Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is the convergence of film-making, animation and computer game development.

It generally employs a highly filmic style of storytelling, applying traditional film-making and animation techniques in virtual environments which are often constructed using the real-time 3D game-engines of popular computer games such as Halo, HalfLife, Quake, Second Life, Sims, Unreal, The Movies, World of Warcraft or Counterstrike.

The great thing for VCE Media Students is that Machinima enables a very cost-effective and time-efficient way to create ‘films’, with a great degree of creative control. (No need for expensive dollies and cranes, brilliant actors, expensive costumes, multiple camera setups and lighting rigs!):

Machinima can be produced in a two ways:

1. Similar to animation, it can be programmed, where the cameras, characters, effects etc. are scripted for playback in real-time. While similar to animation, the programming is driven by events rather than keyframes.

2. It can also be recorded in real-time within the virtual environment, much like filmmaking – the majority of game-specific Machinima pieces are produced in this fashion.

So students can use their own or school computers to make machinima.  How, I hear you ask?

Paul Marino outlines several ways at his website…
“A number of ways, actually.

First, if you’ve ever played a computer game on a network (LAN) at work or seen others play it, each person in the game is using their computer to log into the server computer. Each computer represents one character in the game, usually running around shooting at each other. Everyone playing can see each other’s character in real time in the game world, from their characters viewpoint on their monitor. In Machinima, the roles shift: the characters, instead of shooting each other, are actors in the scene, and the server doubles as the camera, recording everything that happens in the virtual world.

Secondly, people sometimes produce Machinima on their own (not using a LAN) by using tools the game developers publish for a particular game. These tools often allow the end user to create new levels, import new characters and create scripted events. While the game developer produce these tools often to extend the replayability of the game, Machinima developers have used them to create their films. This essentially turns the off-the-shelf game into a small Machinima studio.

Lastly, some teams use a combination of these approaches – recording their custom assets in real-time. These recordings take place at the data level (as opposed to capturing multiple gigabytes of video footage). This recorded data approach yields the most flexibilty as editing at the data level creates a final Machinima that can playback within the game engine itself.”

I sense that a few media teachers and students are still skeptical or perhaps just unaware of how like film-making and animation ‘machinima’ is, and of how much hard-work is required to get a great product – just like any other media form.

It is a wonderful new media-form just waiting for eager talented students to take it on.  I’m sure next year or the year after we will start seeing brilliant machinima works at TopScreen and other displays of media students work.

Time to check out these great examples of ‘now classic’ early machinima….

A notable example of Half-Life 2 machinima is A Few Good G-Men, a machinima produced from the famous courtroom scene from Rob Reiner’s film A Few Good Men.

One of the most notable features of Half-Life 2’s Source engine is Faceposer’s ability to take any voices in sound form and have an ingame character automatically lipsynch to the words. A fairly known example is I’m Still Seeing Breen, by Paul Marino, set to music by Breaking Benjamin.

Similar to Half-Life 2’s machinima capabilities, Crytek’s CryENGINE 2 is capable of complex facial animation as well as choreographed animations. One of the first narrative examples of these techniques being applied is Eden from Big Push Productions

A full-length (90 minute) remake of the H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds, about a group of computer servers being attacked by new users, called War of the Servers, has been released by Lit Fuse films on DVD and online (in two parts).

Then there is always the Red vs. Blue ….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs._Blue

You can find more Machinima classics here…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_machinima_productions