Emesis Blue

You don’t hear the word “machinima” much these days. Like old coinage, it has gone out of circulation. But reach down deep enough into your digital pockets and you may find some long forgotten tokens of machinima from that earlier era of online. While sometimes crude, in taste or execution, it took undeniable effort to mint such assets. Now, the internet has moved on to contactless payments where you can prompt AI to make your memes for you¹ .

Videos made within video game engines. Pyjama-programmers brute forcing their way behind and in front of the in-game camera to act out vignettes in your favourite outer space-themed shooter^{2 3}.

I am a day one Team Fortress 2 guy. My Xbox 360 copy of the The Orange Box spun for Valve’s Pixar-esque class-based shooter. Back in 2007, I was at university and living the life of hedonism:

• Late nights (studying at the library)
• Binge drinking (hot Ribena)
• Taking drugs (mesalazine, Vitamin D)
• Sleeping around (between my bed and the living room couch)
• Staying up to 4am (playing Team Fortress 2 with the Americans⁴).

Eventually, as the Xbox 360 version went unpatched, I crossed over into PC gaming, or rather, into laptop-gaming. That year, I lived in Buccleuch Street, Edinburgh, and in 2fort.

All that being said, my stats page on Steam reports a lowly 15 hours despite having unlocked 325 out of 500 achievements. Mysterious? Well, the lesson here is to never join a custom map called “_unlock_all_achievements_”. The damn thing did in fact start unlocking all achievements and I quit in a panic once I realised this might incur a ban on my Steam account. I think I even messaged Valve and apologised.

These days, I rack up the hours in Team Fortress 2 on YouTube. You know of Valve’s iconic Meet The Team videos⁵. But do you know my favourite Team Fortress 2 YouTubers?

Have you seen shounic’s snappy explanation of the game’s code with their sharpest of sharp illustrated explanations⁶? What about Uncle Dane’s engineering masterclass? Or his foray into semi-automated geospatial land surveying⁷? Or how about Great Blue’s study on the rarest kill icon⁸? Or FUNKe’s supremely well animated and well intentioned eulogy⁹? Or what it FEELS to play like LazyPurple¹⁰?

I saw that machinima had evolved from comedy made within a game engine, to using those assets to produce these entertaining, informative and thoughtful studies of the game itself.

When Valve released the software they used to create their animated Meet The Team videos, known as Source Film Maker, they released not only the previously hard fought for in-game camera, but the character models, the lighting rigs, the sets and scenery, and sounds and dialogue. A mini-movie studio released for free for anyone brave enough to conquer its legendarily uncompromising behaviour¹¹.

Valve themselves released a standalone fifteen minute short with the official voice actors, writers and artists¹². The bar was already set high for Team Fortress 2 machinima.

Emesis Blue is a horror film. No caveats, no disclaimers.

Yes, it is made by fans, but no, this is far beyond any fan film. Emesis Blue is made by Fortress Films entirely in Source Filmmaker using the game’s maps, characters and assets. This is the best machinima I’ve ever seen.

Every aspect is executed at the highest level.

The plot at its core answers the question: what would happen if you had mercenaries who could come back from the dead again, and again, and again? What if a respawn machine was real?

The story is one of lies, murder, betrayal, paranoia, and the fear of what lies beyond and the horrors that scared men do on either side. Effusive descriptions, I know, but it’s all built up from the foundation that is in the game. A team in red and a team in blue are fighting over a briefcase in an abandoned fort.

The nine classes transcend their national stereotypes into actual cinematic characters. They are performed so well I was convinced that the original voice actors had to have been involved. I was wrong. It’s one thing to nail an impression of the quips and voice tags in the game. It’s another thing entirely to deliver dialogue and deliver scenes so naturally.

The world is dripping in atmosphere and drenched in dread. It baffles me how they achieved this in the Source engine. How did they capture the performances so well? How did they pose and frame those shots? I wonder if the painstaking hand-crafted nature of Source Film Maker motivates all shots to be worthwhile, not a frame wasted.

And it all comes together in motion with a pacing that flows so effortlessly. I watched the film twice in my original sitting. A third watch happened when I started to write up this article. I know I’ve written fairly little here. Just know, it’s because I don’t want to spoil any more than I have already.

It’s just all so visually arresting. And my praise is not that Emesis Blue is as good as a real movie, though it is. I loved when the eyes changed colour with every blink or how they are often illuminated unnaturally white. I loved the reverence to the source material, but complete disregard to anything other than telling a ghost story.

I loved that this movie took a videogame I am intimately familiar with and creeped me out.

Further reading/watching

1. Rather than pasting screenshots into MS Paint and writing in all caps in Impact font like how the real men do it. ↩︎
2. Half-Life: Full Life Consequences ↩︎
3. I’m not a Halo guy but here is the obligatory Red vs. Blue link ↩︎
4. I would often play with a chap from Alaska. We would play Pyros on opposing teams and meet in the middle bridge of 2fort and spam the taunt button so we would play our axes like air guitars. ↩︎
5. Meet The Team, Valve ↩︎
6. sticky bombs will eventually detonate themselves, shounic ↩︎
7. TF2 Maps (Actual Size), Uncle Dane ↩︎
8. What is the Rarest Kill Icon in TF2?, Great Blue ↩︎
9. I Miss Team Fortress 2, FUNKe ↩︎
10. How it FEELS to Play TF2 series, LazyPurple ↩︎
11. How it FEELS to SUFFER in SFM (sp00ky) [Behind the Scenes], LazyPurple ↩︎
12. Expiration Date, Valve ↩︎