
posted by growabrain at 2:48 PM on January 15, 2011

It's been around 2 hours, so hopefully soon some people will chime in and post what they thought of the video.
posted by paisley henosis at 2:57 PM on January 15, 2011

Comment from the video page:

Obviously a lot of work and technically very impressive, the soundtrack is especially well chosen. But unfortunately it's just not a very good screen-play. Every scene feels like an intro, there's no structure or pace. We need solid character development and a feeling that the narrative is going somewhere. Most of the shots are too long so it constantly feels like a scene-change. I watched about 3 minutes chunks, and I agree with this.

I did find one part with voice acting, and the voice acting was flat out *terrible*.

posted by paisley henosis at 3:03 PM on January 15, 2011

I watched the first 10 minutes thinking it would really develop into a watchable feature. Then it got boring and slow. When I noticed that comment complaining about lack of character development, I figured it was not going to pick up, so I quit. I was really starting to believe I was going to intentionally watch and enjoy an entire feature made on GTA IV, though, and that was exciting while it lasted.
posted by scrowdid at 3:09 PM on January 15, 2011

I was just about to remark on how unusual it is to have an FPP about a long-subject video and not actually see any comments until around the appropriate time had passed for people to actually be able to have seen the linked video....

But apparently the silence wasn't people watching the piece, it was just people being polite.
posted by hippybear at 3:14 PM on January 15, 2011

(My pledge: I am never going to watch any online video that starts with a 30 sec. advertisement, no matter how great the video is supposed to be)

You're gonna miss a lot. Me, I use the commercial time to go to the kitchen and get a snack, which is the way everybody did it with the TV back before TiVos. (Which explains why I got so fat back then. But I digress.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:20 PM on January 15, 2011

This seems like a really really interesting way to make a movie.

Is anyone working on a game called, "Make a Movie?" Just a world you can use to tell stories? That would be kind of awesome.
posted by drjimmy11 at 3:22 PM on January 15, 2011

drjimmy11: Is anyone working on a game called, "Make a Movie?" Just a world you can use to tell stories? That would be kind of awesome.

Peter Molyneux made that game already, though as I recall people seemed to find it not-very-fun.
posted by paisley henosis at 3:26 PM on January 15, 2011

DON'T LITTER
posted by SPrintF at 3:45 PM on January 15, 2011

This seems like a really really interesting way to make a movie.

It can have really excellent results, and some so-so ones.

I've watched Star Trek machinima movies made using some ST game. They were of mixed results.

However, I've never laughed so hard as when I watched the complete Red vs. Blue cycle, made using Halo. Excellent dialogue, great voice acting, pretty decent plot... across all the seasons. It's something actually worth buying, if it is to your liking.
posted by hippybear at 3:53 PM on January 15, 2011

Me, I use the commercial time to go to the kitchen and get a snack...

I am completely sure preload advertisements would be much, much more successful if they only advertised kitchen and bathroom stuff at ten times the volume of the actual video.
posted by griphus at 4:03 PM on January 15, 2011

It is just amazing how good some things look, and how bad other things look.
posted by Chuckles at 5:18 PM on January 15, 2011

hippybear: "However, I've never laughed so hard as when I watched the complete Red vs. Blue cycle, made using Halo. Excellent dialogue, great voice acting, pretty decent plot... across all the seasons. It's something actually worth buying, if it is to your liking."

True. You can watch the first season on Google Video here; it's very much worth it.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:27 PM on January 15, 2011 [3 favorites]

yeah i didn't want to be that guy that complained about something without watching it, but literally nothing happened in the first 10 minutes, so i turned it off.
posted by empath at 9:04 PM on January 15, 2011

I just watched the whole thing. I liked it. As might be expected from a movie made from Grand Theft Auto, it has some nifty car chase scenes. By the end I was into it enough that I could let go of my "oh come on" response and thoroughly enjoy the sequence where the garbageman-vigilante steals a hot car to evade the cops and rescue the girl -- while garbage men from all over the city use their trucks to block the cops during the pursuit.

According to the credits this movie was basically made by one person. That to me is pretty much incredible. It's got a nice noirish feel, and the action hero portions were well done. Clearly it was inspired by the game engine used to create it and for the most part the script was written to deemphasize things that you can't do well with tools like that -- dialogue and character acting, especially. Given the limitations of the medium I thought it was really quite well done.

The voice acting wasn't great, but the narration voiceover was fine. The script was clearly written by a non-native english speaker. It could probably use some additional editing, maybe trim ten or fifteen minutes. The first half hour or so needs the most work I think, which is unfortunate since a lot of people won't get past that. But this was the first machinima I've been able to watch the whole way through and appreciate as a movie.
posted by bigbigdog at 10:32 PM on January 15, 2011 [1 favorite]

On the other hand, This 3 minute video of GTA 4 without any friction for the cars is absolutely hilarious.
posted by delmoi at 10:39 PM on January 15, 2011 [4 favorites]

I didn't watch very much of it, but it made me want (and I didn't think this would be something I would ever want) a GTA game where you're actually paying as a cop, rising up through a corrupt system.

In the GTA universe, the cops are basically just another gang with the same double-crosses that you get anywhere else, but here you'd have to start off by actually responding to things with professionalism before being disillusioned.

I'd play the hell out of that game.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:02 AM on January 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

ANd now that I've said that, I realize that L.A. Noire is very likely going to take that kind of route, as inspired by L.A. Confidential as it appears to be, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not looking for the detective story (though that will be cool) so much as the story of the guy who has to control low-level situations at the beginning, making arrests instead of shooting, until he rises in the ranks and the morality gets murkier and murkier.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:11 AM on January 16, 2011

(My pledge: I am never going to watch any online video that starts with a 30 sec. advertisement, no matter how great the video is supposed to be)

Yeah, and those ads recur every five minutes. I don't think I'm going to make it through 17 of them.
posted by XMLicious at 12:59 AM on January 16, 2011

Given the limitations of the medium I thought it was really quite well done.

Agreed. GTA IV's world is already presented in such a sweeping, cinematic way, one that lends itself to a work like this.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:23 AM on January 16, 2011

Blazecock Pileon: Agreed. GTA IV's world is already presented in such a sweeping, cinematic way, one that lends itself to a work like this.

On the other hand, too much of the video seemed too much like just watching someone play GTA with the cinematic camera turned on, to me.
posted by paisley henosis at 8:28 AM on January 16, 2011

Here's the Youtube version, 720p, with much less advertising.
posted by samsara at 8:33 AM on January 16, 2011 [1 favorite]

Nothing against this video, but I think I'd rather just play GTAIV for two hours.
posted by box at 12:03 PM on January 16, 2011