Machinima - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Machinima is the use of real-time 3D computer graphics

3D computer graphics

3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...

rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation

Computer animation

Computer animation is the process used for generating animated images by using computer graphics. The more general term computer generated imagery encompasses both static scenes and dynamic images, while computer animation only refers to moving images....

. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are often fan labor

Fan labor

Fan labor is a term used to refer to the productive creative activities engaged in by fans, primarily those of various media properties or musical groups...

ers, by virtue of their re-use of copyrighted materials (see below).

The practice of using graphics engines from video games arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene

Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

, Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 video game

1992 in video gaming

-Events:-Notable releases:* Gremlin Graphics releases Zool, Amiga's answer to Mario and Sonic. It goes on to become the best selling Commodore Amiga game, boosting the already popular computer to be the leading gaming machine in Europe....

Stunt Island
Stunt Island
Stunt Island is a video game designed by Adrian Stephens and Ronald J. Fortier and was published by Disney Interactive in 1992. The game, marketed as "The Stunt Flying and Filming Simulation", provides an island which contains a number of different sets, such as a city, an oil rig, a canyon, and an...

, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

(FPS) video games, such as id Software

Id Software

Id Software is an American video game development company with its headquarters in Richardson, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack...

's Doom and Quake. Originally, these recordings documented speedrun

Speedrun

A speedrun is a play-through, or recording thereof, of a whole video game or a selected part of it performed with the intent of completing it as fast as possible, optionally under certain prerequisites, mainly for the purposes of entertainment and competition...

s—attempts to complete a level as quickly as possible—and multiplayer matches. The addition of storylines to these films created "Quake movies". The more general term machinima, a misspelled portmanteau of machine cinema, arose when the concept spread beyond the Quake series

Quake (series)

The Quake series is a line of first-person shooter video games produced by id Software.-Overview:The Quake series is somewhat unusual in that its focus changes frequently; the story of Quake II has nothing to do with Quake, and Quake III Arena has little to do with either of its predecessors...

to other games and software. After this generalization, machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements.

Machinima has advantages and disadvantages when compared to other styles of filmmaking

Filmmaking

Filmmaking is the process of making a film, from an initial story, idea, or commission, through scriptwriting, casting, shooting, directing, editing, and screening the finished product before an audience that may result in a theatrical release or television program...

. Its relative simplicity over traditional frame-based animation

Traditional animation

Traditional animation, is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand...

limits control and range of expression. Its real-time nature favors speed, cost saving, and flexibility over the higher quality of pre-rendered computer animation. Virtual acting is less expensive, dangerous, and physically restricted than live action

Live action

In filmmaking, video production, and other media, the term live action refers to cinematography, videography not produced using animation...

. Machinima can be filmed by relying on in-game artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

(AI) or by controlling characters and cameras through digital puppetry

Digital puppetry

Digital puppetry is the manipulation and performance of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtual environment that are rendered in real-time by computers...

. Scenes can be precisely scripted, and can be manipulated during post-production

Post-production

Post-production is part of filmmaking and the video production process. It occurs in the making of motion pictures, television programs, radio programs, advertising, audio recordings, photography, and digital art...

using video editing

Video editing

The term video editing can refer to:* Linear video editing, using video tape* Non-linear editing system , using computers with video editing software* Offline editing* Online editing...

techniques. Editing, custom software, and creative cinematography

Cinematography

Cinematography is the making of lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography...

may address technical limitations. Game companies have provided software for and have encouraged machinima, but the widespread use of digital asset

Digital asset

A digital asset is any item of text or media that has been formatted into a binary source that includes the right to use it. A digital file without the right to use it is not an asset. Digital assets are categorised in three major groups which may be defined as textual content , images and...

s from copyrighted games has resulted in complex, unresolved legal issues.

Machinima productions can remain close to their gaming roots and feature stunts or other portrayals of gameplay. Popular genres include dance videos, comedy, and drama. Alternatively, some filmmakers attempt to stretch the boundaries of the rendering engines or to mask the original 3-D context. The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences

Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences

This is a list of film festivals dedicated to machinima, the use of real-time 3-D engines in filmmaking. The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences regularly holds such festivals, and recognizes exemplary machinima works through awards nicknamed the Mackies.-Machinima Expo:The is an annual...

(AMAS), a non-profit organization

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

dedicated to promoting machinima, recognizes exemplary productions through Mackie awards given at its annual Machinima Film Festival. Some general film festivals accept machinima, and game companies, such as Epic Games

Epic Games

Epic Games, Inc., also known as Epic and formerly Epic MegaGames, is an American video game development company based in Cary, North Carolina. Its most recent success has been the Gears of War series of games, although it is also known for its Unreal Engine technology. It is the parent company of...

, Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer and publisher founded on February 8, 1991 under the name Silicon & Synapse by three graduates of UCLA, Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce and currently owned by French company Activision Blizzard...

and Jagex

Jagex

Jagex Games Studio, based in Cambridge, is the UK’s largest independent developer and publisher of online games. Jagex is best known for RuneScape, the world's largest free-to-play MMORPG....

, have sponsored contests involving it.

Precedent

1980s software crackers

Software cracking

Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...

added custom introductory credits sequences (intros) to programs whose copy protection they had removed. Increasing computing power allowed for more complex intros, and the demoscene

Demoscene

The demoscene is a computer art subculture that specializes in producing demos, which are non-interactive audio-visual presentations that run in real-time on a computer...

formed when focus shifted to the intros instead of the cracks. The goal became to create the best 3-D demos in real-time with the least amount of software code. Disk storage was too slow for this; graphics had to be calculated on the fly and without a pre-existing game engine

Game engine

A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...

.

In Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 computer game

1992 in video gaming

Stunt Island
Stunt Island
Stunt Island is a video game designed by Adrian Stephens and Ronald J. Fortier and was published by Disney Interactive in 1992. The game, marketed as "The Stunt Flying and Filming Simulation", provides an island which contains a number of different sets, such as a city, an oil rig, a canyon, and an...

, users could stage, record, and play back stunts; as Nitsche stated, the game's goal was "not ... a high score but a spectacle." Released the following year, id Software

Id Software

's Doom included the ability to record gameplay as sequences of events that the game engine could later replay in real-time. Because events and not video frames were saved, the resulting game demo

Game demo

A game demo is a freely distributed demonstration or preview of an upcoming or recently released video game. Demos are typically released by the game's publisher to help consumers get a feel of the game before deciding whether to buy the full version....

files were small and easily shared among players. A culture of recording gameplay developed, as Henry Lowood of Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

called it, "a context for spectatorship.... The result was nothing less than a metamorphosis of the player into a performer." Another important feature of Doom was that it allowed players to create their own modifications

Mod (computer gaming)

Mod or modification is a term generally applied to personal computer games , especially first-person shooters, role-playing games and real-time strategy games. Mods are made by the general public or a developer, and can be entirely new games in themselves, but mods are not standalone software and...

, map

Level (computer and video games)

A level, map, area, or world in a video game is the total space available to the player during the course of completing a discrete objective...

s, and software for the game, thus expanding the concept of game authorship.

Dooms 1996 successor, Quake, offered new opportunities for both gameplay and customization, while retaining the ability to record demos. Multiplayer game

Multiplayer game

A multiplayer video game is one which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time. Unlike most other games, computer and video games are often single-player activities that put the player against preprogrammed challenges and/or AI-controlled opponents, which often...

s became popular, almost a sport; demos of matches between teams of players (clans

Clan (computer gaming)

In computer and video gaming, a clan or guild is an organised group of players that regularly play together in a particular multiplayer games. These games range from groups of a few friends to 1000-person organizations, with a broad range of structures, goals and members. The lifespan of a clan...

) were recorded and studied. Paul Marino

Paul Marino

Paul Marino is a film director, producer, animator, voice actor, and author currently focused on machinima, the art of using engines from video games to create films. He is a co-founder and the executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences , a non-profit organization formed in...

, executive director of the AMAS, stated that deathmatch

Deathmatch (gaming)

Deathmatch or Player vs All is a widely-used gameplay mode integrated into many shooter and real-time strategy computer games...

es, a type of multiplayer game, became more "cinematic". At this point, however, they still documented gameplay without a narrative.

Quake movies

On October 26, 1996, a well-known gaming clan, the Rangers

United Ranger Films

United Ranger Films was a machinima production group responsible for the first examples of machinima. They were an offshoot from the Quake deathmatch clan, The Rangers, and were made up of members of the clan. Their first movie, Diary of a Camper, was a revolution at the time, because it was the...

, surprised the Quake community with Diary of a Camper
Diary of a Camper
Diary of a Camper is a short 1996 American film made using id Software's 1996 first-person shooter computer game Quake. It was created by United Ranger Films, then a subdivision of a popular group of computer game players, or clan, known as the Rangers. The film was first released over the Internet...

, the first widely known machinima film. This short, 100-second demo file contained the action and gore of many others, but in the context of a brief story, rather than the usual deathmatch. An example of transformative or emergent gameplay

Emergent gameplay

Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or table top role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics....

, this shift from competition to theater required both expertise in and subversion of the game's mechanics. The Ranger demo emphasized this transformation by retaining specific gameplay references in its story.

Diary of a Camper
Diary of a Camper
Diary of a Camper is a short 1996 American film made using id Software's 1996 first-person shooter computer game Quake. It was created by United Ranger Films, then a subdivision of a popular group of computer game players, or clan, known as the Rangers. The film was first released over the Internet...

inspired many other "Quake movies," as these films were then called. A community of game modifiers (modders), artists, expert players, and film fans began to form around them. The works were distributed and reviewed on websites such as The Cineplex, Psyk's Popcorn Jungle, and the Quake Movie Library (QML). Production was supported by dedicated demo-processing software, such as Uwe Girlich's Little Movie Processing Center (LMPC) and David "crt" Wright's non-linear editor

Non-linear editing system

In video, a non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing digital audio workstation system which can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source material...

Keygrip; the latter became known as "Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a timeline-based video editing software application. It is part of the Adobe Creative Suite, a suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems, though it can also be purchased separately. When purchased separately, it comes...

for Quake demo files". Among the notable films were Clan Phantasm's Devil's Covenant, the first feature-length

Feature length

Feature length is motion picture terminology referring to the length of a feature film. According to the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a feature length motion picture must have a running time of more than 40 minutes to be eligible for an Academy Award.The term may also...

Quake movie; Avatar and Wendigo's Blahbalicious
Blahbalicious
Blahbalicious is a machinima film made using the Quake game engine. It was recorded by Mackey 'Avatar' McCandlish and Brian 'Wendigo' Hess and released at 11pm ET on Monday 8 December 1997...

, which the QML awarded seven Quake Movie Oscars; and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield
Operation Bayshield
Operation Bayshield is a short 1997 film made by Clan Undead, a group of video game players. The work was created by using the machinima technique of recording a demonstration file of player actions in id Software's 1996 first-person shooter video game Quake, which could replay such files on demand...

, which introduced simulated lip sync

Lip sync

Lip sync, lip-sync, lip-synch is a technical term for matching lip movements with sung or spoken vocals...

hronization and featured customized digital asset

Digital asset

s.

Released in December 1997, id Software's Quake II
Quake II
Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...

improved support for user-created 3-D models. However, without compatible editing software, filmmakers continued to create works based on the original Quake; these included the ILL Clan

ILL Clan

The ILL Clan is a machinima production team based in Brooklyn, New York City. One of the first of the "Machinima Clans," they created their first short: Apartment Huntin' in 1997, and have continued to produce machinima since then...

's Apartment Huntin' and the Quake done Quick

Quake done Quick

Quake done Quick is a series of machinima and speedrun movies in which Quake, its mission packs, and a few of its related games, are completed as fast as possible, utilizing any shortcut or trick necessary...

group's Scourge Done Slick
Quake done Quick
Quake done Quick is a series of machinima and speedrun movies in which Quake, its mission packs, and a few of its related games, are completed as fast as possible, utilizing any shortcut or trick necessary...

. Quake II demo editors became available in 1998; in particular, Keygrip 2.0 introduced "recamming", the ability to adjust camera locations after recording. Paul Marino called the addition of this feature "a defining moment for [m]achinima". With Quake II filming now feasible, Strange Company

Strange Company

Strange Company is a group of machinima creators and distributors based in Edinburgh, Scotland. They are known in the medium as the longest-standing machinima production company, having produced machinima films since 1997, and for creating the Machinima.com website, which distributes such films on...

's 1999 production Eschaton: Nightfall was the first work to feature entirely custom-made character models.

The December 1999 release of id's Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena , is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly...

posed a problem to the Quake movie community. The game's demo file included information needed for computer network

Computer network

A computer network, often simply referred to as a network, is a collection of hardware components and computers interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information....

ing; however, to prevent cheating, id warned of legal action for dissemination of the file format. Thus, it was impractical to enhance software to work with Quake III. Concurrently, the novelty of Quake movies was waning. New productions appeared less frequently, and, according to Marino, the community needed to "reinvent itself" to offset this development.

Generalization

In January 2000, Hugh Hancock, the founder of Strange Company, launched a new website, machinima.com

Machinima.com

Machinima.com is a gaming and media streaming website, that aims to be a hub for machinima, the art of creating animated videos in real-time virtual 3-D environments. The site features machinima-related articles, and news. Machinima productions can be submitted for possible redistribution after...

. The new name surprised the community; a misspelled contraction of machine cinema (machinema), the term machinima was intended to dissociate in-game filming from a specific engine

Game engine

A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...

. The misspelling stuck because it also referenced anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

. The new site featured tutorials, interviews, articles, and the exclusive release of Tritin Films' Quad God
Quad God
Quad God is a 2000 film made by Tritin Films. It was created using the machinima technique of recording video frames from id Software's 1999 first-person shooter video game Quake III Arena...

. The first film made with Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena
Quake III Arena , is a multiplayer first-person shooter video game released on December 2, 1999. The game was developed by id Software and featured music composed by Sonic Mayhem and Front Line Assembly...

, Quad God was also the first to be distributed as recorded video frames, not game-specific instructions. This change was initially controversial among machinima producers who preferred the smaller size of demo files. However, demo files required a copy of the game to view. The more accessible traditional video format broadened Quad Gods viewership, and the work was distributed on CDs bundled with magazines. Thus, id's decision to protect Quake IIIs code inadvertently caused machinima creators to use more general solutions and thus widen their audience. Within a few years, machinima films were almost exclusively distributed in common video file formats.

Machinima began to receive mainstream notice. Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert

Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...

discussed it in a June 2000 article and praised Strange Company's machinima setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

's sonnet "Ozymandias

Ozymandias

"Ozymandias" is a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, published in 1818 in the January 11 issue of The Examiner in London. It is frequently anthologised and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem...

". At Showtime Network's 2001 Alternative Media Festival, the ILL Clan

ILL Clan

's 2000 machinima film Hardly Workin' won the Best Experimental and Best in SHO awards. Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg

Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...

used Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...

to test special effects while working on his 2001 film

2001 in film

The year 2001 in film involved some significant events, including the first of the Harry Potter series and also the first of The Lord of the Rings trilogy...

Artificial Intelligence: A.I. Eventually, interest spread to game developers. In July 2001, Epic Games

Epic Games

announced that its upcoming game Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003 or UT2003 is a first-person shooter video game designed mainly for multiplayer gaming. The game is part of the Unreal franchise's series of games, and is a sequel to Unreal Tournament ....

would include Matinee, a machinima production software utility. As involvement increased, filmmakers released fewer new productions to focus on quality.

At the March 2002 Game Developers Conference

Game Developers Conference

The Game Developers Conference is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking...

, five machinima makers—Anthony Bailey, Hugh Hancock, Katherine Anna Kang

Katherine Anna Kang

Katherine Anna Kang is a video game industry figure, machinima film producer, designer, entrepreneur and business woman. In 2000, as founder and CEO of Fountainhead Entertainment she championed machinima and became known as one of machinima’s biggest supporters...

, Paul Marino, and Matthew Ross—founded the AMAS, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima. At QuakeCon

QuakeCon

QuakeCon is a bring-your-own-computer computer gaming event with a competitive tournament held every year in Dallas, Texas, USA. The event, which is named after id Software's game Quake, sees thousands of gamers from all over the world attend every year to celebrate the company's gaming dynasty...

in August, the new organization held the first Machinima Film Festival, which received mainstream media coverage. Anachronox: The Movie, by Jake Hughes and Tom Hall, won three awards, including Best Picture. The next year, "In the Waiting Line", directed by Tommy Pallotta

Tommy Pallotta

Tommy Pallotta is an American film director and producer.-Biography:Pallotta received a degree in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin. There, he met Richard Linklater and began his film career as an actor and production assistant on Linklater's directorial debut, Slacker...

and animated by Randy Cole, became the first machinima music video to air on MTV

MTV

MTV, formerly an initialism of Music Television, is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs....

. As graphics technology improved, machinima filmmakers used other video games and consumer-grade video editing software

Video editing software

Video editing software, is application software which handles the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a computer non-linear editing systems...

. Using Bungie

Bungie

Bungie, Inc is an American video game developer currently located in Bellevue, Washington, USA. The company was established in May 1991 by University of Chicago undergraduate student Alex Seropian, who later brought in programmer Jason Jones after publishing Jones' game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of...

's 2001 game Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved, frequently referred to as Halo: CE, or Halo 1, is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The first game of the Halo franchise, it was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system, and is...

, Rooster Teeth Productions

Rooster Teeth Productions

Rooster Teeth Productions is a production group from Austin, Texas that specializes in the creation of live action shorts, animated peices and machinima, or films created using real-time, interactive engines from computer and video games. The name Rooster Teeth is a euphemism for Cockbite, an...

created a popular comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles
Red vs. Blue
Red vs. Blue, often abbreviated as RvB, is a set of related comic science fiction video series created by Rooster Teeth Productions and distributed through the Internet and on DVD...

. The series' second season

Red vs. Blue (season 2)

This is a list of episodes for season 2 of the machinima comedy series Red vs. Blue.-Main Series:-External links:**...

premiered at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of New York City's Upper West Side. Reynold Levy has been its president since 2002.-History and facilities:...

in 2004.

Mainstream appearances

Machinima has appeared on television, starting with G4

G4 (TV channel)

G4, also known as G4 TV, is an American cable- and satellite-television channel originally geared primarily toward young adult viewers, originally based on the world of video games...

's series Portal
Portal (TV series)
Portal is a former TV show which aired on G4. During its two-season run from 2002-2004, it was one of the most popular shows on the network. Written, produced, and hosted by Dave Meinstein, Portal was in many ways a comedy, a soap opera, a skit comedy show, and a news show...

. In the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

series Time Commanders
Time Commanders
Time Commanders was a series of programmes made by Lion TV and PlayGen for BBC Two that ran for two seasons from 2003 to 2005. The programmes, originally hosted by Eddie Mair and more recently by Richard Hammond, featured a specially made game engine to reenact historical battles. A team of four...

, players re-enacted historic battles using Creative Assembly

Creative Assembly

The Creative Assembly is a British video game developer established in 1987 by Tim Ansell and based in the West Sussex town of Horsham. An Australian branch is also operated from Fortitude Valley, Queensland...

's real-time game Rome: Total War
Rome: Total War
Rome: Total War is a PC strategy game developed by The Creative Assembly and released on by Activision...

. MTV2

MTV2

MTV2 is a cable network that is widely available in the United States on digital cable and satellite television, and is progressively being added to analogue cable lineups across the nation...

's Video Mods
Video Mods
Video Mods was a television series that aired on MTV2. The show turned video games into music videos. It was created by Tony Shiff of Big Bear Entertainment in 2003. A pilot aired in Dec 2003, having been underwritten by Electronic Arts...

re-creates music videos using characters from video games such as The Sims 2
The Sims 2
The Sims 2 is a strategic life simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to the best-selling computer game, The Sims, which debuted on February 4, 2000. It was first released on September 14, 2004 for Microsoft Windows. A port to Apple Mac OS X...

, BloodRayne
BloodRayne
BloodRayne has received mostly mixed to positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the Xbox version 73.53% and 76/100, the GameCube version 68.88% and 73/100, the PlayStation 2 version 68.87% and 75/100 and the PC version 65.78% and 65/100.-External links:*...

, and Tribes. Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment

helped to set part of "Make Love, Not Warcraft

Make Love, Not Warcraft

"Make Love, Not Warcraft" is the eighth episode of the tenth season of the animated television series South Park, and the 147th episode overall. It first aired on Comedy Central in the United States on October 4, 2006. In the episode, Cartman, Kyle, Stan and Kenny enjoy playing the popular...

", an Emmy Award

Emmy Award

An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...

–winning 2006 episode of the comedy series South Park
South Park
South Park is an American animated television series created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone for the Comedy Central television network. Intended for mature audiences, the show has become famous for its crude language, surreal, satirical, and dark humor that lampoons a wide range of topics...

, in its massively multiplayer online role-playing game

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....

(MMORPG) World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...

. By purchasing broadcast rights to Douglas Gayeton

Douglas Gayeton

Douglas Gayeton is an award-winning American multimedia artist, filmmaker, writer, and photographer who divides his time between a farm near Petaluma, California and Pistoia, a medieval Tuscan town....

's machinima documentary Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator in September 2007, HBO became the first television network to buy a work created completely in a virtual world

Virtual world

A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...

. In December 2008, machinima.com signed fifteen experienced television comedy writers—including Patric Verrone

Patric Verrone

Patric Miller Verrone is an American television writer and labor leader. He served as a writer and producer for several animated television shows, most notably Futurama.-Schooling and pre-television career:...

, Bill Oakley

Bill Oakley

Bill Oakley is an American television writer and producer, known for his work on the animated comedy series The Simpsons. Oakley and Josh Weinstein became best friends and writing partners at high school; Oakley then attended Harvard University and was Vice President of the Harvard Lampoon...

, and Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe

Mike Rowe may refer to:*Michael Rowe, television writer for Futurama*Mike Rowe , host of the Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs* Mike Rowe , retired Canadian professional ice hockey player...

—to produce episodes for the site.

Commercial use of machinima has increased. Rooster Teeth sells DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

s of their Red vs. Blue series and, under sponsorship from Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts, Inc. is a major American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers...

, helped to promote The Sims 2
The Sims 2
The Sims 2 is a strategic life simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to the best-selling computer game, The Sims, which debuted on February 4, 2000. It was first released on September 14, 2004 for Microsoft Windows. A port to Apple Mac OS X...

by using the game to make a machinima series, The Strangerhood
The Strangerhood
The Strangerhood is a comedy series created by Rooster Teeth Productions. The series is produced primarily by using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from computer and video games to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio. The animation is created using the computer game The...

. Volvo Cars

Volvo Cars

Volvo Car Corporation, or Volvo Personvagnar AB, is a Swedish automobile manufacturer founded in 1927, in Gothenburg, Sweden. It is owned by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. Volvo was originally formed as a subsidiary company to the ball bearing maker SKF. When Volvo AB was introduced on the Swedish...

sponsored the creation of a 2004 advertisement, Game: On
Game: On
Game: On is a 2004 short film produced by Ethan Vogt, a student at New York University, as an advertisement for Volvo Cars. The work is the first to combine live action and machinima, the use of real-time computer animation from a three-dimensional graphics rendering engine...

, the first film to combine machinima and live action

Live action

In filmmaking, video production, and other media, the term live action refers to cinematography, videography not produced using animation...

. Later, Electronic Arts commissioned Rooster Teeth to promote their Madden NFL 07
Madden NFL 07
Madden NFL 07 is the 2007 edition of the popular Madden NFL series. It is the first in the video game series to be released for the PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles. Former Seattle Seahawks running back Shaun Alexander is on the cover.-Features:...

video game. Blockhouse tv uses Moviestorm

Moviestorm

Moviestorm is real-time 3D animation software published by Moviestorm Ltd. The software is aimed at people of all age groups and appeals to those with a diverse range of backgrounds and interests. Currently active members include bloggers, musicians, writers, teachers, students, engineers,...

's machinima software to produce it's pre-school educational DVD series Jack and Holly
Jack and Holly
Jack and Holly is a preschool animated series from the UK which centres around two characters, Jack and Holly. It was created, written and produced by husband and wife team Jezz Wright and Julianne Martin at Blockhouse TV.-Main characters:...

Game developers have continued to increase support for machinima. Products such as Lionhead Studios

Lionhead Studios

Lionhead Studios is a British computer game development company led by industry veteran Peter Molyneux, and acquired by Microsoft Game Studios in April 2006. Lionhead started as a breakaway from the developer Bullfrog, which was also founded by Molyneux. Lionhead's first game was Black & White, a...

' 2005 business simulation game The Movies
The Movies
The Movies is a business simulation game created by Lionhead Studios for Microsoft Windows and subsequently ported to Mac OS X by Feral Interactive. It was released on November 8, 2005 in North America, and November 11, 2005 in Europe after reaching gold status on October 8, 2005...

, Linden Research's virtual world Second Life
Second Life
Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...

, and Bungie's 2007 first-person shooter Halo 3
Halo 3
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the Halo franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2...

encourage the creation of user content by including machinima software tools. Using The Movies, Alex Chan, a French resident with no previous filmmaking experience, took four days to create The French Democracy
The French Democracy
The French Democracy is a short 2005 French political film made by Alex Chan using computer animation from Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies. The plot centers on three Moroccan men who turn to rioting after facing different forms of discrimination...

, a short political film about the 2005 civil unrest in France

2005 civil unrest in France

The 2005 civil unrest in France of October and November was a series of riots by mostly Muslim North African youths in Paris and other French cities, involving mainly the burning of cars and public buildings at night starting on 27 October 2005 in Clichy-sous-Bois...

.

In a recent interview with PC Magazine

PC Magazine

PC Magazine is a computer magazine published by Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009...

, Valve CEO and co-founder Gabe Newell

Gabe Newell

Gabe Logan Newell is the co-founder and managing director of video game development and online distribution company Valve Corporation.-Work:...

said that they wanted to make a Half-Life

Half-Life (series)

The Half-Life series of video games share a science fiction alternate history. Nearly all of the games are first-person shooters on the GoldSource or Source engines, and most are linear, narrative, single-player titles....

feature film themselves, rather than hand it off to a big-name director like Sam Raimi

Sam Raimi

Samuel Marshall "Sam" Raimi is an American film director, producer, actor and writer. He is best known for directing cult horror films like the Evil Dead series, Darkman and Drag Me to Hell, as well as the blockbuster Spider-Man films and the producer of the successful TV series Hercules: The...

, and that their recent Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is a free-to-play team-based first-person shooter multiplayer video game developed by Valve Corporation. A sequel to the original mod Team Fortress based on the Quake engine, it was first released as part of the video game compilation The Orange Box on October 10, 2007 for Windows...

"Meet The Team" machinima shorts were experiments in doing just that.

Comparison to film techniques

The AMAS defines machinima as "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment". In other 3-D animation methods, creators can control every frame and nuance of their characters but, in turn, must consider issues such as key frame

Key frame

A key frame in animation and filmmaking is a drawing that defines the starting and ending points of any smooth transition. They are called "frames" because their position in time is measured in frames on a strip of film...

s and in-betweening

Tweening

Inbetweening or tweening is the process of generating intermediate frames between two images to give the appearance that the first image evolves smoothly into the second image. Inbetweens are the drawings between the key frames which help to create the illusion of motion...

. Machinima creators leave many rendering details to their host environments, but may thus inherit those environments' limitations. Because game animations focus on dramatic rather than casual actions, the range of character emotions is often limited. However, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that a small range of emotions is often sufficient, as in successful Japanese anime television series.

Another difference is that machinima is created in real time, but other animation is pre-rendered. Real-time engines need to trade quality for speed and use simpler algorithms and models. In the 2001 animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a 2001 Japanese-American computer animated science fiction film directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series of role-playing video games. It was the first photorealistic computer animated feature film and also holds the record for the most...

, every strand of hair on a character's head was independent; real-time needs would likely force them to be treated as a single unit. Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd argue that improvement in consumer-grade graphics technology will allow more realism; similarly, Paul Marino

Paul Marino

connects machinima to the increasing computing power predicted by Moore's Law

Moore's Law

Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware: the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years....

. For cut scenes in video games, issues other than visual fidelity arise. Pre-rendered scenes can require more digital storage space, weaken suspension of disbelief

Suspension of disbelief

Suspension of disbelief or "willing suspension of disbelief" is a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literary works of fiction...

through contrast with real-time animation of normal gameplay, and limit interaction.

Like live action, machinima is recorded in real-time, and real people can act and control the camera. Filmmakers are often encouraged to follow traditional cinematic conventions, such as avoiding wide fields of view

Field of view

The field of view is the extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment....

, the overuse of slow motion

Slow motion

Slow motion is an effect in film-making whereby time appears to be slowed down. It was invented by the Austrian priest August Musger....

, and errors in visual continuity

Continuity (fiction)

In fiction, continuity is consistency of the characteristics of persons, plot, objects, places and events seen by the reader or viewer over some period of time...

. Unlike live action, machinima involves less expensive, digital special effects and set

Set construction

Set construction is the process by which a set designer works in collaboration with the director of a production to create the set for a theatrical, film or television production...

s, possibly with a science-fiction or historical theme. Explosions and stunts can be tried and repeated without monetary cost and risk of injury, and the host environment may allow unrealistic physical constraints. University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

experiments in 2002 and 2003 attempted to use machinima to re-create a scene from the 1942 live-action film Casablanca
Casablanca (film)
Casablanca is a 1942 American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, and featuring Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Dooley Wilson. Set during World War II, it focuses on a man torn between, in...

. Machinima filming differed from traditional cinematography in that character expression was limited, but camera movements were more flexible and improvised. Nitsche compared this experiment to an unpredictable Dogme 95

Dogme 95

Dogme 95 was an avant-garde filmmaking movement started in 1995 by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, who created the "Dogme 95 Manifesto" and the "Vow of Chastity". These were rules to create filmmaking based on the traditional values of story, acting, and theme, and...

production.

Berkeley sees machinima as "a strangely hybrid form, looking forwards and backwards, cutting edge and conservative at the same time". Machinima is a digital medium based on 3-D computer games, but most works have a linear narrative structure

Narrative structure

Narrative structure is generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer....

. Some, such as Red vs. Blue
Red vs. Blue
Red vs. Blue, often abbreviated as RvB, is a set of related comic science fiction video series created by Rooster Teeth Productions and distributed through the Internet and on DVD...

and The Strangerhood
The Strangerhood
The Strangerhood is a comedy series created by Rooster Teeth Productions. The series is produced primarily by using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from computer and video games to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio. The animation is created using the computer game The...

, follow narrative conventions of television situational comedy. Nitsche agrees that pre-recorded ("reel") machinima tends to be linear and offers limited interactive storytelling; he sees more opportunities in machinima performed live and with audience interaction. In creating their improvisational comedy series On the Campaign Trail with Larry & Lenny Lumberjack and talk show Tra5hTa1k with ILL Will, the ILL Clan

ILL Clan

blended real and virtual performance by creating the works on-stage and interacting with a live audience. In another combination of real and virtual worlds, Chris Burke's talk show This Spartan Life
This Spartan Life
This Spartan Life is an award-winning talk show created by Bong + Dern Productions and produced and directed by Chris Burke, who hosts the show under the pseudonym Damian Lacedaemion...

takes place in Halo 2
Halo 2
Halo 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios. Released for the Xbox video game console on November 9, 2004, the game is the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed Halo: Combat Evolved...

s open multiplayer environment. There, others playing in earnest may attack the host or his interviewee. Although other virtual theatrical performances have taken place in chat room

Chat room

The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...

s and multi-user dungeon

MUD

A MUD , pronounced , is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, with the term usually referring to text-based instances of these. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat...

s, machinima adds "cinematic camera work". Previously, such virtual cinematic performances with live audience interaction were confined to research labs equipped with powerful computers.

Machinima can be less expensive than other forms of filmmaking. Strange Company produced its feature-length machinima film BloodSpell
BloodSpell
BloodSpell is a 2006 fantasy film produced by Strange Company. BloodSpell employs filming techniques known as machinima, and is the first feature-length production to use BioWare's Aurora Engine, developed for the computer role-playing game Neverwinter Nights, to generate the video portion of the...

for less than £

Pound sterling

The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...

10,000. Before using machinima, Burnie Burns

Burnie Burns

Michael Justin "Burnie" Burns is an independent filmmaker living in Texas. His best known contributions have been in machinima, although he has also worked with live-action. In April 2003, Burns, along with several of his friends, created the Internet machinima series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch...

and Matt Hullum

Matt Hullum

Matt Hullum is an independent filmmaker in Austin, Texas. Along with Burnie Burns, he is a co-founder of Rooster Teeth Productions, a company that specializes in machinima, the art using engines from computer and video games to create films...

of Rooster Teeth Productions spent US$

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

9,000 to produce a live-action independent film; in contrast, the four Xbox

Xbox

The Xbox is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and is the predecessor to the Xbox 360. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console...

game consoles used to make Red vs. Blue in 2005 cost $600. The low cost caused a product manager for Electronic Arts to compare machinima to the low-budget independent film

Independent film

An independent film, or indie film, is a professional film production resulting in a feature film that is produced mostly or completely outside of the major film studio system. In addition to being produced and distributed by independent entertainment companies, independent films are also produced...

The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film pieced together from amateur footage. The film was produced by the Haxan Films production company. The film relates the story of three student filmmakers The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film pieced together from amateur...

, without the need for cameras and actors. Because these are seen as low barriers to entry

Barriers to entry

In theories of competition in economics, barriers to entry are obstacles that make it difficult to enter a given market. The term can refer to hindrances a firm faces in trying to enter a market or industry - such as government regulation, or a large, established firm taking advantage of economies...

, machinima has been called a "democratization of filmmaking". Berkeley weighs increased participation and a blurred line between producer and consumer against concerns that game copyrights limit commercialization and growth of machinima.

Comparatively, machinimists using pre-made virtual platforms like Second Life

Second Life

Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab. It was launched on June 23, 2003. A number of free client programs, or Viewers, enable Second Life users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars...

have indicated that their productions can be made quite successfully with no cost at all. Creators like dutch director Chantal Harvey, producer of the 48 Hour Film Project

48 Hour Film Project

The 48 Hour Film Project is a contest in which teams of filmmakers are assigned a genre, a character, a prop, and a line of dialogue, and have 48 hours to create a short film containing those elements. Shortly after the 48 hours of filmmaking, the films from each city are then screened at a theater...

Machinima sector, have created upwards of 200 films using the platform. Harvey's advocacy of the genre has resulted in the involvement of film director Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway, CBE is a British film director. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular...

who served as a juror for the Machinima category and gave a keynote speech during the event.

Character and camera control

Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd list four main methods of creating machinima. From simple to advanced, these are: relying on the game's AI to control most actions, digital puppetry

Digital puppetry

Digital puppetry is the manipulation and performance of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtual environment that are rendered in real-time by computers...

, recamming, and precise scripting of actions. Although simple to produce, AI-dependent results are unpredictable, thus complicating the realization of a preconceived film script. For example, when Rooster Teeth produced The Strangerhood
The Strangerhood
The Strangerhood is a comedy series created by Rooster Teeth Productions. The series is produced primarily by using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from computer and video games to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio. The animation is created using the computer game The...

using The Sims 2
The Sims 2
The Sims 2 is a strategic life simulation computer game developed by Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It is the sequel to the best-selling computer game, The Sims, which debuted on February 4, 2000. It was first released on September 14, 2004 for Microsoft Windows. A port to Apple Mac OS X...

, a game that encourages the use of its AI, the group had to create multiple instances of each character to accommodate different moods. Individual instances were selected at different times to produce appropriate actions.

In digital puppetry, machinima creators become virtual actors; each crew member controls a character in real-time, as in a multiplayer game. The director can use built-in camera controls, if available. Otherwise, video is captured from the perspectives of one or more puppeteers who serve as camera operators. Puppetry allows for improvisation and offers controls familiar to gamers, but requires more personnel than the other methods and is less precise than scripted recordings. However, some games, such as the Halo series

Halo (series)

Halo is a multi-million dollar science fiction video game franchise created by Bungie and now managed by 343 Industries and owned by Microsoft Studios. The series centers on an interstellar war between humanity and a theocratic alliance of aliens known as the Covenant...

, (except for Halo PC and Custom Edition, which allow AI and custom objects and characters), allow filming only through puppetry. According to Marino, other disadvantages are the possibility of disruption when filming in an open multi-user environment and the temptation for puppeteers to play the game in earnest, littering the set with blood and dead bodies. However, Chris Burke intentionally hosts This Spartan Life
This Spartan Life
This Spartan Life is an award-winning talk show created by Bong + Dern Productions and produced and directed by Chris Burke, who hosts the show under the pseudonym Damian Lacedaemion...

in these unpredictable conditions, which are fundamental to the show. Other works filmed using puppetry are the ILL Clan's improvisational comedy series On the Campaign Trail with Larry & Lenny Lumberjack and Rooster Teeth Productions' Red vs. Blue. In recamming, which builds on puppetry, actions are first recorded to a game engine's demo file format, not directly as video frames. Without re-enacting scenes, artists can then manipulate the demo files to add cameras, tweak timing and lighting, and change the surroundings. This technique is limited to the few engines and software tools that support it.

A technique common in cut scenes of video games, scripting consists of giving precise directions to the game engine

Game engine

A game engine is a system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and personal computers...

. A filmmaker can work alone this way, as J. Thaddeus "Mindcrime" Skubis did in creating the nearly four-hour The Seal of Nehahra
The Seal of Nehahra
The Seal of Nehahra is an American film made in 2000, created by Mindcrime Productions as part of the Nehahra Project. Made using a modified version of id Software's 1996 first-person shooter computer game Quake and released over the Internet as a non-interactive game demo package, the film was the...

(2000), the longest work of machinima at the time. However, perfecting scripts can be time-consuming. Unless what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. The term is used in computing to describe a system in which content displayed onscreen during editing appears in a form closely corresponding to its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product...

) editing is available, as in Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption, changes may need to be verified in additional runs, and non-linear editing may be difficult. In this respect, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd compare scripting to stop-motion

Stop motion

Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...

animation. Another disadvantage is that, depending on the game, scripting capabilities may be limited or unavailable. Matinee, a machinima software tool included with Unreal Tournament 2004
Unreal Tournament 2004
Unreal Tournament 2004, also known as UT2K4 and UT2004, is a futuristic first-person shooter computer game developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes...

, popularized scripting in machinima.

Limitations and solutions

When Diary of a Camper was created, no software tools existed to edit demo files into films. Rangers clan member Eric "ArchV" Fowler wrote his own programs to reposition the camera and to splice footage from the Quake demo file. Quake movie editing software later appeared, but the use of conventional non-linear video editing software is now common. For example, Phil South inserted single, completely white frames into his work No Licence to enhance the visual impact of explosions. In the post-production

Post-production

of Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, Rooster Teeth Productions

Rooster Teeth Productions

added letterbox

Letterbox

Letterboxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting videographic image has mattes above and below it; these mattes are part of the image...

ing with Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro

to hide the camera player's head-up display

Head-Up Display

A head-up display or heads-up display is any transparent display that presents data without requiring users to look away from their usual viewpoints...

.

Machinima creators have used different methods to handle limited character expression. In the Halo video game series, helmets completely cover the characters' faces. To prevent confusion, Rooster Teeth's characters move slightly when speaking, a convention shared with anime. Some machinima creators use custom software. For example, Strange Company uses Take Over GL Face Skins to add more facial expressions to their characters filmed in BioWare's 2002 role-playing video game

Role-playing video game

Role-playing video games are a video game genre with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics. The player in RPGs controls one character, or several adventuring party members, fulfilling one or many quests...

Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights , produced by BioWare and published by Infogrames , is a third-person perspective computer role-playing game that is based on third edition Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms rules. It was originally to be published by Interplay Entertainment, but the publisher's financial...

. Similarly, Atussa Simon used a "library of faces" for characters in The Battle of Xerxes. In some cases, some game companies may provide such software; examples include Epic Games' Impersonator for Unreal Tournament 2004 and Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation

Valve Corporation is an American video game development and digital distribution company based in Bellevue, Washington, United States...

's FacePoser for Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 , the sequel to Half-Life, is a first-person shooter video game and a signature title in the Half-Life series. It is singleplayer, story-driven, science fiction, and linear...

. Another solution is to blend in non-machinima elements, as nGame did by inserting painted characters with more expressive faces into its 1999 film Berlin Assassins. It may be possible to point the camera elsewhere or employ other creative cinematography or acting. For example, Tristan Pope combined creative character and camera positioning with video editing to suggest sexual actions in his controversial film Not Just Another Love Story.

Legal issues

New machinima filmmakers often want to use game-provided digital asset

Digital asset

s, but doing so raises legal issues. As derivative work

Derivative work

In United States copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major, copyright-protected elements of an original, previously created first work .-Definition:...

s, their films could violate copyright or be controlled by the assets' copyright holder, an arrangement that can be complicated by separate publishing and licensing rights. The software license agreement

Software license agreement

A software license agreement is a contract between the "licensor" and purchaser of the right to use software. The license may define ways under which the copy can be used, in addition to the automatic rights of the buyer including the first sale doctrine and .Many form contracts are only contained...

for The Movies
The Movies
The Movies is a business simulation game created by Lionhead Studios for Microsoft Windows and subsequently ported to Mac OS X by Feral Interactive. It was released on November 8, 2005 in North America, and November 11, 2005 in Europe after reaching gold status on October 8, 2005...

stipulates that Activision

Activision

Activision is an American publisher, majority owned by French conglomerate Vivendi SA. Its current CEO is Robert Kotick. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the world's first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles...

, the game's publisher, owns "any and all content within... Game Movies that was either supplied with the Program or otherwise made available... by Activision or its licensors..." Some game companies provide software to modify their own games, and machinima makers often cite fair use

Fair use

Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...

as a defense, but the issue has never been tested in court. A potential problem with this defense is that many works, such as Red vs. Blue, focus more on satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

, which is not protected by fair use, rather than on parody

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

. Berkeley adds that, even if machinima artists use their own assets, their works could be ruled derivative if filmed in a proprietary

Proprietary software

Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...

engine. The risk inherent in a fair-use defense would cause most machinima artists simply to yield to a cease-and-desist

Cease and desist

A cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity and not to take it up again later or else face legal action. The recipient of the cease-and-desist may be an individual or an organization....

order. The AMAS has attempted to negotiate solutions with video game companies, arguing that an open-source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

or reasonably priced alternative would emerge from an unfavorable situation. Unlike The Movies, some dedicated machinima software programs, such as Reallusion's iClone

IClone

iClone is a 3D rendering and animation software program that enables users to make 3D animated films. It is notable for being one of the very few animation softwares that use a real-time "WYSIWYG" view to let animators see the results of their work immediately, and to play back animations in the...

, have licenses that avoid claiming ownership of users' films featuring bundled assets.

Generally, companies want to retain creative control over their intellectual properties

Intellectual property

Intellectual property is a term referring to a number of distinct types of creations of the mind for which a set of exclusive rights are recognized—and the corresponding fields of law...

and are wary of fan-created works, like fan fiction

Fan fiction

Fan fiction is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator...

. However, because machinima provides free marketing, they have avoided a response demanding strict copyright enforcement. In 2003, Linden Lab was praised for changing license terms to allow users to retain ownership of works created in its virtual world Second Life. Rooster Teeth initially tried to release Red vs. Blue
Red vs. Blue
Red vs. Blue, often abbreviated as RvB, is a set of related comic science fiction video series created by Rooster Teeth Productions and distributed through the Internet and on DVD...

unnoticed by Halos owners because they feared that any communication would force them to end the project. However, Microsoft, Bungie's parent company at the time, contacted the group shortly after episode 2, and allowed them to continue without paying licensing fees.

A case in which developer control was asserted involved Blizzard Entertainment's action against Tristan Pope's Not Just Another Love Story. Blizzard's community managers encouraged users to post game movies and screenshots, but viewers complained that Pope's suggestion of sexual actions through creative camera and character positioning was pornographic. Citing the user license agreement, Blizzard closed discussion threads about the film and prohibited links to it. Although Pope accepted Blizzard's right to some control, he remained concerned about censorship of material that already existed in-game in some form. Discussion ensued about boundaries between MMORPG player and developer control. Lowood asserted that this controversy demonstrated that machinima could be a medium of negotiation for players.

Microsoft and Blizzard

In August 2007, Microsoft issued its Game Content Usage Rules, a license intended to address the legal status of machinima based on its games, including the Halo series. Microsoft intended the rules to be "flexible", and, because it was unilateral, the license was legally unable to reduce rights. However, machinima artists, such as Edgeworks Entertainment

Edgeworks Entertainment

Edgeworks Entertainment is a machinima and new media production company created by Alexander Winn and Ryan Luther. At midnight on February 9, 2005, Episode 1 of their new machinima series was released. The Codex crew, which then consisted of Alexander Winn, Ryan Luther, Patrick Malone and Meghan...

, protested the prohibitions on extending Microsoft's fictional universe

Fictional universe

A fictional universe is a self-consistent fictional setting with elements that differ from the real world. It may also be called an imagined, constructed or fictional realm ....

s (a common component of fan fiction) and on selling anything from sites hosting derivative works. Compounding the reaction was the license's statement, "If you do any of these things, you can expect to hear from Microsoft's lawyers who will tell you that you have to stop distributing your items right away."

Surprised by the negative feedback, Microsoft revised and reissued the license after discussion with Hugh Hancock and an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...

. The rules allow noncommercial use and distribution of works derived from Microsoft-owned game content, except audio effects and soundtracks. The license prohibits reverse engineering

Reverse engineering

Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation...

and material that is pornographic or otherwise "objectionable". On distribution, derivative works that elaborate on a game's fictional universe

Fictional universe

A fictional universe is a self-consistent fictional setting with elements that differ from the real world. It may also be called an imagined, constructed or fictional realm ....

or story are automatically licensed to Microsoft and its business partners. This prevents legal problems if a fan and Microsoft independently conceive similar plots.

A few weeks later, Blizzard Entertainment posted on WorldofWarcraft.com their "Letter to the Machinimators of the World", a license for noncommercial use of game content. It differs from Microsoft's declaration in that it addresses machinima specifically instead of general game-derived content, allows use of game audio if Blizzard can legally license it, requires derivative material to meet the Entertainment Software Rating Board

Entertainment Software Rating Board

The Entertainment Software Rating Board is a self-regulatory organization that assigns age and content ratings, enforces industry-adopted advertising guidelines, and ensures responsible online privacy principles for computer and video games as well as entertainment software in Canada, Mexico and...

's Teen content rating guideline, defines noncommercial use differently, and does not address extensions of fictional universes.

Hayes states that, although licensees' benefits are limited, the licenses reduce reliance on fair use regarding machinima. In turn, this recognition may reduce film festivals' concerns about copyright clearance; in an earlier analogous situation, festivals were concerned about documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

s until best practices for them were developed. According to Hayes, Microsoft and Blizzard helped themselves through their licenses because fan creations provide free publicity and are unlikely to harm sales. If the companies had instead sued for copyright infringement, defendants could have claimed estoppel

Estoppel

Estoppel in its broadest sense is a legal term referring to a series of legal and equitable doctrines that preclude "a person from denying or asserting anything to the contrary of that which has, in contemplation of law, been established as the truth, either by the acts of judicial or legislative...

or implied license

Implied license

An implied license is an unwritten license which permits a party to do something that would normally require the express permission of another party...

because machinima had been unaddressed for a long time. Thus, these licenses secured their issuers' legal rights. Even though other companies, such as Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts

, have encouraged machinima, they have avoided licensing it. Because of the involved legal complexity, they may prefer to under-enforce copyrights. Hayes believes that this legal uncertainty is a suboptimal solution and that, though limited and "idiosyncratic", the Microsoft and Blizzard licenses move towards an ideal video gaming industry standard for handling derivative works.

Common genres

Nitsche and Lowood describe two methods of approaching machinima: starting from a video game and seeking a medium for expression or for documenting gameplay ("inside-out"), and starting outside a game and using it merely as animation tool ("outside-in"). Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd similarly distinguish between works that retain noticeable connections to games, and those closer to traditional animation. Belonging to the former category, gameplay and stunt machinima began in 1997 with Quake done Quick. Although not the first speedrun

Speedrun

ners, its creators used external software to manipulate camera positions after recording, which, according to Lowood, elevated speedrunning "from cyberathleticism to making movies". Stunt machinima remains popular. Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved
Halo: Combat Evolved, frequently referred to as Halo: CE, or Halo 1, is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The first game of the Halo franchise, it was released on November 15, 2001 as a launch title for the Xbox gaming system, and is...

stunt videos offer a new way to look at the game, and compare Battlefield 1942
Battlefield 1942
Battlefield 1942 is a 3D World War II first-person shooter computer game developed by Swedish company Digital Illusions CE and published by Electronic Arts for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh . The game can be played in singleplayer mode against the computer game AI or in multiplayer mode...

machinima creators to the Harlem Globetrotters

Harlem Globetrotters

The Harlem Globetrotters are an exhibition basketball team that combines athleticism, theater and comedy. The executive offices for the team are currently in downtown Phoenix, Arizona; the team is owned by Shamrock Holdings, which oversees the various investments of the Roy E. Disney family.Over...

. Built-in features for video editing and post-recording camera positioning in Halo 3
Halo 3
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the Halo franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2...

were expected to facilitate gameplay-based machinima. MMORPGs and other virtual worlds have been captured in documentary film

Documentary film

s, such as Miss Galaxies 2004, a beauty pageant that took place in the virtual world of Star Wars Galaxies
Star Wars Galaxies
Star Wars Galaxies is a Star Wars themed MMORPG for Microsoft Windows developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by LucasArts.-History:...

. Footage was distributed in the cover disc of the August 2004 issue of PC Gamer
PC Gamer
PC Gamer is a magazine founded in Britain in 1993 devoted to PC gaming and published monthly by Future Publishing. The magazine has several regional editions, with the UK and US editions becoming the best selling PC games magazines in their respective countries...

. Douglas Gayeton

Douglas Gayeton

's Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator documents the title character's interactions in Second Life.

Gaming-related comedy offers another possible entry point for new machinima producers. Presented as five-minute sketches, many machinima comedies are analogous to Internet Flash animations. After Clan Undead's 1997 work Operation Bayshield
Operation Bayshield
Operation Bayshield is a short 1997 film made by Clan Undead, a group of video game players. The work was created by using the machinima technique of recording a demonstration file of player actions in id Software's 1996 first-person shooter video game Quake, which could replay such files on demand...

built on the earliest Quake movies by introducing narrative conventions of linear media

Linear medium

A linear medium is any medium which is intended to be written to or accessed in a linear fashion, literally meaning in a line.This means that the information is written to or read from the medium in a given order, so for example a book containing a novel is intended to be read from front to back,...

and sketch comedy

Sketch comedy

A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...

reminiscent of the television show Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live is a live American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title of NBC's Saturday Night.The show's sketches often parody contemporary American culture...

, the New-York-based ILL Clan

ILL Clan

further developed the genre in machinima through works including Apartment Huntin' and Hardly Workin'. Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles chronicles a futile civil war over five seasons and 100 episodes. Marino wrote that although the series' humor was rooted in video games, strong writing and characters caused the series to "transcend the typical gamer". An example of a comedy film that targets a more general audience is Strange Company's Tum Raider, produced for the BBC

BBC

in 2004.

Machinima has been used in music videos, of which the first documented example is Ken Thain's 2002 "Rebel vs. Thug", made in collaboration with Chuck D

Chuck D

Carlton Douglas Ridenhour , better known by his stage name, Chuck D, is an American rapper, author, and producer. He helped create politically and socially conscious rap music in the mid-1980s as the leader of the rap group Public Enemy.- Early life :Ridenhour was born in Queens, New York...

. For this, Thain used Quake2Max, a modification

Mod (computer gaming)

of Quake II
Quake II
Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...

that provided cel-shaded animation

Cel-shaded animation

Cel-shaded animation is a type of non-photorealistic rendering designed to make computer graphics appear to be hand-drawn. Cel-shading is often used to mimic the style of a comic book or cartoon. It is a somewhat recent addition to computer graphics, most commonly turning up in video games...

. The following year, Tommy Pallotta

Tommy Pallotta

directed "In the Waiting Line" for the British group Zero 7

Zero 7

Zero 7 is a British musical duo consisting of Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker. The group members began their musical careers as studio engineers and in 1997 formed the group Zero 7. Their debut album, Simple Things was released in 2001 and received critical acclaim...

. He told Computer Graphics World, "It probably would have been quicker to do the film in a 3D animated program. But now, we can reuse the assets in an improvisational way." In television, MTV features video game characters on its show Video Mods
Video Mods
Video Mods was a television series that aired on MTV2. The show turned video games into music videos. It was created by Tony Shiff of Big Bear Entertainment in 2003. A pilot aired in Dec 2003, having been underwritten by Electronic Arts...

. Among World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...

players, dance and music videos became popular after dancing animations were discovered in the game.

Others use machinima in drama; these works may or may not retain signs of their video game provenance. Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament
Unreal Tournament is a futuristic first-person shooter video game co-developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes. It was published in 1999 by GT Interactive. Retrospectively, the game has also been referred to as UT99 or UT Classic to differentiate it from its numbered sequels...

is often used for science fiction and Battlefield 1942 for war, but some artists subvert their chosen game's setting or completely detach their work from it. In 1999, Strange Company

Strange Company

used Quake II
Quake II
Quake II, released on December 9, 1997, is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Id Software and distributed by Activision. It is not a sequel to Quake; it merely uses the name of the former game due to Id's difficulties in coming up with alternative names.The soundtrack for Quake II...

in Eschaton: Nightfall, a horror film based on the work of H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft

Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....

. A later example is Damien Valentine's series Consanguinity, made using BioWare

BioWare

BioWare is a Canadian video game developer founded in February 1995 by newly graduated medical doctors Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip. BioWare is currently owned by American company Electronic Arts...

's 2002 computer game Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights
Neverwinter Nights , produced by BioWare and published by Infogrames , is a third-person perspective computer role-playing game that is based on third edition Dungeons & Dragons and Forgotten Realms rules. It was originally to be published by Interplay Entertainment, but the publisher's financial...

and based on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Another genre consists of experimental works that attempt to push the boundaries of game engines. One example, Fountainhead's Anna, is a short film that focuses on the cycle of life and is reminiscent of Fantasia
Fantasia (film)
Fantasia is a 1940 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and released by Walt Disney Productions. The third feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film consists of eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, seven of which are...

. Other productions go farther and completely eschew a 3-D appearance. Friedrich Kirschner's The Tournament and The Journey deliberately appear hand-drawn, and Dead on Que's Fake Science resembles two-dimensional Eastern European modernist animation from the 1970s.

Some have used machinima to make political statements, often from left-wing perspectives

Left-wing politics

In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...

. Alex Chan's take on the 2005 civil unrest in France

2005 civil unrest in France

, The French Democracy
The French Democracy
The French Democracy is a short 2005 French political film made by Alex Chan using computer animation from Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies. The plot centers on three Moroccan men who turn to rioting after facing different forms of discrimination...

, attained mainstream attention and inspired other machinima commentaries on American and British society. Horwatt deemed Thuyen Nguyen's 2006 An Unfair War, a criticism of the Iraq war, similar in its attempt "to speak for those who cannot". Joshua Garrison mimicked Chan's "political pseudo-documentary style" in his Virginia Tech Massacre, a controversial Halo 3
Halo 3
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the Halo franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2...

–based re-enactment and explanation of the eponymous real-life events

Virginia Tech massacre

The Virginia Tech massacre was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. In two separate attacks, approximately two hours apart, the perpetrator, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people...

. More recently, War of Internet Addiction
War of Internet Addiction
War of Internet Addiction is an anti-censorship machinima advocacy production on behalf of the mainland Chinese World of Warcraft community, aesthetically notable for being made entirely in in-universe style...

addressed internet censorship in China using World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...

.

Competitions

After the QML's Quake Movie Oscars, dedicated machinima awards did not reappear until the AMAS created the Mackies for its first Machinima Film Festival in 2002. The annual festival has become an important one for machinima creators. Ho Chee Yue, a founder of the marketing company AKQA

AKQA

AKQA is a creative agency specializing in interactive marketing. The privately held company has offices in London, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C, Amsterdam, Berlin, Shanghai and San Salvador, totally roughly 1,000 full-time employees.-Philosophy:...

, helped to organize the first festival for the Asia chapter of the AMAS in 2006. In 2007, the AMAS supported the first machinima festival held in Europe. In addition to these smaller ceremonies, Hugh Hancock of Strange Company

Strange Company

worked to add an award for machinima to the more general Bitfilm Festival in 2003. Other general festivals that allow machinima include the Sundance Film Festival

Sundance Film Festival

The Sundance Film Festival is a film festival that takes place annually in Utah, in the United States. It is the largest independent cinema festival in the United States. Held in January in Park City, Salt Lake City, and Ogden, as well as at the Sundance Resort, the festival is a showcase for new...

and the Florida Film Festival

Florida Film Festival

The Florida Film Festival, produced by Enzian Theater in Maitland, Florida, is an annual international film festival. Showcasing the best American independent and foreign films, the festival has become one of the most respected regional film events in the United States.-Overview:The Festival...

. The Ottawa International Animation Festival

Ottawa International Animation Festival

-History:In 1976, the Canadian Film Institute founded the biennial Ottawa International Animation Festival . First held August 10 to 15, 1976, the OIAF created a gathering place for North American animation professionals and enthusiasts to ponder the craft and business of animation...

opened a machinima category in 2004, but, citing the need for "a certain level of excellence", declined to award anything to the category's four entries that year.

Machinima has been showcased in contests sponsored by game companies. Epic Games

Epic Games

' popular Make Something Unreal contest included machinima that impressed event organizer Jeff Morris because of "the quality of entries that really push the technology, that accomplish things that Epic never envisioned". In December 2005, Blizzard Entertainment

Blizzard Entertainment

and Xfire

Xfire

Xfire is a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers, that also serves as a game server browser and has various other features. It is currently available for Microsoft Windows. Xfire was originally developed by Ultimate Arena based in Menlo Park, California...

, a gaming-focused instant messaging

Instant messaging

Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

service, jointly sponsored a World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft
World of Warcraft is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe, which was first introduced by Warcraft: Orcs & Humans in 1994...

machinima contest.

External links

Academic machinima bibliography to 2007
Academic machinima bibliography to 2011
Warcraft Movies, a resource for World of Warcraft machinima
Machinima, a resource for all machinima works
Blue Entertainment, a resource for battlefield 2 machinima
T.O.M.B. The Online Motions Box, links to thousands of Machinima motions
GamersTube, a resource for various machinima
The Movie Vault, a competitive machinima video website
Flight Sim Machinima, links to flight-sim machinima
Machinination, a resource for machinima artists
Machinima Central- Machinima Community/Resources

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.