Machinima: Difference between revisions

File:RVB group shot.jpg

A scene from Rooster Teeth Productions' popular machinima series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, recorded using digital puppetry in Bungie's Halo series of video games and then edited in post-production with Adobe Premiere Pro

In filmmaking, machinima (Template:Pron-en or /məˈʃɪnɨmə/) refers to the use of real-time three-dimensional (3-D) graphics rendering engines to generate computer animation, or to films that incorporate this animation. Machinima filmmakers, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, often use graphics engines from video games. This use has roots in the 1980s demoscene movement, characterized by animated introductions attached to software; Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 computer game Stunt Island; and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) video games. Originally, these recordings documented speedruns—attempts to complete a mission as quickly as possible—and multiplayer matches. The idea to add a story eventually arose, and id Software's 1996 FPS Quake was used to film the first works of machinima, originally called "Quake movies". When filming began to spread beyond the Quake series, the more general term machinima arose as a misspelled portmanteau of machine cinema. Over time, the number of games and software tools used for machinima increased, and machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements.

Compared to other filmmaking processes, machinima has advantages and disadvantages. It is simpler than traditional animation, but at the expense of control and range of expression. Compared to pre-rendered computer animation, machinima sacrifices quality for speed, cost savings, and flexibility. It is less expensive, dangerous, and physically restricted than live action, but, again, allows for limited expression. Because machinima is animated in real-time, it is possible to combine reality and the virtual environment of the graphics engine. Machinima creators can film by relying on in-game artificial intelligence (AI), scripting actions precisely, using digital puppetry, and manipulating recordings after the take. Video editing, custom software tools, and creative cinematography help to address technical limitations. Because productions often incorporate elements from video games, many productions are legally defined as derivative works. Some game companies have encouraged machinima, but the legal issues can be complex.

Some machinima productions remain close to their gaming roots and feature stunts or other gameplay. Dance videos, comedy, and drama are also popular. Other works attempt to stretch the boundaries of the rendering engines and deliberately avoid resemblance to the original 3-D context. The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima, recognizes exemplary productions through Mackies awards given at its annual Machinima Film Festival. Some major film festivals accept machinima films, sometimes in a separate category. Game companies, such as Epic Games and Blizzard Entertainment, have sponsored contests involving machinima.

History

Precedent

In the 1980s, software crackers, who attempted to circumvent programs' built-in security, often credited themselves in custom introductory sequences, or intros, attached to the affected programs. As the power of personal computers increased, more elaborate intros appeared. Eventually, focus shifted from the cracks to the intros, thus forming the demoscene movement. In these demos, which contained 3-D computer graphics, the goal was to create the best possible visuals in real-time with the smallest amount of software code. To achieve this, the graphics had to be calculated on the fly, instead of loaded from storage. These tasks were accomplished without a pre-existing game engine.

Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 computer game Stunt Island allows users to stage, record, and play back stunts; as Nitsche stated, "Players do not gain a high score but a spectacle." Released the following year, id Software's computer game Doom included the ability to record gameplay as sequences of events to be later replayed in real-time by the game engine. Because events, not actual video frames, were recorded, the saved game demo files were small and easily shared among players, thus developing, as Henry Lowood of Stanford University wrote, "a context for spectatorship.… The result was nothing less than a metamorphosis of the player into a performer." Doom allowed players to create their own modifications, maps, and software tools to work with the game, thus revising the concept of game authorship.

Doom's 1996 successor, Quake, offered new opportunities for both gameplay and customization, while retaining the ability to record demos. Multiplayer games became popular, almost a sport; demo files of matches between teams of players, or clans, were recorded and studied. Paul Marino, executive director of the AMAS, stated that deathmatches, a type of multiplayer game, became more "cinematic". At this point, the demo files produced were still merely documented gameplay without a narrative.

Quake movies

A scene from Diary of a Camper, the first machinima production

On October 26, 1996, a well-known gaming clan, or group of players, the Rangers, surprised the Quake community with the release of Diary of a Camper, the first machinima film to be widely viewed and distributed. This short, 100-second demo file contained the action and gore of many others, but in the context of a brief story, rather than the usual deathmatch. An example of transformative or emergent gameplay, this transformation from competition to theater required both expertise in and subversion of the game's mechanics. Player modification of the game had reached the point that the resultant activity no longer resembled gameplay. However, the final product contains connections to gameplay through similarities to previous gameplay demos.

Diary of a Camper inspired many other Quake movies, as these films were then called. Dedicated demo-processing tools, such as Uwe Girlich's Little Movie Processing Center (LMPC) and David "crt" Wright's non-linear editor Keygrip, were developed. Keygrip became "known as the Adobe Premiere for Quake demo files". A community of game modification writers, artists, expert players, and film fans formed around Quake movies. Among the websites devoted to distribution and review of Quake movies were The Cineplex, Psyk's Popcorn Jungle, and the Quake Movie Library (QML). Notable works include Clan Phantasm's Devil's Covenant, the first feature-length Quake movie; Avatar and Wendigo's Blahbalicious, which the QML awarded seven Quake Movie Oscars; and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield, which used simulated lip synchronization and was the first machinima production to use custom digital assets.

Released in December 1997, id Software's Quake II added support for user-created 3-D models. However, filming with the original Quake continued until editing tools were adapted to the new game. New Quake productions included the ILL Clan's Apartment Huntin' and the Quake done Quick group's Scourge Done Slick. Editing programs for Quake II films became available in 1998. Among these was Keygrip 2.0, which introduced recamming, the ability to adjust camera locations after recording. Paul Marino called the release of this feature "a defining moment for [m]achinima" because it added power and flexibility. Strange Company's 1999 film Eschaton: Nightfall was the first Quake II machinima production made with entirely custom models.

The December 1999 release of id's Quake III Arena posed a problem to the Quake movie community. The game's demo file included information needed for computer networking; however, to prevent cheating, id discouraged dissemination of the demo file format with warnings of legal action. Thus, enhancing editing tools to work with Quake III was infeasible. Concurrently, the novelty of Quake movies was waning. New productions appeared less frequently, and the community needed to "reinvent itself" to offset this.

Generalization to machinima

Hugh Hancock, the founder of Strange Company and inventor of the term machinima

In January 2000, Hugh Hancock, the founder of Strange Company, launched a new website, Machinima.com. The new term machinima surprised the community; a misspelled contraction of machine cinema (machinema), the term was intended to dissociate in-game filming from a specific engine. The misspelling stuck because it made a further reference to anime. Machinima.com included tutorials, interviews, articles, and the exclusive release of Tritin Films' Quad God. The first film made with Quake III Arena, Quad God was also the first to be created by recording game-produced video frames, not game-specific instructions. This change was initially controversial among machinima producers who had preferred demo files and their smaller sizes. However, demo files required a copy of the game to view. The traditional video format broadened Quad God's viewership, and the work was distributed on magazine-bundled CDs. Thus, id's decision to protect Quake III's code inadvertently led machinima creators to think more generally and to aim for a wider audience. Within a few years, the use of common video file formats was almost universal for machinima.

Machinima soon began to receive mainstream notice. In June 2000, Roger Ebert called it an "extraordinary" new art form and praised Strange Company's machinima setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias". The ILL Clan's 2000 film Hardly Workin' won Best Experimental and Best in SHO awards at Showtime Network's 2001 Alternative Media Festival. During production of his 2001 film Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Steven Spielberg used Unreal Tournament to test scenes involving special effects. Game developers became interested, too: In July 2001, Epic Games announced that Matinee, a machinima production utility, would ship with its upcoming game Unreal Tournament 2003. As involvement increased, machinima releases became less frequent in favor of higher quality.

At the Game Developers Conference in March 2002, five machinima makers—Anthony Bailey, Hugh Hancock, Katherine Anna Kang, Paul Marino, and Matthew Ross—founded the AMAS, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima. In August, the new organization held the first Machinima Film Festival, which received mainstream media coverage, at QuakeCon. Anachronox: The Movie, by Jake Hughes and Tom Hall, won three awards, including Best Picture. The next year, "In the Waiting Line", directed by Tommy Pallotta, became the first machinima music video to air on MTV. As graphics technology improved, other games and consumer-grade video editing software programs were used to create machinima. Rooster Teeth Productions premiered the second season of its popular comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, created with Bungie's Halo series of video games, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2004.

Continued mainstream and commercial use

A scene from a machinima portion of "Make Love, Not Warcraft"

Machinima has also appeared on television. Time Commanders, a BBC television show in which players re-enacted historic battles, used Creative Assembly's real-time game Rome: Total War. The MTV2 television show Video Mods re-creates music videos using characters from video games, such as The Sims 2, BloodRayne and Tribes. In 2006, the creators of the comedy television series South Park collaborated with Blizzard Entertainment to use machinima in setting parts of an Emmy-Award-winning episode, "Make Love, Not Warcraft", inside Blizzard's massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. HBO's September 2007 acquisition of rights to broadcast Douglas Gayeton's machinima documentary Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator was the first sale of a work created completely in a virtual world to a television network.

Commercial use of machinima has increased. Rooster Teeth began to produce DVDs of their Red vs. Blue series. To promote The Sims 2, Electronic Arts sponsored Rooster Teeth to create a machinima series, The Strangerhood, using the game. In 2005, Volvo sponsored the creation of Game: On, a combination of machinima and mainstream advertising. Electronic Arts commissioned Rooster Teeth to create the first machinima broadcast commercials to promote their Madden NFL 07 video game.

Game developers continue to provide more support for machinima. Products such as Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies, Linden Research's virtual world Second Life, and Bungie's 2007 first-person shooter Halo 3 encourage the creation of user content through the inclusion of machinima tools. Using The Movies, Alex Chan, a French resident with no previous filmmaking experience, took four days to create The French Democracy, a short political film about the 2005 civil unrest in France.

Production

Relation to other filmmaking methods

The AMAS defines machinima as "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment". In other 3-D animation methods, creators can control every frame and nuance of their characters. In turn, they must consider issues such as key frames and in-betweening. Machinima creators leave many rendering details to their host 3-D environments, but may thus inherit the environments' limitations. Game animations focus on dramatic rather than casual actions, and the range of character emotions is often limited. Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that a limited range of emotions is often sufficient to tell a story, and make a comparison to the small set of facial expressions used in successful Japanese anime television series.

Another difference is that machinima is created in real time, but other forms of animation are pre-rendered. To operate in real-time, many engines need to trade quality for speed, using less sophisticated algorithms and simpler models. In the 2001 animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, every strand of hair on a character's head was modeled independently; in a real-time environment, hair is likely to be treated as a single unit. Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd argue that, as consumer-grade graphics technology continues to improve, more realistic effects will be possible; Paul Marino relates the feasibility of machinima to the increasing computing power predicted by Moore's Law. For cut scenes in video games, issues other than visual fidelity arise. Pre-rendered scenes can require more digital storage space, weaken suspension of disbelief through contrast with real-time animation of normal gameplay, and limit interaction.

Like live action, machinima is recorded in real-time, and real people can perform parts and control the camera. Unlike live action, machinima involves less expensive, digital sets and special effects. Science-fiction and historical settings are feasible. Explosions and stunts can be tried and repeated without monetary cost and risk of injury, and the host environment may offer physical constraints impossible to achieve in reality. Experiments at the University of Cambridge in 2002 and 2003 attempted to use machinima to re-create a scene from the 1942 live-action film Casablanca. The filming process differed from that of traditional cinematography, in that technical restrictions limited character expression, but, in contrast to meticulously planned takes, camera movements were flexible and improvised. Nitsche compared the experiment to an unpredictable Dogme 95 production.

The ILL Clan performs its machinima comedy talk show Tra5hTa1k with ILL Will in front of a live audience at Stanford University in 2005.

Berkeley sees machinima as "a strangely hybrid form, looking forwards and backwards, cutting edge and conservative at the same time". Machinima is a digital medium based on 3-D computer games, but most works have a linear narrative structure, and some series, such as Red vs. Blue and The Strangerhood, clearly follow narrative conventions of television situational comedy. Nitsche agreed that pre-recorded, or "reel", machinima tended to be linear and offered limited interactive storytelling; he saw more opportunities in machinima performed live and interactively. In their improvisational comedy series On the Campaign Trail with Larry & Lenny Lumberjack and talk show Tra5hTa1k with ILL Will, the ILL Clan blended real and virtual performance by creating the works on-stage and interacting with a live audience. Although other virtual theatrical performances had been given in chat rooms and multi-user dungeons, machinima adds "cinematic camera work". Previously, virtual cinematic performances with live audience interaction were confined to powerful computer research labs. In another combination of real and virtual worlds, Chris Burke's talk show This Spartan Life takes place in Halo 2's open multiplayer environment, in which others may be playing in earnest, and may unpredictably attack the host or his interviewee.

Machinima can be less expensive than other forms of filmmaking. Strange Company produced its feature-length machinima film BloodSpell for less than £10,000. Before using machinima, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum of Rooster Teeth Productions spent US$9,000 to produce a live-action independent film; in contrast, the four Xbox game consoles used to make Red vs. Blue in 2005 cost $600. A product manager for Electronic Arts compared machinima to The Blair Witch Project without the need for cameras and actors. Some view these as low barriers to entry and call machinima a democratization of filmmaking; Berkeley sees increased participation and a blurrier line between producer and consumer, but states that game copyrights limit commercialization and growth of machinima.

Character and camera control

Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd define four main paradigms of creating machinima, from simplest and least complex to most powerful: relying on the game's AI to control most actions, using, digital puppetry, recamming, and precise scripting of actions. One game that encourages the use of the first technique is The Sims 2, which has built-in recording capabilities. Although simple to produce, results dependent on AI are unpredictable, and can resemble home movies. Thus, incorporating a preconceived script can be difficult. For example, when Rooster Teeth produced The Strangerhood, they had to use multiple instances of each character; each instance would be in a different mood, and could be mixed to achieve the intended result.

Scripting became popular with third-party machinima creators due to Matinee, a machinima tool included with Unreal Tournament 2004. A technique commonly used by game companies to create cut scenes, scripting involves the specification of precise actions for every character, allowing for fine-grained control. A single person can film this way, but the process of perfecting these commands can be time-consuming, and effects of changes cannot be seen immediately. In this respect, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd compare scripting to stop-motion animation. Another disadvantage is that, depending on the game, full scripting support be unavailable.

In digital puppetry, machinima creators become virtual actors; each puppeteer controls a character in real-time, as in a multiplayer game. One or more crew members become camera operators by capturing footage from their characters' perspectives, or the director uses the game's built-in camera controls. Puppetry allows for improvisation and offers controls familiar to gamers, but requires more personnel than the other methods, and user controls are less precise than scripted recordings. According to Marino, other disadvantages are possible disturbances from other players when filming in an open multi-user environment, and the temptation for puppeteers to play the game in earnest, littering the set with blood and dead bodies. Chris Burke intentionally hosts This Spartan Life in such conditions, however, and the resultant unpredictability is part of the show's nature. Other works filmed using puppetry are the ILL Clan's improvisational comedy series On the Campaign Trail with Larry & Lenny Lumberjack and Rooster Teeth Productions' Red vs. Blue.

Recamming involves digital puppetry, but the actions are first recorded to a game engine's demo file format, not directly to video frames. Without re-enacting scenes, machinima creators can manipulate the demo files. They can add cameras, tweak timing and lighting, and change the surroundings. A disadvantage of this method is that few engines and tools support it.

Software, technical limitations, and solutions

When Diary of a Camper was created, no software tools existed to edit demo files into films. Rangers clan member Eric "ArchV" Fowler wrote his own programs to reposition the camera and to splice footage from the Quake demo file. Quake movie editing tools later appeared, but the use of conventional non-linear video editing software is now common. For example, Phil Rice inserted single, completely white frames into his production No Licence to enhance the visual effect of explosions. During production of Red vs. Blue, Rooster Teeth Productions uses Adobe Premiere Pro to add letterboxing that hides the camera player's head-up display.

Machinima creators have used different methods to handle limited character expression. In the Halo video game series, helmets completely cover the characters' faces. To prevent confusion, Rooster Teeth has a character move slightly when speaking, a convention shared with anime. Some machinima creators use custom tools. For example, Strange Company uses Take Over GL Face Skins to add more facial expressions to their characters filmed in BioWare's 2002 computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights. Similarly, Atussa Simon used a "library of faces" for characters in The Battle of Xerxes. Alternatively, some game companies provide separate tools for enhancing expressions; examples include Epic Games' Impersonator for Unreal Tournament 2004 and Valve Corporation's FacePoser for Half-Life 2. Another solution is to blend in non-machinima elements, as nGame did by inserting painted characters with more expressive faces into its 1999 film Berlin Assassins. Other cases can be handled by pointing the camera elsewhere or other creative cinematography or acting. Tristan Pope used creative character and camera positioning and video editing to suggest sexual actions in his film Not Just Another Love Story.

Legal issues

The option to use game-provided digital assets is attractive to new filmmakers, but raises legal issues. Machinima that uses game assets is considered a derivative work and thus could violate copyright or be controlled by the copyright holder of the assets used. For example, the software license agreement for The Movies stipulates that Activision, the game's publisher, owns "any and all content within... Game Movies that was either supplied with the Program or otherwise made available... by Activision or its licensors..." Some game companies provide tools to modify their own games, and machinima makers often cite fair use as a defense, but the issue has yet to be tested in court. Because a defense dependent on fair use is risky, most machinima makers would simply comply with a cease-and-desist order. Publishing and licensing rights can, in some cases, complicate ownership. Berkeley adds that, even if machinima makers use their own assets, their works could be considered derivative if filmed in a proprietary engine. The AMAS has attempted to negotiate with video game companies to find solutions, under the premise that, were all commercial game companies implacable, an open-source or otherwise reasonably priced alternative would emerge. Dedicated machinima creation software programs, such as Short Fuze's Moviestorm and Reallusion's iClone, have been released under licenses that, unlike that of The Movies, avoid claiming ownership of content reused in users' films.

File:Second Life shadows.ogv

Linden Lab allows users to retain ownership of their Second Life creations, such as this video.

Companies generally want to retain creative control over their intellectual property, and tend to be wary of fan-created derivative works. However, machinima provides free marketing, and game companies have avoided strict enforcement of copyright law with respect to machinima. In a 2003 press release, Linden Lab announced that it changed the license terms for its virtual world to recognize Second Life "the ownership of in-world content by the subscribers who make it". Rooster Teeth initially tried to release Red vs. Blue without attracting attention from Halo's owners; they feared that any notice from Bungie would force them to end the project. However, Microsoft, Bungie's parent company at the time, contacted the group shortly after episode 2, and allowed them to continue without paying license fees.

A case in which a developer asserted creative control involved Tristan Pope's Not Just Another Love Story. Blizzard Entertainment's community managers encouraged the posting of game movies and screenshots. However, viewers complained that Not Just Another Love Story, which used creative camera and character positions to suggest sexual actions, was pornographic. Citing that the user license agreement prohibited pornographic material, Blizzard ultimately closed discussion threads about the film and prohibited links to it. Although Pope accepted Blizzard's right to some control, he was concerned about censorship of material that already existed in-game in some form. Discussion ensued about the boundaries between player and developer control in MMORPGs. This controversy showed that machinima itself could be a negotiation medium for players.

Microsoft and Blizzard license agreements

In August 2007, Microsoft issued its Game Content Usage Rules to address the legal status of machinima based on its games, including the Halo series. Originally, the rules created confusion; Edgeworks Entertainment incorrectly interpreted them as a reduction of machinima creators' rights. Based on feedback from Hugh Hancock and an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Microsoft revised and reissued the license. The rules allow noncommercial use and distribution of works, including machinima, derived from Microsoft-owned game content, except for audio effects and soundtracks. The license prohibits reverse engineering and material that is pornographic or otherwise "objectionable". To prevent legal problems if a fan and Microsoft independently conceive similar plots, derivative works that elaborate on a fictional universe or story are, when distributed, automatically licensed to Microsoft and its business partners.

A few weeks later, Blizzard Entertainment posted on WorldofWarcraft.com their Letter to the Machinimators of the World, their license for noncommercial use of game content. The terms differ from those of Microsoft in that they address machinima instead of game-derived content in general, allow use of audio if Blizzard is legally able to license it, restrict derivative material to the Entertainment Software Rating Board's Teen content rating guideline, specify noncommercial use differently, contain no explicit provision for handling the extension of fictional universes or plots.

Hayes states that, although the license terms have significant restrictions that limit benefit to licensees, they give some legal recognition to machinima, and reduce the need for affected machinima makers to rely on fair use. In turn, this may reduce film festivals' concerns about copyright clearance; in an analogous situation, festivals had been concerned about documentary films until best practices were developed. The game companies stand to gain from these license agreements, too. Fan creations often serve as free publicity and are unlikely to harm sales of games. If the companies had instead decided to sue for copyright infringement, a defendant could have tried a defense of estoppel or implied license because machinima had been unaddressed for a long time. In this sense, these licenses helped to protect the rights of their issuers. Even though other companies, such as Electronic Arts, have encouraged machinima, they have not issued explicit licenses for it, perhaps because of the legal complexity in doing so; they may be content to under-enforce their intellectual property rights. Hayes believes that this legal uncertainty is suboptimal and that, although the Microsoft and Blizzard licenses are limited and "idiosyncratic", they are a step towards an ideal video gaming industry standard for the licensing of derivative works.

Common genres

See also: List of machinima productions

Nitsche gives two opposite ways to approach machinima: starting from a video game and seeking a medium for expression or for documenting gameplay ("inside-out"), and starting outside a game and using it merely as animation tool ("outside-in"). Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd similarly distinguish between productions that retain noticeable connections to games, and those that are closer to traditional animation. In the former category, gameplay and stunt machinima began in 1997 with Quake done Quick. Although this project was not the first speedrun, its creators used external programs to manipulate camera positions after recording the speedrun, which, according to Lowood, marked a "shift from cyberathleticism to making movies". Stunt machinima remains popular; games commonly used for the genre include Halo: Combat Evolved and Battlefield 1942. Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that stunt videos created with Halo: Combat Evolved offer a new way to look at the game, and compare Battlefield 1942 machinima creators to the Harlem Globetrotters. Built-in features for video editing and post-recording camera positioning in Halo 3 are expected to facilitate gameplay-based machinima.

MMORPGs and other virtual worlds have been captured in documentary films, such as Miss Galaxies 2004, a beauty pageant that took place in the virtual world of Star Wars Galaxies. Footage was distributed in the cover disc of the August 2004 issue of PC Gamer. Douglas Gayeton's Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator documents the title character's interactions in Second Life.

Through gaming-related inside jokes, comedy offers another possible entry point for new machinima producers. Presented as five-minute sketches, many machinima comedies are analogous to Internet Flash animations. The New-York-based ILL Clan pioneered this genre in machinima; their productions include Apartment Huntin' and Hardly Workin'. The most successful machinima series, Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, chronicles a futile civil war. Although its humor was game-based, strong writing and characters caused the series to "transcend the typical gamer". The series spanned five seasons and 100 episodes. An example of comedy targeted at a more general audience is Strange Company's Tum Raider, produced for the BBC in 2004.

Machinima has also been used in music videos. The first documented example is Ken Thain's 2002 production "Rebel vs. Thug", made in collaboration with Chuck D. The following year, Tommy Pallotta directed "In the Waiting Line" for the British group Zero 7. On television, video game characters appear in MTV's music video show Video Mods. After World of Warcraft players discovered dancing animations in the game, dance and music videos became popular among that community.

Although stunts and comedy offer entry points for many, other filmmakers use machinima for drama. Many such productions bear some resemblance to the original visual setting of the game; for example, Unreal Tournament is used for science fiction, and Battlefield 1942 for war-based themes. Other creators subvert or completely detach their production from the game's original setting. For example, in 1999, Strange Company used Quake II to create Eschaton: Nightfall, a horror film based on the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft. A later example is Damien Valentine's series Consanguinity, made using BioWare's game Neverwinter Nights and based on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Another genre consists of experimental works that attempt to push the boundaries of game engines. One example is Fountainhead's Anna, a short film, reminiscent of Fantasia, about the cycle of life. Other productions eschew a 3-D appearance altogether. Friedrich Kirschner's machinima productions The Tournament and The Journey appear hand-drawn, and deliberately avoid 3-D graphics and photorealism. Fake Science, by Dead on Que, appears two-dimensional, and resembles 1970s Eastern European modernist animation.

Awards, festivals, and contests

Further information: [[:List of machinima festivals]]

Matt Kelland of Short Fuze (left) and Keith Halper of Kuma Reality Games at the 2008 Machinima Film Festival with the Mackie award for Best Technical Achievement

After the QML's Quake Movie Oscars, awards dedicated to machinima did not reappear until the AMAS created the Mackies for its first Machinima Film Festival in 2002. Held annually, the festival has become the most important one for machinima creators. Ho Chee Yue, a founder of the marketing company AKQA, became interested in machinima and, in 2006, helped to organize in Singapore the first film festival for the Asia chapter of the AMAS. In 2007, the AMAS supported the first machinima festival held in Europe.

Other film festivals include a category for machinima. Hugh Hancock of Strange Company worked with the Bitfilm Festival to add an award for machinima in 2003. The Ottawa International Animation Festival added a machinima category in 2004, but, citing the need for "a certain level of excellence", declined to present an award to any of the category's four entries. Machinima has also appeared at the Sundance Film Festival and the Florida Film Festival.

Game companies have sponsored contests involving machinima. Epic Games' popular Make Something Unreal contest included a category for machinima, and event organizer Jeff Morris was "really impressed by the quality of entries that really push the technology, that accomplish things that Epic never envisioned". In December 2005, Blizzard Entertainment collaborated with Xfire, a gaming-focused instant messaging service, to hold a World of Warcraft machinima contest.

References

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External links

• Directory at Machinima Premiere
• Warcraft Movies, a resource for World of Warcraft machinima
• Flight Sim Machinima, links to flight-sim machinima