Why “UnFramed”? (aka History, Pt. 1)
The title of this blog isn’t entirely random, and there is a bit of a history behind it…. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to explain a little…
Back in about 1998, I was 17, and was at school…. I’d been vaguely interested in computer graphics for a while, having found the demo of a program called Imagine 3D (I think that was it, anway) on the front of a computer magazine.
One day (somewhere around September/October time) a friend of mine (James Hamer-Morton, who is currently part of Broken Pipe Films with me) showed me something that he had made using the game Unreal. It was a short movie, complete with voices. It was, however, running completely in the game. At the time, I’d not seen anything like it before. Most games back then had completely rendered cutscenes to tie what story they had together. What James had come across was Machinima.
We decided to make a short film using these techniques, but at the time, my computer wasn’t powerful enough to run Unreal, so we felt we couldn’t really make it under the “Unreal Movie Team” name that he’d been using…. So Team Frame was born….
We went on to make a number of shorts, and one slightly longer film using Quake 2 (probably the most popular machinima tool at the time), before moving back on to using Unreal. It was probably late-1999 time that we merged the two ‘companies’ (Team Frame and Unreal Movie Team) to form UnFramed Productions (hence the capitalization on the F….). We worked on various projects for a while, including writing the Unreal Movie Studio, which went on to become the most popular tool for creating machinima in Unreal Tournament.
We both started moving more towards live-action films, and James and a friend (another James) set up Broken Pipe Films. I was later invited to join Broken Pipe Films, and UnFramed was left by the wayside somewhere…. About a year or so ago, we decided to resurrect UnFramed to use as the name that any VFX work either of us did (well, mostly me) under.
So when I set up this blog, it was an obvious choice of name to use….
Apologies if I’ve bored you a little with this ramble… It’s been interesting for me to think back over it - there’s a lot of stuff that I’d forgotten I remembered and had to dredge up from the depths of my memory.
Hopefully I’ll have some more interesting stuff soon - I’m going to do some run-downs of some of the older projects I worked on - just need to make sure I can track down some of the files!