Machinima
"[6] Released the following year, id Software's Doom included the ability to record gameplay as sequences of events that the game engine could later replay in real-time.
[20] 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 Keygrip,[21] which later became known as "Adobe Premiere for Quake demo files".
[28] Borg War, a 90-minute animated Star Trek fan film, was produced using Elite Force 2 (a Quake III variant) and Starfleet Command 3, repurposing the games' voiceover clips to create a new plot.
[32] Coined by Anthony Bailey in a May 1998 email to Hancock,[33] the term is a misspelled portmanteau of machine cinema (machinema) which was intended to dissociate in-game filming from a specific engine.
[40] The next year, "In the Waiting Line", produced by Ghost Robot, directed by Tommy Pallotta and animated by Randy Cole, utilizing Fountainhead Entertainment's Machinimation tools, it became the first machinima music video to air on MTV.
[43] Using Bungie's 2001 game Halo: Combat Evolved, Rooster Teeth Productions created a popular comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles.
[51] Within the timeframe between Machinima Inc., and Rooster Teeth's respective closures, Australian animator Luke Lerdwichagul would gain prominence from his Super Mario 64 and Garry's Mod-based comedy series, SMG4.
Pre-rendered scenes can require more digital storage space, weaken suspension of disbelief through contrast with real-time animation of normal gameplay, and limit interaction.
[61] Filmmakers are often encouraged to follow traditional cinematic conventions,[62][63] such as avoiding wide fields of view, the overuse of slow motion,[64] and errors in visual continuity.
[72] The low cost caused a product manager for Electronic Arts to compare machinima to the low-budget independent film The Blair Witch Project, without the need for cameras and actors.
[citation needed] Harvey's advocacy of the genre has resulted in the involvement of film director Peter Greenaway who served as a juror for the Machinima category and gave a keynote speech during the event.
[76] For example, when Rooster Teeth produced The Strangerhood using The Sims 2, a game that encourages the use of its AI, the group had to create multiple instances of each character to accommodate different moods.
[79] 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.
[6] 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.
[90] In the post-production of Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, Rooster Teeth Productions added letterboxing with Adobe Premiere Pro to hide the camera player's heads-up display.
The most typical ways that amateur-style machinima gets around limitations of expression include taking advantage of speech bubbles seen above players' heads when speaking, relying on the visual matching between a character's voice and appearance, and finding methods available within the game itself.
Garry's Mod and Source Filmmaker include the ability to manipulate characters and objects in real-time, though the former relies on community addons to take advantage of certain engine features, and the latter renders scenes using non-real-time effects.
[93] 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 Neverwinter Nights.
[95] 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.
[101] Unlike The Movies, some dedicated machinima software programs, such as Reallusion's iClone, have licenses that avoid claiming ownership of users' films featuring bundled assets.
[109] 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.
[126] 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.
[130] Even after over 200 episodes of the show being broadcast onto the Internet since 2003, the only real similarities that can be drawn between Red vs. Blue and the game-world it takes place in are the character models, props, vehicles, and settings.
[135] Scott portrays Freeman as a snarky, sociopathic character who makes frequent references to works and texts including science fiction, horror films, action movies, American history, and renowned novels such as Moby Dick.
Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd state that Halo: Combat Evolved stunt videos offer a new way to look at the game, and compare Battlefield 1942 machinima creators to the Harlem Globetrotters.
[157] 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.
[158] Alex Chan's take on the 2005 civil unrest in France, The French Democracy, attained mainstream attention and inspired other machinima commentaries on American and British society.
[161] Joshua Garrison mimicked Chan's "political pseudo-documentary style" in his Virginia Tech Massacre, a controversial Halo 3–based re-enactment and explanation of the eponymous real-life events.
[172] By purchasing broadcast rights to Douglas Gayeton'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.
[178] Products such as Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies, Linden Research's virtual world Second Life, and Bungie's 2007 first-person shooter Halo 3 encourage the creation of user content by including machinima software tools.
