As a professional in the games industry, or someone who aspires to become one, you probably have at least the two basic loves required for the job - a love of games and a love of artistic creation. We make games because of a combination of these two forces. This is not the only option of course, just the most obvious. For instance, the popular art show "I am 8-Bit" (recently an attraction at GDC) is full of video-game-inspired art created in more traditional media such as paintings and crafts. However, in recent years, these combined loves of gaming and creation have lead to the invention of an entirely new art form of potential interest to us - the machinima film.
Machinima is the art of making animated films within a real-time virtual environment1 - in almost all cases this virtual environment is a video game engine2. The elements of a game engine, such as the physics engine, the sound module and artificial intelligence coding, combine to make all that is built within it function like a virtual simulation of the real world. Machinima uses these properties to create an audio-visual narrative similar to film or animation. It at first appears to look like animation, as the characters, props and locations are not real world and often abstracted and uses many effects that formerly only animation could achieve. Where animation is slow and painstaking to produce, machinima is not - it uses the real-time nature of video game engines to animate in real time. For example, instead of having an animator painstakingly make an apple fall frame by frame, the physics engine makes it fall automatically. Since all the animation work is done either before the production is recorded or automatically animated by the game engine, production is more like that of film: recorded live with improvisations possible by both cast and crew alike. As such, machinima is its own unique art form somewhere in between or outside the realm of animation and film.
Red Vs Blue
History
The history of machinima begins with the invention of the replay demo. This was first pioneered by Dani Berry with Modem Wars in 19883. In such a system, demos are recorded not as video, but as a set of instructions for the game to replay exactly every movement that had been made during gameplay for any user that downloaded, installed, and played the file in their copy of the game4. Machinima grew in particular out of the large demo-scene around the later game Quake, where many created ‘how-to' demos for players to learn new techniques or to show off particularly exciting matches between expert players - however none of these demos were any more narrative than sports footage5.
That soon changed, however, when a clan (a group of players that play together as a team) called the Rangers realized the potential for using Quake's demo tools as an audio-visual medium and created the first true machinima, entitled Diary of a Camper6. Its popularity inspired others to make movies using Quake, and thus the earliest machinima were known as "Quake movies". Programmers soon developed tools to allow more advanced filmmaking to be done - for example, a program called Keygrip let the filmmaker add in extra cameras so the view did not have to remain in the first person perspective7. Machinima took its name in January, 2000, when Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey decided a new term was needed to encompass not only movies made in Quake but in any game engine. They combined the word "machine" and "cinema" to make "machinema". However, Hancock's accidental misspelling of it as "machinima" stuck8.
It was around this time that machinima began to really take off. The film Quad God by Tritin Films pushed the limits by being much longer than previous machinima films and also by being the first machinima to be shot on video so it could be viewed by anyone9. In June of that year, film critic Roger Ebert even took note of machinima, calling it an "extraordinary" new art form10. Since then, machinima has been used in music videos11, television programs12, and used to create special effects in Hollywood films13, as well as in the more obvious explosion of amateur filmmaking that made it popular. Some, such as the extremely popular machinima series Red vs. Blue, have begun to sell their films on DVD to meet demand, turning even the amateur filmmaking side of machinima into a commercial enterprise in rare occasions14.
