Creativity Bytes: A Brief Guide To Machinima

The South Park crew as machinima

Here’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Machinima.

So, what are machinima?
A bastard amalgamation of the words “machine,” “cinema,” and “anime,” the term is used to describe the act of creating real-time animation by manipulating a video game's engine and assets. Effectively, using video games as a medium to make films.

Where did it come from?
In the beginning God created the video game, then in 1996 a bunch of gamers calling themselves the Rangers (some later went on to form United Rangers Films) came along and decided they wanted to make a short film using a demo function in popular first person shooter, Quake. They named this video Diary of a Camper because it showed a lone camper (a camper is a sly git who hides and picks players off rather than getting into the melee of battle) facing off to the Rangers in a deathmatch. It featured dialogue and a rudimentary narrative and lo, machinima were born. However, it wasn’t until 2000 when a website started by Hugh Hancock, called itself machinima.com, that the term itself was coined.

And so it began: Diary of a Camper

This week you're really digging…
Tom Jantol’s stunning films, one of which has been nominated for the FILE PRIX LUX prize. Also that South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” where they rip into the massively popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game, using machinima to create some of the animation.

Nano talk
It’s not only used to create fan fiction but is also used for special effects in the film industry. New Zealand software engineer Stephen Regelous used it to make a special-effects program, Massive, which generates individualistic crowd members and earned him an Academy Award for its contribution to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Spielberg used it for pre-production in A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Machinima also has its own non-profit organization to promote the cause, Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, and as technology allows for more realistic representations in video games like the recent LA Noire, it’ll probably go mainstream about two minutes from now, with a mock reality show about Duke Nukem.

BlackShark’s swarming The 1K Project II (2007), created using Trackmania Sunrise

Describe yourself as…
The host in the machinima.

Keywords
Video, game, engine, 3D, script, machine, animation, real-time, film.

Difficulty level
Virtual

Age range
Single to multiplayer.

Tom Jantol’s FILE PRIX LUX-nominated Wizard of OS: The Fish Incident (2008)

Tagline
Storytelling just needs a medium.

To recap: Video-game generated filmmaking.

Next week: Social media art