Operation Bayshield - Background and Production

Background and Production

Clan Undead credits United Ranger Films with inspiring them to make their own film. According to clan member Tom "Paradox" Mustaine, working for Ritual Entertainment at the time, the idea arose during a New Year's Eve gathering. where the group decided to make a "larger comedy film in the Quake engine". According to Henry Lowood of Stanford University, this marked a shift toward narrative conventions of linear media, in contrast to earlier gameplay-based machinima works, such as Diary of a Camper and Quake done Quick. However, filming still required both the ability to program game modifications and to play proficiently. According to Lowood, Clan Undead probably recorded the raw footage "in a small number of continuous runs". Because there were no publicly available machinima software tools at the time, they handled the significant pre- and post-production work through custom scripts in QuakeC, an interpreted programming language developed for Quake.

Operation Bayshield was the first machinima work to incorporate custom digital assets. Clan Undead created graphical textures specifically for their characters and used custom visual effects, such as manipulating character images to produce first instance of lip synchronization in machinima. Although the effect was primitive, it was not used again in machinima for another year. This lip synchronization is an example of crude digital puppetry; other examples included the shaking of character bodies when laughing and synchronized delivery of dialogue. Lowood believes that Clan Undead pre-recorded individual lines of dialogue to WAV files, and then triggered playback through a command in QuakeC. In April 1997, Clan Undead distributed the source code for its Operation Bayshield scripts over the Internet; Lowood believes that this release extended the Quake community's culture of sharing game modifications.