Friday Fanboy: The Codex Series

Last weekend the six- and eight-year-olds came back from a friend's house raving about a new movie they'd seen, The Codex Series. Never heard of it? I hadn't either. But I looked it up and found the most extraordinary thing.

The Codex Series is a machinima film, made with networked Xboxes running Halo 2. As in all machinima, the human actors are essentially puppeteers, controlling the videogame characters to act out scenes in the game's multiplayer environments while the actors do the voiceovers. All the visuals are generated by the game itself, so the role of the filmmaker is simply to write a script, act it out, and edit the results. The technique is the same as the earlier Red vs. Blue, the Beckett-like surrealist comedy of bored marines stranded on an alien planet, which has been a favorite of ours at Wired for several years now (read Clive Thompson's excellent NYT Mag piece about it here.)

The end result of all these projects is super low-cost computer graphics animation, like a basement Pixar. Anyone can make a CG film this way and every year hundreds of talented amateurs do. Some of them are amazing.

The Codex Series is the best machinima I've ever seen. It has a stirring plot (an alternative history of the battle between humans and the Covenant in the Halo universe), edge-of-your-seat pacing, distinctive characters, and a pulse-quickening soundtrack. The kids watched it all weekend, and now beg to see it again. I'm on my third viewing myself, and I must say that Episode 18 is a stunner, a masterful interweaving of simultaneous rally-the-troops speeches by commanders about to battle. It builds to a crescendo that will leave you breathless.

The series has 20 episodes, and then, unlike Red vs. Blue, it stops. The creators, who are all in their teens, have now graduated from high school and scattered to the winds. Plus the film's runaway success has left some ruinous bandwidth bills for the millions of downloads:

Q:  Are you going to make a second season?

A:  Most of the Codex Crew went off to college right after finishing Episode 20.  While making The Codex this summer we met every day at noon and worked until at least eight o'clock every night, sometimes going as late as 3:30 the next morning! Obviously we don't have that kind of time in college, especially since we have been scattered into three different time zones. The Codex has also been a very expensive project for us, and now that we're in college we can't really afford expensive hobbies.

If you're not sufficiently impressed yet, consider this: My children's favorite film was not made by Disney, but by a dozen Dallas teenagers playing a videogame in one of their parents' basement. By Hollywood standards, the film cost essentially nothing to make and is free to download. It's had 13m viewers so far. There is now a DVD and a soundtrack CD.

If that isn't Long Tail, I don't know what is.

Comments

[Lex]

Chris, I'm not much of a gamer: Are these videos appropriate for young children? ("Appropriate" = little/no onscreen violence, bad language or nudity)

[chris anderson]

Lex,

Well, it's all a judgment call by the parents. We think that Halo itself is okay for our kids (killing aliens, not people, and in non-realistic settings), but it may not be for other parents and other kids.

As for the films itself, the word "shit" is used in one episode (two?) so we've deleted that one. There's a ton of fighting, but again it's videogame fighting so it's no worse than the stuff on many TV shows for kids of that primary school age. There's no nudity or sexual themes.

Again, all families are different so your mileage may vary.

[Naveegunner]

Hi, I'd like to say, thank you for writing this. I'm sure I speak for everyone on The Codex forums when I say the more publicity we get the better. I'm glad you enjoyed what so many have (and unfotunatley, so many have not)

[tb2571989]

Hi, I'm from the Codex Forums as well. I'd like to thank Chris and his babysitter for showing tham the Codex. The more, the merrier, we say, so drop by and have a look. View the trailer and that will get you addicted, guanateed!

[grunty_thirst]

Hello to all that have read this review, I like the two people above am a member of the Codex Forums and would also like to thankyou for such a positive review. Also, to anyone reading this please check out the Codex Series and perhaps become a member.

[Eza]

Also a codex member. Thanks Chris for such a great review. It's always nice to acknowledge other people's hard work and the Codex crew definetly put much effort into the series. They came out with a stunning result, so for those of you who havn't seen it, it's definetly worth checking out.

www.thecodexseries.com

[Bzerker]

The Codex is a stand alone first in the Halo machinima community, but it’s only a first. As a fan of machinima I can say that there are hundreds of these types of videos that are at par or even better then the Codex but are basically ignored for one reason or another. I suggest that if you enjoy the Codex that you go Google 'Halo Machinima' or even just 'machinima' and you will find many more 'underground' video's that are both funny, serious, sad, dramatic, over all entertaining.

[bzerker]

I applogize if I offened anyone here with my comments, I simply ment to state that there are others out there and hopefully people will enjoy the others if they enjoyed the codex.

[allen thompson]

They need to get back together and start the second season of the Codex!

[Sbear]

I'm from the Codex series forums

Just wanting to let ya know that the new series: The Heretic, a prequel to the Codex Series, is going to be released sometime in the near future (we hope!)