Machinimas are animated movies made with game graphics engines and without real actors, props, cameras or sets. Compared with months to create a CGI animated film, you can do a machinima in almost real time.
The January 25, 2005, Salt Lake Tribune had a good introduction to the article in this article.
Here are two screen shots from Red Vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles.
Here are two screenshots from Killer Robot, from the nanoflix web site:
And one image from The Fibber McGee Xmas Skit,
which was created in Sims 2 using the sound track of an old 1940s radio comedy
drama.
A hotbed of machinima action is Mesquite, near Dallas, Texas.
Companies involved include Fountainhead Entertainment, developing Machinimation software. A contact person is Drew Campbell.
Organizations include Machinima Academy of Arts and Sciences, a New York organization. Paul Marino is contact person.
The first known machinima was Diary of a Camper. A more-recent machinima, two hours in length if it really exists at all, is Anachronox: The Movie. Other machinimas have been created since, and the topic was featured on slashdot on January 7, 2005.
There were machinima sessions at
Sundance Film Festival 2005.
A good source of info on machinimas is www.machinima.com
Dakine Wave
makes an inexpensive ($25 plus s&h) easy-to-use machinima creation package called
Virtual Stage. If you go to their website and see the Video Demonstration,
noticing how easy it is to make a machinima, you are likely to be hooked
on these things! Virtual Stage lets you create a set (or use one of theirs, like
a living room, where you can even hang your own pictures on the wall), set up virtual cameras, add your choice of characters, type in
dialog for them to speak, and let the action begin. You use the mouse to make
the actors walk, turn and do gestures. It's amazing!
The 9/14/2004 GameSpot has a story about a $5000 contest for who can create the best machinima using Sims 2. If you don't want the money, you can also opt for a 4-week internship at Maxis Studios!
And here is a real-life experience creating a machinima, from a Spymac.com member:
...After a while, I realized that I could use this technology for a mini-term project, and did. I created a machinima video, with Red vs. Blue as the inspiration. The plot was distinctly not Halo because it was, after all, a school project.
Cult Classic premiered in the ETC Auditorium to an audience of about 75, a pretty good turnout for a Science and Math sponsored activity. There were only four movies that night, all student made in the spirit of the event (Mini-Term movie festival, woohoo.). Two were documentaries, and as such didn't get much fanfare. Then there was my (and the two Karthiks, my partners in crime for the project.) and Kellen Carpenter's movie, the name of which escapes my memory at the moment. If you ever have to decide between these two movies however, pick his. Much funnier, as we spent too much time trying to get decent video, and well... we sucked at voice acting (though the outside people who did voices were awesome.)
Meanwhile, Alison Johns, editor of Film and Video Magazine, writes that machinimas are the new entry point into filmmaking for people with ideas but no money in this editorial. Even established directors, she writes, can use the technique to plan a shoot in 3 dimensions so that the camera crew can better understand it.
The Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive had an illustrated lecture by Rainey Straus on 2/23/2005. She discussed the growing cross-fertilization between video games and contemporary artists. She showed some of her own machinimas, and concluded with a live virtual performance of a machinima using the Sim platform.
Two days later, on February 25, the Washington Times carried an article about the business aspects of machinimas. Among the revelations: About a million people per week download free episodes of "Red vs. Blue" from Rooster Teeth Productions, and the company actually makes a small profit from merchandise sales (according to founder Burnie Burns). Most such downloads happen with BitTorrent. Videogame manufacturers like machinimas, seeing them as free advertising.
On March 22, 2005, Sony released the video game God of War and began promoting it with machinima. According to a New York Times article (registration required):
In the PlayStation 2 video game "God of War," the character Kratos is a fearsome Spartan warrior "driven by pure revenge," according to Sony Computer Entertainment, which will release the game tomorrow.
But in a series of short animations that will be available on the Web, Kratos, under the name Ron Johnson, is something of a comedian as well as a pitchman....
Archive.org has a Machinima Archive with 330 downloadable examples.
Heavy.com has released episode 1 of Pimp My Weapon, a humorous machinima based on Sony's new PS2 action game God of War. Episodes 2 and 3 should be out by mid-April, 2005.
Here is a wonderful music-video machinima by Paul Marino! You've gotta see it! Warning: this machinima music video contains spoiler footage of Half Life 2. Will Harris opines in the April 17, 2005, Inquirer:
Half-Life fanatic Paul Marino has taken the genre to the next level with his new music video...Using FacePoser software, the G-Man becomes the lead singer, emoting and lip-syncing unbelievably...this will surely be looked back on as a seminal work...This is going to be huge.
Popular Science magazine (http://popsci.com/) has a How 2.0 article titled Move Over, Pixar on machinimas in the July 2005 issue.
On June 24, 2005 MTV2 debuted Video Mods, a series based upon the rock-star lives of videogame characters.
The Sept. 24, 2007, issue of Time magazine reports that HBO has acquired the rights to a series shot in Second Life. My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alta, is slated to be released in 2008.
Machinas are on the way up. Have fun with them!
Legal stuff: Trademarks used at this website belong to their respective companies.