Machinima

Machinima (a portmanteau word for machine cinema) is both a film genre and a collection of associated production techniques. The term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) with ordinary PCs and the 3d engines of first person shooter video games in real-time (on the computer of either the creator or the viewer) rather than offline with huge render farms.

The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation.

Because machinima describes events at a more abstract level than their concrete realization as a sequence of rendered 2D frames, it allows digital films that can be played at very high framerate and resolutions to be stored/transmitted more efficiently than conventional video formats. (Imagine 3d Macromedia Flash compression.)

Although talented programmers have always created audiovisual "demos", machinima per se arrived with Quake movies in 1997; the term was coined at the start of 1998. As of June 2003, the medium has yet to produce a film commonly considered "classic," along the lines of Citizen Kane or Schindler's List, but interest is continuing to grow.

Quake II and Unreal are examples of video games which are currently used to create machinima; Epic Games, the releasers of Unreal Tournament 2003, included a tool called Matinee with the game, and sponsored a contest for $50,000 to create a machinima film with the video game. Also used is the video game The Sims, which has a "photo album" feature players can use to stage elaborate stories. For example, player nsknight has, over several months, staged a highly-rated photo album telling the story of three sisters whose mother is murdered; other players have staged stories of abusive relationships, drug addiction, and interracial adoptions. The process for putting game tools to unexpected ends is known as emergent play.

External links

• Machinima.com, a central site for Machinima with hundreds of films and articles
• Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, an advocacy group for machinima
• Artery: Machinima, a 22-minute documentary originally broadcast on Scottish TV about Machinima.
• A Wired piece about people using The Sims game to stage elaborate stories.
• Red vs Blue, wildly popular series of short films made using the computer game Halo.

see also computer-generated art