If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip of a machinima movie by simply clicking the image.

What is machinima? Fountainhead Ent.’s Anna is an example. © 2003 Fountainhead Ent. Inc.

Machinima is hot. It’s got its own film festivals; it’s being used to produce pilots for TV shows and games; it’s being sponsored by first-rank animation businesses such as NVIDIA. What is it?

What is it?
Machinima (“mah-sheen-eh-mah”) is the creation of films within a realtime, 3D virtual environment such as a videogame engine. It is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and gaming — its name is a combination of “machine” and “cinema.” This is storytelling within an interactive virtual space where characters can be controlled by humans (in essence, puppeteers), scripts or artificial intelligence. By skillful re-use of gaming assets and techniques, machinima producers can create short or long stories for a fraction of the time and costs of a conventional 3D keyframed animated production.

Rather than normal 3D animation, which is created frame by frame and then rendered, machinima can be created and rendered simultaneously within the hardware. This can of course put some real stress onto the graphics processor unit (GPU), and compromises in resolution and depth of detail must be made to keep the frame rate at a filmic 24 frames per second. Nevertheless, with the quantum increases in graphics power afforded by new generations of GPUs these days, it’s easy to see that this will get better and better with time — and machinima films such as Anna (a short that can be seen on www.machinima.com) are already very good, and can tell a moving story within what some call a “microbudget.”

Frank Dellario of ILL Clan asked game designers to use machinima to create vignettes to introduce The Video Game Awards on Spike TV.

Where You’ll Spot Machinima
Machinima was first used to create cinematics, the story-telling parts of videogames (also called “cutscenes”) that set up a game sequence, or transition from one level or area of the game to another. It made sense to create these sequences using the basic tools that the game was created with. Cinematics, which were once limited to short, low resolution sequences due to the memory constraints of gaming cartridges, are now a major production item on games that have DVD-sized memory space to play with, and can be short, artfully created stories within their own right.

In fact, the game Anachronox (produced by experienced cinematographer Jake “Strider” Hughes) had so many cinematic sequences that the decision was made to edit them together, and Anachronox: The Movie was born. “When I added up the total running time of all the cutscenes, it came to two hours and 30 minutes, so I thought it might be fun to string them together to see if it would work as a straight narrative,” Hughes notes. The movie (which can be downloaded in segments from www.machinima.com) won a number of awards at the Machinima Film Festival of 2002. Although the film shows its gaming roots, the compelling story of Sylvester “Sly” Boots, a down-at-heel private investigator in a futuristic world, comes through loud and clear.