In an attempt to assess the state, future and direction of online filmmaking, plugincinema.com has been chatting to a variety of practitioners and experts throughout the field to get their views.

Hugh Hancock is the Chair of Strange Company, a group specalising in making what some consider to be the ultimate form of post-modern filmmaking; Machinima. He is heavily involved with the machinima film community portal, Machinima.com where he, amongst other things writes of machinima; "...it's on a collision course with the next generation of TV-perfect games- games set not in a dodgy game background written in half an hour by a programmer on a coffee break, but in richly detailed and popular universes already known to millions of viewers, with game content specifically designed to dove-tail perfectly with that background.."

PC: Just to establish yourself in our minds; could you name your top three of any media (films, books, artwork, web sites, games etc.) that have influenced the work you do?

HH: OK, I'm answering as a film director here, rather than connecting these directly to Machinima- This is also a big "off the top of my head" list - it'll have changed by next week;

Twin Peaks and (to a lesser extent) David Lynch's other work in film, particularly Lost Highway: a stunning, surreal, brilliant TV series that is probably directly responsible for my being in filmic media at all. Buffy The Vampire Slayer: possibly the finest-crafted TV series ever, and something that has influenced the way I'm writing and directing now more than just about anything else, on virtually all levels from concepts to editing and camerawork. Transmetropolitan: Warren Ellis' stunning series of graphic novels: pissed-off post-cyberpunk journalism coupled with first-rate storytelling and a genuine sense of anger at the status quo. Probably influenced my journalism more than my fiction, but it's gone both ways. The work of Tim Powers, particularly Last Call. If you want to see how to convey a sense of danger and magic, read Powers. The Crow. Kinda obvious and a bit cliche these days, but this really was the film of the nineties as far as style and mood went for me. Particularly, its use of music was echoed in later films like The Matrix, and was probably one of the things about its direction that influenced me most.

Phew. . Oh, no, wait...

PC: To balance it out, what three of any media (films, books, artwork, web sites, etc.) were the worst things you've ever had to experience?

HH: I don't actually tend to remember bad things, which may be a problem for this question...

Vampire: the Masquerade- Redemption: read the rant - er, review- on Machinima.com for the full skinny on why - I'm a fan of vampires in literature, a game player and a Machinima creator, and this game pissed me off immensely on all those counts.

Unbreakable: I'm not sure I actually think this film was badly made - in fact, I'm sure it wasn't, as to generate such a strong reaction it had to have been brilliantly created. However, I've never sat through such an utterly nihilistic, self-loathing film in my life: whilst I enjoy "dark" films (see Lynch, above...), I found that this film really was filled with a total sense of hatred that made watching it incredibly unpleasant.

PC: How did your involvement with Machinima filmmaking come about?

HH: I've been involved with storytelling in various forms, most notably in prose and in the theatre, for a number of years. Somewhere around 1996/97 I was also very into Quake, which had just come out at the time, and so, when a group of UK Quake luminaries got together to produce one of those odd Quake Movies I'd heard about, I joined up as a scriptwriter. Shortly afterwards I ended up directing and writing the project, which had turned into the first part of the Eschaton series, from an idea I'd had some six months before. Whilst working on that I saw the huge potential of Machinima, and from there on in I've been an obsessive, really...

PC: What is, in your opinion the most valuable asset of the Machinima.com and why?

HH: Phew, well, that's a difficult one- we have so many, both on Machinima.com the website and within the Machinima community.

Overall, though, I'd have to answer the same for both of them, although given it's rather a double answer that balances things out... I'd say our most valuable assets at the moment are our films and the potential they show. Machinima is great- it's a really lively community that makes these films, and whilst the films themselves may not always be Oscar-standard (although some are getting close- the Ill Clan's Hardly Workin', for example...), what they do uniformly show is the energy and the potential of this art form: there's a lot of people out there putting a lot of effort into making film after film, and if you watch those films, you can't but help feeling the massive potential there, as I have and as many other people both within and without the Machinima community have. That potential is breaking out, and has been for some time, into truly brilliant work, and it's going to do so more and more over the next few years.

PC: Do you think filmmaking technology is being driven by the producers of the technology or the people who create the films?

HH: At the end of the day, it's a two-way process. Obviously, the people who create the films are the end market for the technology producers, and so in that sense they drive the market. However, equally, the technology producers are often the people who drive widespread adoption of particular techniques or technologies, by making them accessible through their tools. However, if the producers don't like the tools, then they won't buy them. And so on. It's a feedback loop. My personal feeling is that the best tools tend to be created by people who make films too (Lightwave, Renderman, and of course, I hope, our own Lithtech Film Producer), but that's a personal bias and I don't have much hard evidence to back that claim up.

PC: Have you become aware of any particular point in the development of the internet when you decided, "wow, this will change the world!"?

HH: Yes - when I first heard of it. I'd been reading William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors for years by 1995, when I first came across the Internet in an issue of New Scientist magazine, and their vision of the 'Net was inspirational. It's a very weird feeling to open a magazine and discover that fiction really has, in all important ways, come to life. I've only ever had that experience once- it was one of the weirdest and most exciting moments of my life.

PC: Are there any current developments that you see as a threat to Machinima filmmaking?

HH: Erm, I'm not really sure what you mean by a threat here. I can't see much closing Machinima down as an art form, apart from a global ban on computers or creativity. Certainly, I'm worried by the increasing corporate hold on the intellectual commons, as typified by things like the DCMA, and the various flaps over fan-fiction and intellectual property distribution (and the periodic hysteria over violence in the media is irritating as always) but neither of those issues are really likely to do lasting harm to the art form.

About the only serious "threat" I could see would be the emergence of a new film-making technique which was even more flexible, even cheaper, even easier to use and even better for allowing ordinary people to tell stories, and I'm all for threats like that!

PC: Where do you see Machinima filmmaking heading in the future?

HH: Well, the first place that it's unquestionably going is toward the traditional holds of pre-rendered CGI: it's already been starting in computer games with the rise of the Machinima cut-scene, and, as projects like Lithtech Film Producer and Fountainhead's Sidrial show, it's rapidly becoming credible as a solution for film-makers and animators, too. Fairly soon I expect to see a lot of TV and film made using Machinima techniques- particularly for comparatively low-budget, high-turnaround projects like TV series, Machinima is perfect, as it's much cheaper and quicker to produce than pre-rendered CGI.

In the longer term, I expect to see Machinima starting to converge film and computer games- that's going to happen anyway, but I expect Machinima to be on the cutting edge of those developments by virtue of its game roots. We haven't yet seen the first true Interactive Movie, and we don't even know what it's going to look like or how it will work, but when it finally appears and revolutionizes film and gaming, I expect Machinima to be involved there.

PC: On the same lines, where do you see the future of online filmmaking in general, heading?

HH:Ooh, that's a very difficult question. Given what has been happening for the past few years, particularly in the area of on-line distribution, I'd expect that nothing particularly startling will come out of purely on-line film-making for a few years. Various incremental advances will be made, and quite possibly a couple of minor revolutions will happen right under our noses without anyone taking much notice (I expect to see films produced by groups working in conventional media over the Internet, for example). However, the "Second coming" hype is dying down, and, as generally happens, many people will probably now spend the next few years ridiculing the notion of totally on-line films as "so 1999" and assuming it's a dead fad, whilst quite a lot of very smart people work quietly on fixing the things that they thought went wrong with the first generation of film-making.

My time scales could be wrong. What I do predict, though, is that when something big does happen to break through in on-line distribution, it'll come from nowhere, it'll be the result of the convergence of two or three disparate technologies married in way that's obvious after the fact, and it'll all happen very fast and catch virtually everyone on the hop. Just as happened in the case of Napster, and in the case of the Web, and email, and most other major, society-changing technological advances.

That's my guess, anyway.

PC: Thanks for you time Hugh.