PLOT
QUESTIONS
What
is the Borg War movie about?
Didn’t
Janeway destroy the Borg?
Why
did a freighter attack a cube?
Don’t
the Borg usually assimilate species rather than destroy them?
How
did that klingon drop on the ground the thaser missed?
Since
when is Tuvok a Captain of his own ship?
Does
the Romulan female want to have sex with Tuvok?
Barclay
is the CEO? What bet did Picard lose?
Wouldn’t
the Dallas be destroyed if its warp core overloaded?
How
did the Romulan female transport a giant piece of equipment off
the ship?
How
did all those people on the bridge come back? Didn’t they die?
Won’t
the same thing happen all over again if the Borg try to assimilate
the same species?
Why
does the Archeopendra leave the planet?
Why
did Jureth’s younger brother abandon the Dallas?
How
did a lieutenant take command of the Scimitar?
Didn’t
the Tal-Shiar get destroyed some years earlier?
Why
is the Romulan lieutenant sabotaging the Dallas’s mission to
disable the Borg Planet?
How
could a Federation warp drive create a singularity?
What
is Stripperella doing on the bridge of the Enterprise?
Is
this meant to actually take place during the storyline for SFC3?
How
could the Klingon captain have survived being blasted to bits by
the Borg?
How
did the Borg get blown up by a relatively small volley?
PRODUCTION
QUESTIONS
Isn't
Borg War just scripted EF2 character motions with the original
dialogue playing in different sequences?
Why
didn’t you use a real animation program rather than machinima?
Did
you write this all by yourself?
Who
designed Seven of Nine's daughters' outfit?
Why
isn’t Borg War high resolution?
Is
there going to be a sequel?
How
did you make this movie?
How
many people worked on this movie?
I
want to do machinima. Can
you give me more detail?
Can
you tell me more about how you did the special effects and video
editing?
PERSONAL
AND LEGAL QUESTIONS
Is
this a game mod or just a movie?
Are
you worried about copyright violation?
Aren't
you stealing the work of the actors?
What
is Starbase 28?
Are
you, like, a gigantic Star Trek fan?
Why
are you doing this?
What
does Borg War have to do with Ethiopian orphans?
How
do you know how many clips have been downloaded?
PLOT
QUESTIONS
Q:
What is the Borg War movie about?
A:
Borg War depicts the conflict between the Federation, Klingons,
Romulans, and a strain of Borg infected with a mind-controlling,
flesh-mutating virus. The incursion of these diseased Borg throws
the Alpha quadrant's finely balanced power structures into chaos.
As Picard marshals the free races to oppose the Borg, the Klingons
and Romulans use the turmoil as an excuse for interracial war.
Meanwhile, the Borg themselves struggle against the infection,
which is using them as a source for food.
Q.
Didn’t Janeway destroy the Borg?
A:
She certainly crippled them, but they’d naturally recover due to
their adaptability. I don’t know whether there is still a Queen.
Probably. In any case, the Archeopendra took over that function
for the Borg colony in this movie.
Q:
Why did a freighter attack a cube?
A:
It didn’t. The cube attacked the freighter. The freighter, in
trying to escape, fired its single photon torpedo – more an act
of defiance than a real attempt to destroy the cube. When the
freighter captain saw that there was no way he could outrun the
cube, he hoped that ramming the cube might destroy it. It was a
good idea, but wasn’t enough to destroy the cube – only enough
to damage it seriously. That’s why the cube immediately moves to
the asteroid to convert it – the Archeopendra (who has the
knowledge of the on-board Borg at his claw-tips) knew that he
needed a better craft. And he had the mega-replicator technology
required to build a ship out of the asteroid. That process was
almost complete when the warbird stumbled onto the scene.
Q:
Don’t the Borg usually assimilate species rather than destroy
them?
A:
Yup. But the Archeopendra has his own agenda. He’s perfectly
happy with his own genetics, which he considers perfect. What he
wants is alien technology to increase his power – and then he
wants to wipe out everything else. That’s why, after the
infection, the “Overborg” (as they call themselves) only want
to assimilate “technological” diversity. The “biological”
diversity is dropped from their request. Essentially, they only
see humanoids as temporary hosts that allow them to breed their
own “perfect” species.
Q:
How did that klingon drop on the ground the thaser miss
ed?
A:
It was a partial ricochet, deflected by his armor.
Q:
Since when is Tuvok a Captain of his own ship?
A:
Since he got promoted after the return of Voyager. This is 17
years later.
Q:
Does the Romulan female want to have sex with Tuvok?
A:
Actually, she’s taunting him. Romulans think Vulcans are a bit,
well stuffy. In fact, Tuvok is married with 3 children. His
expression is more one of exasperation than anticipation.
Q:
Barclay is the CEO? What bet did Picard lose?
A:
Evidently a pretty bad one. Actually, when the events take place,
the Enterprise isn’t fully crewed. Picard has it “parked” at
Unity Starbase, but he’s pretty much tied up at the Starbase
launching the anti-Borg preparations.
Q:
Wouldn’t the Dallas be destroyed if its warp core overloaded?
A:
The core was set to explode the moment that the ship came out of
warp. The trick here was ejecting the warp core the second before
it came out of warp. That way, the core continued move for a
second, leaving the ship behind (and throwing it suddenly out of
warp). It was a small miracle that the Dallas survived this, but
it was the only logical alternative to certain destruction. Tuvok
is no dummy.
Q:
How did the Romulan female transport a giant piece of equipment
off t
he ship?
A:
That particular shuttle has a transporter bay, which Aria used to
transfer the holocloak off the Dallas and then onto the Scimitar.
In fact, she could have used the Scimatar’s transporters for the
second transport, but the pattern was already in the shuttle’s
buffer, so she did what was quickest and most convenient.
Q:
How did all those people on the bridge come back? Didn’t they
die?
A:
The people on the bridge were just stunned in preparation for
future infection.
Q:
Won’t the same thing happen all over again if the Borg try to
assimilate the same species?
A:
Yes, the potential for a repeat incident is there, but the
federation has the "converted" enterprise to study --
thereby giving the federation access to the latest Borg technology
(like the mega-replicator used to convert entire planets) as well
as the Exomorph biological information. That's why Picard is so
confident that any future invasion will be futile.
Q:
Why does the Archeopendra leave the planet?
A:
Because it’s about to get sucked into the singularity created by
the explosion of the Dallas’s hybrid warp core.
Q:
Why did Jureth’s younger brother abandon the Dallas?
A:
He figured it was lost cause trying to keep the Dallas out of the
black hole with a Borg dreadnaught approach and saw a way to
defeat the enemy by sacrificing the Dallas, which was a goner
anyway.
Q:
How did a lieutenant
take command of the Scimitar?
A:
She’s only disguised as a lieutenant. When she got herself
assigned to the holocloak project she didn’t want the Federation
to realize that she was actually an Admiral and a high ranking
member of the revived Tal-Shiar.
Q:
Didn’t the Tal-Shiar get destroyed some years earlier?
A:
You can’t keep a good secret police down.
Q:
Why is the Romulan lieutenant sabotaging the Dallas’s mission to
disable the Borg Planet?
A:
Let’s look at what she did. She manipulated the Mi’Qoch clan
to take control of the Dallas and then aimed the Dallas directly
at the Borg Planet, setting the Dallas’s warp core to overload a
few moments before it strikes the planet. Then she stole the
holocloak. By doing these things:
-
She
ensures that there will be a war between the Federation (which
will naturally conclude that the Mi’Qoch clan pirated the
Dallas to get the holocloak technology for the Klingons) and
the Klingons (who will naturally conclude that the Mi’Qoch
clan was eliminated because they represented a threat to the
Federation/Romulan collaboration).
-
She
simultaneously destroys the Borg Planet, removing the threat
to the Alpha Quadrant (including the Romulan Star Empire, of
course). Then she can claim credit for the victory by claiming
that the Scimitar (the Romulan ship that was at Unity Starbase)
was actually responsible for the destruction of the Borg
Planet.
-
She
also takes control of the only existing holocloak, which can
then be secretly replicated and incorporated into future
Romulan ship designs, ensuring that the Romulans will have
tactical superiority over both the Klingons and the
Federation, whose fleets will be weakened by their internal
conflict.
In
other words, she is simply thinking like a Romulan. Of course, she
still has the Enterprise to contend with but, not surprising,
she’s got that problem covered, too, as you shall see.
Q:
How could a Federation warp drive create a singularity?
A:
The holocloak is real power gobbler and if far more expensive to
run, in terms of resources, than a typical cloak. In order to
power the Dallas’s holocloak, the Federation and the Romulans,
working together, have given the ship a hybrid engine that
incorporates both Romulan and Federation technology.
Q:
What is Stripperella doing on the bridge of the Enterprise?
A:
Despite her healthy good looks, Kleeya is a highly-trained
scientist, a specialist in man-machine interfaces in general, and
the Borg in particular. Her mother was Seven Of Nine, who appears
to have bequeathed her, along with a deep understanding of
cybernetics, a sense of fashion that, shall we say, is oblivious
of the impact that it has upon non-Vulcans.
Q:
Is this meant to actually take place during the storyline for
SFC3?
A:
No, Borg War takes place in a slightly different (e.g. non-canon)
timeline. In that timeline, the events that take place in SFC3
never took place, and Jureth of the house of Mi'Qoch continued in
his pro-federation sympathies, while his brother (who in the SFC3
universe is played by the player) becomes associated with the
younger Klingons who chafe at the continuing peace. So
essentially, you can watch "Borg War" without worrying
about the SFC storyline (although if you're familiar with the
game, you might get a chuckle at how I reused some of the dialog.)
Q:
How could the Klingon captain have survived being blasted to bits
by the Borg?
A:
If we’re going to get into “could so-and-so really have
survived” discussions, we could be here for weeks. But, OK,
OK… Young Mi’Qoch survived because 1) Klingons are wicked hard
to kill and 2) His ship had an extended life support system on the
bridge that would continue to work marginally – and seal off
minor hull breaches – allowing him to stay alive. Or perhaps he
was saved by a special, but highly secret type of instrumentation
that’s present on every starship in the Alpha Quadrant, known as
a “plot device.” When activated it ensures that no continuing
character gets killed.
Q:
How did the Borg get blown up by a relatively small volley?
A:
The Noc’jedge is not a classic “Bird of Prey” (which would
be about one tenth the size) but a battleship of a similar design,
but comparable in overall size to the Enterprise D. Since Borg War
takes place 17 years after the return of Voyager, the Klingons
have developed two new weapons: a delayed blast armor-penetrating
photon torpedo which explodes from inside the penetrated ship. If
you notice, the first volley is preceded by concentrated disruptor
fire – this is to help puncture any shielding or armor. The
second volley from the Noc’jedge is targeted in exactly the same
place on the cube, in order to take advantage of the earlier
penetration. Even so, it seems unrealistic for a single battleship
to destroy a Borg cube, right? There are three reasons that was
possible. First, this is not a full-sized Borg Cube like the one
that took on an entire fleet at Wolf 359; it’s a much smaller
version, as can be seen by comparing it to the Noc’jedge.
Second, this particular cube is only a shell of what it was
originally, since the Borg have transferred overall control
elsewhere, as seen in Episode 2. Third, this cube is further
weakened by problems in its control systems, as explained in
subsequent episodes.
Q:
Is Borg War ever going to be canon?
A:
No, not even canon-fodder.
PRODUCTION
QUESTIONS
Q:
Isn't Borg War just scripted EF2 character motions with the
original dialogue playing in different sequences?
A:
Well, sort of. The raw footage of Borg War was made using two
games, EF2 and SFC3. What the two games supplied were textures,
animations, sound clips (including voiceovers) and models. The
production of the raw footage involved the creation of all new
sets, about 200 additional textures, modding of all character
model configuration files, extensive editing of voiceover clips
(about 50 percent are combined from 2 or more clips), a lot of
camera work (placement, pan, zoom, etc.) and about 35,000 lines of
EF2 script, which are posted HERE.
The hundreds of hours of raw footage was then extensively edited
to create the final film and many new SFX were added using the
video editor. The entire process of making Borg War, start to
finish, took approximately 1620 hours or about 202 eight hour
workdays. The final product may not have justified all that work,
but that's a different issue entirely.
Q:
Why didn’t you use a real animation program rather than
machinima?
A:
Development time. This is the quickest way to make a
movie. Doing it with today's animation packages as a single
individual with a single computer would have been impossible.
Q:
Did you write this all by yourself?
A:
Yes. The writing was a fairly involved process. I had an idea of
what I wanted to have happen, but I wanted to re-use the sound
clips from the two games so that the voice acting would sound
professional and so I could use the voices of Stewart and Russ.
Writing the script required more or less memorizing the contents
of several thousand voice clips files and then rearranging them
(or segments of them) into an entirely new plot. In some cases I
was able to use the clips verbatim, but in other cases I did a
fair amount of audio editing. The trick was sometimes finding a
clip, or editable portions of clips, that were appropriate to the
plot. I was also bound, to a certain extent, by the contents of
the clips themselves, which is why the plot has some elements in
common with the plots of the SFC3 and EF2 games (e.g. holocloaks
and exomorphs, respectively.)
Q:
Who designed Seven of Nine's daughters' outfit?
A:
An EF2 modding guru named James Brophy designed the outfit and
posted it at Ef2files.com. The original outfit for the Kleeya
character in EF2 was essentially lingerie, so the jumpsuit is
actually conservative by comparison. If anyone is offended, try to
remember that it’s just a cartoon. Incidentally, there’s a
transsexual Borg War fan out there who insists that Kleeya, being
part Borg, should have interchangeable parts. I’m not sure
exactly what that means, but I thought I’d put it out there for
people to ponder.
Q:
Why isn’t Borg War high resolution
?
A:
Because Borg War is machinima, which means that it’s filmed in
real-time, 29.9 frames per second. While it’s true that if
somebody were starting a Star Trek machinima project now, it would
make sense to wait for the Star Trek Legacy engine for the space
sequences and perhaps a customization of the Half-Life 2 engine
for the inside shots. However, Borg War was begun in 2004 and, as
a one-person project, took two years. So it’s based on 2004
technology. Short of warping time, space and reality, I’m not
sure how I could have made Borg War more state-of-the-art.
Q:
Is there going to be a sequel?
A:
No.
Q:
Any chance of working the bug out so the lips and words are in
sync or is it just me?
A:
It's just you. Seriously, the way that the lipsyncing is done is
limited by the game engine and the tools that were provided with
it. EF2 has two methods for lipsyncing. The first (which they
supported in the modding environment) was relatively simplistic --
the louder the tone, the more open the mouth is. It works
reasonably well, compared to, say, the original dubbing of
Godzilla. The other method (which they didn't make available)
actually moves the lips, teeth and tongue separately. Only voice
files that are used verbatim from the EF2 game have this
capability, so I used these wherever I could (mostly with Picard
and Tuvok). Newer game engines, like Half-Life 2, have much better
facilities for lipsyncing. Unfortunately, Borg War was started in
2004 (this stuff can take a long time) so it uses the game engines
that were available at the time.
Q:
How did you make this movie?
A:
This is a machinima project -- a movie created by manipulating the
customization features of two game engines.
For
Starfleet Command 3, I make changes to the setup files for the
ships to make them act in ways that are unnatural to the game, but
necessary to get a particular shot (e.g. a disabled Enterprise
that will stay in one place, rather than move to attack.)
I then "play" the game. The game engine records
the activities, with a camera angle that's always centered on the
"players" ship, but which can can zoom and rotate during
playback, which I record as described below.
For special shots, I use a special ship that is only a
black dot, which can fly in between and around other ships.
This effectively gives me additional camera angles. For a
few of the more complex special effects, I set up multiple
computers with multiple "players" and manipulate them
simultaneously.
Elite
Files 2 has a much more sophisticated customization engine which
served not just to play the game, but to create the cinematics for
the game. I use an
editing program (provided free from the game developers) to layout
the sets, place pre-created objects and characters, define
locations for characters to walk, and so forth.
I then execute the game in "development" mode and
record the actions of the characters and objects, based upon a
script. The scripting
language is, for you techies out there, a multi-threaded C
variant, which allow me to define the pre-formed animations that
the characters will execute.
These animations, combined with dialog (see below), are
combined to build each raw scene.
Essentially, every single action, from a character raising
an eyebrow, to a massive explosion of everything in the room, is
under my direct control.
The
original source of the dialog is the sound files for the two
games. To build the
dialog for the movie, I take snippets and sections of the dialog
and recombine them into new dialog that conforms to my plotline,
using an inexpensive sound editor named Audacity.
The resulting sound clips are run through a program that
makes the mouths of the characters move in sync to the words.
However, in many cases the dialog is added to the movie
during the editing phase and "lipsynced" to the
movements of the character's mouths.
I
create raw footage using a Dazzle 150 capture device. The output from the screen and sound card are
"recorded" onto a separate machine.
This output, while stored digital, has gone through a
analog phase, which is why the images are not as crisp as in the
computer game itself. However,
rather than seeing this as disadvantage, I've noted that the
analog phase makes the final animation look more realistic, by
softening edges. The
raw footage is then combined and mixed using the Pinnacle Studio 9
video editor.
Some
of this editing is quite elaborate, involving "greenscreen"
overlays, multiple editing passes, and so forth.
The result is an uncompressed video file that contains all
the dialog and sound effects.
That file is then run through another pass to add ambient
sounds (like the dull thrum of a starship engine).
The final file is then combined with other final files into
a file that makes up a "part" of the film.
It is at this final stage that I add the background music.
The resulting files are then compressed slightly degrades quality,
but I don't think that anyone is likely to want to download files
that are almost three
gigabytes in size.
Q:
How many people worked on this movie?
A:
This project was entirely built, filmed and edited by one person,
in his spare time, over the period of about 18 months.
I use my three best friends, all of whom are Star Trek
fans, as consultants. The
four of us appear in the movie several times, as our computer
animated avatars, of course. We can be identified by the
"28" on our communicator badges.
Of course, several dozen people worked on the original
video games, which were both major productions from major game
studios. They created
all the basic animations that went into the two games.
The developers have been very supportive of my efforts,
even though the two games that I am using are no longer being
officially distributed.
Q:
I want to do machinima. Can
you give me more detail?
A:
First, if you're interested in knowing more about the mechanics of
machinima, go to machinima.com -- that's the center of the
machinima community. As
for Borg War, while there is a somewhat detailed technical
description above, it probably makes sense to provide a more
detailed description to my fellow machinimists, especially since
it's not always clear what's part of the "game" and
what's pure programming and video editing on my part. As you know,
there are essentially two types of machinima. The first are
projects where the actual point of the machinima is that you're
watching the video of a particular game being played. The most
famous example of this is "Red vs. Blue," whose title
emphasizes the dependence of the project upon the premises
inherent in the game. The second type of machinima is where the
game itself is irrelevant, except as a vehicle or engine for
creating the animation. Borg War falls into this category and
never uses the game AI and never shows actual game play. To make
it clear what's involved, I'll explain how I did the "Jureth
Blows Out The War Drive" scene in part five. Here were the
steps:
-
I
created an engine room set. The game provided the textures for
the walls and one complex object, the warp drive. The game
engine has a built-in animation that allows you to move walls
in order to make them doors. I used that function to create a
hatchway into the engine room, massive blast-doors that
descended from the ceiling, and a set of 16 movable panels
that burst out the engine casing, in order to simulate
emergency controls. In order to make the warp engine vibrate
prior to explosion, I created multiple instances of the
engine, slightly offset and an animation script that cycled
through the different instances, showing and hiding them,
while simultaneously activating several sources of smoke to
simulate the friction of an engine about to fly out of its
casing. To make the warp engine explode and fly out of the
engine room, I created multiple, trigger-able invisible
"exploders" (like the exploding barrels so popular
in first person shooters), and some 20 more instances of the
engine and fired the exploders from the script, while hiding
and showing the different instances of the engine as it flew
out the front wall. I simultaneously made that wall invisible
and triggered a shower of sparks. All of that had to be done
by hand and programmed as subroutines in the programming
script.
-
I
scripted the main character. The game gave me the basic
appearance of the character and about 100 basic animations,
which range from "idle" (stand and do nothing) to
"wtf" (raise your hands over your head in an
exasperated manner a couple of times) to
"ent-mainchair-gesture1" (scratch your knee while
sitting). In order to animate the character, I wrote a
programming script (in a multi-threaded) C++ variant that
chains those animations into a successive series of actions
that make sense. In order to do this, I have to turn off the
game AI. (This means that, if there's a fight, I don't just
film the game play but block out every position where a
character stands, every movement to get to those positions and
every movement that every character makes) But that's not all.
I also have to put together the dialog. This entails listening
to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of sound clips from the game,
remembering their content, taking them apart and putting them
together in order to create dialog that makes sense in the
context of the movie. But that's not all, either. I also have
to decide on the expressions of each character. In this case,
the one character has a limited number of facial animations,
so I use head positions in order to create an extra sense of
drama. (Yes, I'm even controlling where each character is
looking at every moment of time.) Note that the script had to
control both the character and what was happening inside the
room. What the game provided was an engine to make all this
work, and the primitive animations that were strung together
to form the scene.
-
Build
and script the bridge scene. I also had to do all of the above
for the bridge set, controlling half a dozen other characters,
as well as setting up an explosion that could be seen through
the viewpane windows. The Dallas bridge set had to be built
from scratch (albeit using some pre-defined objects, like the
consoles and the chairs) and the animations for the
environment (shaking, screens blowing up, etc) set up and
scripted. I also had to do some pretty complex animation
tricks to make the main view screen change in accordance to
what was going on in the scene. In total, the scripts for the
engine room and bridge scenes combines runs to well over a
thousand lines of programming code and the sets themselves
involve about a hundred "entities" (walls, objects,
triggerable animations, etc.)
-
Build
the outside-the-ship scenes. These were equally complex as the
inside scenes because they depended even less upon the gaming
engine. All I took from the SFC3 game engine was the Dallas
flying out of warp as seen from the front of the ship. That
was a pretty basic animation, so I used video editing to
create an "in-warp" effect and a dramatic
"coming out of warp" sequence, with a flash and rays
of light, none of which was in the original game. To show the
engine flying out of the Dallas, I created a green
"room" with the engine inside of it, set up a steady
cam sequence that rotated around the engine, filmed it, used
pan and zoom to cause it to grow bigger, thus giving the
impression of a rotating object moving forward. I then added
the flames in the video editor and stuck the resulting
animation over top a screen shot of the Dallas. To show the
Dallas drifting in space, I took a screen shot of the Dallas
from SFC3, modified it in Paint Shop Pro so that the front of
the ship looked broken, converted the screenshot into a EF2
texture, created a set with that texture as the backdrop,
added some plasma smoke SFX and a couple of floating bodies
(using a "dead in space" animation), and then zoomed
the camera slowly forward, rotating slightly so that it gave
the impression of viewing something "broken".
-
Mix
all of the above into a dramatic sequence. After I had all the
raw footage described above, the entire sequence had to be put
together, clip by clip, in order to create a dramatic sequence
that made sense. That entailed the basic video editing, adding
several layers of sound effects, and then adding the music.
When complete, the entire scene runs around 2 minutes, but
involved at least 40 hours of hard work, including writing,
set design, programming, sound editing, video-post processing
and video editing. I find that video editing is like speaking a different
language, one that you've been hearing all your life, but
never really understood.
There's a vocabulary that allows you to tell a
story.
Now,
one could argue that I'm just being stupid because I could have
gotten something just as good simply by filming the game play. But
that's not the case. Game play may be fun, but it's inherently
repetitive, stupid and plot-less; which is why (incidentally) that
it's so ridiculously easy to lampoon. By contrast, if you're
starting from the idea that you have a story that you want to tell
that has nothing to do with the GAME (as opposed to the subject
matter of the game, like Sci Fi or medieval warfare), the GAME
itself is basically irrelevant and (if anything) is simply an
impediment to that story that you want to tell.
Q:
Can you tell me more about how you did the special effects and
video editing?
A:
A detailed description of this aspect of the work is contained in
the "For
Machinimists Only" post on Borg War forum at Machinima.com.
PERSONAL
AND LEGAL
QUESTIONS
Q:
Is this a game mod or just a movie?
A:
It is a game mod. The Borg War movie is a "cinematic" for a game mod
that includes many of the sets used in the production. Thus is it impossible to get the full 100% value of Borg War
without purchasing the two games and running the mod.
Q:
Are you worried about copyright violation?
A:
This website provides new game materials created according to
permissions and restrictions specified in the software licenses
for the Activision games Starfleet Command 3 and Star Trek Elite
Force 2. Star Trek and related marks are trademarks of Paramount
Pictures. This effort
qualifies as a "new game material," and is thus
specifically allowed under the user license of the two games,
provided that the materials are identified as such and not
distributed for profit.
Q:
Aren't you stealing the work of the actors?
A:
Let me try to explain, using my limited knowledge of contract law,
why this isn't stealing.
Creative
work is often called "intellectual property" or IP for
short. The term is meant literally; IP can be bought, sold or
rented. Creatives (meaning actors, writers, singers, etc.)
generate IP. When they are paid for doing so, the rights to
"do things" with that IP (e.g. distribute it in the form
of a CD) are typically sold to a media company, which takes
responsibility for selling an eventual product, like a CD or a
computer game.
The
contracts governing arrangements between media companies and
creatives can be very complex.
These contracts stipulate, often in excruxiating detail,
how and when the creatives will be paid for various usages of the
IP. Voiceover work for computer games is typically sold outright,
without royalties. That means that when a voice artist (this
includes an actor, even a famous one, performing that function)
contributes his or her voice to a computer gaming project, they
are paid a lump sum for their participation. That fee compensates
them for any and all use of the IP that they created. The
purchased IP (e.g. the voice tracks) is then the property of the
company that hired them, in this case Activision. As the owner of
the IP, Activision can grant other people (like you and me) the
right to use that IP.
When
you buy a game, during the install, in most cases you (digitally)
sign an agreement saying what you can and cannot do with the IP.
For example, you can typically resell your install CD but can't
sell pirated copies on Ebay. Game companies consider modding to be
free advertising; they are aware that modders create addiitonal
demand for their games. Because of this, they generally allow
buyers of the game to create what are often called "new game
materials" using the IP that's distributed with the game.
These can range from new "skins" to new levels to new
cinematics (e.g. Machinima like Borg War.)
My
usage of the IP from the two Activision-owned games is thus
specifically allowed by the contract that I "signed"
when I installed the game. Activision's contract with the
creatives (Peters, Stewart, etc.) specifically allows Activision
to grant me those rights. When the actors' agents negotiated that
contract, they presumably charged extra in anticipation for that
usage. So, to sum it up, the voiceover actors (Peters, Stewart,
etc.) have already been paid for my usage of their voiceovers, so
nobody is getting ripped off.
When Activision returned the right to
make Star Trek themed games back to Paramount, all the
intellectual property in Activision's games reverted to Paramount
(now CBS/Paramount). So Paramount owns all the IP and Activision
is no longer involved.
Q:
What is Starbase 28?
Starbase
28 was my first long-format attempt at machinima. My friends and I used to have a regular gaming party every
Friday night where we would play, among other things, Starfleet
Command 3. When we
discovered "movie" mode in the program, I decided that
it would be fun to make a movie.
I literally had never heard of fan films and did not know
that serious ones actually existed. I had also never heard of machinima, for that matter.
Anyway, Starbase 28 was, in a way, the prototype for Borg
War and four of the characters in the Bridge crew of the
Enterprise represent people in Starbase 28.
(Their comm badges have a "28" on them.) Click
here to see Starbase 28!
Q:
Are you a gigantic Star Trek fan?
I
think "respectful of the tradition" would summarize my
viewpoint. I enjoy
watching it with my friends, who are the main reason I started
doing this. (They
wanted more Star Trek.) Over
the years I've seen all the TOS and STNG episodes, perhaps 10 DS9
episodes, a couple of Voyagers and Enterprise, and all the movies.
I rely upon my friends to make sure that I don't tread on
the Canon.
Q:
Why are you doing this?
A:
I'm trying to do a better movie than Nemesis, given the
restrictions of the medium. Beyond
this, I have been interested in computer animation since playing
with MovieMaker on the Atari 800 in the mid-1980s.
Machinima gives me the opportunity to make a feature-length
animated film without the necessity of collaboration. Let me put
it another way. I think of my project as successful when viewers
tell me "Hey, Borg War is a good animated movie; you did some
nice things within the context of the Star Trek genre."
Q:
What does Borg War have to do with Ethiopian orphans?
A:
The first 250,000 downloads of Borg War spawned a donation of
$2,500 to help Ethiopian orphans.
Some of this money was used to help HIV+ orphans and some
was used to sponsor children who are not likely to be adopted.
Q:
How do you know how many clips have been downloaded?
A:
I regularly track Borg War downloads on various video sharing
sites as well on this site. As of this writing (8/17/2007),
there are around 90,000 downloads at machinima.com and around
200,000 on YouTube. I've got around 100,000 full movies downloaded
on borgwarmovie.org, which I count as 10 clips per download
(because that matches the original distribution method).
Another 400,000 or so have been clocked up on a couple of dozen
other sites that I track, and there are at least a dozen others
that I don't track. Note that these numbers include downloads of
the trailers and bloopers, which account for about 5 percent of
the total..
Starbase
28
