Making Money With Machinima

[Wayken Ayres]

This is a blog from http://machinimatalk.com

Making money with machinima:

There is a lot of machinima projects out there, but one of the biggest questions I see on forums and blogs (besides “how to” questions) is the question of making money.

How (if possible) does someone make money with machinima?

I can certainly understand wanting to get paid for one’s work and in these tough economic times people are looking for ways to make an extra income.Or least a few extra bucks.

With most machinima being game play footage, walkthroughs, or other tutorials, making money is difficult, particularly when copyrighted material is being used. If you’re good enough you may be able to get hosted on sites such as Machinima.com and get paid for views, but I can’t speak to the legalities of this method, since I don’t use this form of machinima.

I can only speak for what I do and what I’ve learned through my experience. I use Second Life as my engine, a platform that does allow commercial use. It also allows building your sets from the ground up, so it can fit onto whatever storyline you desire. Personally, I prefer script based machinima, so Second Life works well for my needs.

I buy the licenses to the music I use, and if I need to film on a built sim, I will ask permission from the sim owners. This helps cover me for commercial use.

Now, if you have a product that you know is ready for commercial distribution, the question then becomes…”how do I make money?”

Unless you have money for marketing, this may not be the easiest question to answer.

One common way is to have your work hosted on sites that share advertising revenue. Unless you’re a partner with youtube, it won’t pay to host your material. There are other sites, such blip.tv which shares ad revenue with the content creators. Just do a search for video hosting sites, then check to see if they share revenue, their method of payment, etc.

The main problem now is…traffic. Lets say you host on blip. Well, like youtube and other hosting sites you may get some initial hits, but they don’t last long as your video gets buried under a host of others being uploaded to the site.  Not a formula for longevity.

Something that I have done is host the video on my own site. I do have my videos hosted on blip, then I embed them on my site so visitors can stream the show from there. I can have money come from a few places at this point. One, the revenue from showing the video itself through revenue sharing sites. Two, selling a high definition copy of the videos (assuming I have all the rights to do so) with any extra footage not seen through your sites video stream that you might include to entice sales. Three, I can also have affiliate links on the site in case someone is looking to spend some money, keeping in mind not to overdue it with the ads.

So, I now need traffic to get the most views I can to make the most money I can! Make sense?

Here’s where your marketing skills come into play, especially if you don’t have money to throw at the problem. You can still use the video hosting sites, such as youtube, that don’t pay. If you have a storyline machinima, make a trailer, or perhaps a few different ones, 30 seconds to a minute in length, with your website at the end. Load the trailers on the sites to advertise your film. Not at the same time, mind you.

If you make a few trailers that look different and load each a couple days apart from each other, this will help you keep your “advertisement” visible longer before they’re completely buried. You can also create a blog series to submit to major blog sites. If you make a series on whatever aspect of machinima you choose, such as your story concept, the making of, why you enjoy the art, etc., this will help keep your information in front of an audience.

I use Posterous, which is a blog site that you can link your other blog accounts to and have one blog sent to each of your accounts. This is a huge time saver if you open a number of accounts, from blogger to twitter, even facebook. If you have an interesting show concept, perhaps you can start a video blog or podcast and talk about it on a regular basis, of course linking your website to your hosting accounts so people can find your machinima. If you have some extra money, some paid ads might be an idea, but be careful with this one, since you don't know how well your machinima will do. The market isn't as well defined in this area as it is in live action film.

These are just a few ideas. As a personal disclaimer, check with the licensing of the game engine you use and be sure you’re not going to break any laws.

I wish you the best of luck.

 

Visit our new site at http://machinimatalk.com

[Medhue Simoni]

Here is some thoughts I've had about the subject:

I really have no idea how much some1 can make with revenue sharing. I do know that now Youtube is more open to accepting just about any1 into their program, as long as you are in good standing and don't use copyrighted material. You'd think this would be simple, but if you have anything in that video that any1 can possibly claim copyrights to, especially sound, it is likely to be flagged, and you can't do a thing about it. Unless these revenue sharing deals are significant, I would not even attempt to go about making money in this way.

Personally, I have wanted to get more into machinma since I started in SL, but my time is pretty much all used up in creating all the products that I make and updating them. It does seem obvious to me that if I want to expand more, I'm gonna have to create things in a more game like fashion. The best way to promote this is thru video and machinima. So, to me, machinima is a vehicle for advertising outside of SL. This concept can work pretty good in theory, as it can promote a number of products for people to buy, much like what Lucas did with Star Wars.

The problem I see with specifically machinima, is all the extra prepping that it takes to make a decent looking scene. Sure, you can choose a sight, which is all ready all made up. This does not help with animation. Maybe, if LL created some tools specifically for animating machinima, then it would be much more appealing for me. Facial expressions and talking are also a problem. Lately, I've look at DazStudio to animate a movie with. It is very promising and seems to be made specifically for this purpose. From what I can see tho, it seems most people use it for commercial still shots.

With some of the recent changes in SL, mainly mesh, things are much more compatible with outside programs like Dazstudio. You could import a whole city that was actually made for SL. So, what I plan is to get a number of different SL artists to help me create something. Then, I would make sure every1 that watches the final video knows that everything in the video can be purchased in SL. Plus, the video/movie would be based on an RPG inside SL. Not only will the viewers be able to buy everything in the movie, but also play the movie characters in the RPG. This is no small task, and will likely never be done, but that is my tentative plan.

[Wayken Ayres]

Hi Medhue,

I know things are changing a bit with youtube, I will have to do more research on what the changes are. But you're right, what you get from such sites is minimal, if anything, unless you have a huge number of viewers, perhaps in the millions. So, someone shouldn't expect to see anything right away. A lot of consistent, quality work may result in something down the road, but no guarantees.

I can certainly understand any frustration with making marketable machinima in SL, although I think it can be done. Prep work in machinima is like any other film medium, there is always a huge amount of preproduction steps to work through. I don't build sets myself, I buy sets or hire builders. Money is an issue, but there some cheap options to get started with, even free stuff that can be easily upgraded if necessary. I have a post on my site that describes using a green screen. Live action productions use it, so why not machinima?

There are some tricks to getting audio and avatar lips to work in post production, but I'm not going to get into that here, it's something I'm going to be putting into my blogs at http://machinimatalk.com