Machinima

I don't believe that I have ever blogged about Machinima but I thought it would be worthwhile to mention to people who may not have heard of it.

While digging through my contacts to clean up for the new year/send out holiday cards, I realized that I hadn't talked to Paul Marino in a while. Paul worked with me at Vivendi and left to pursue Machinima full time. Currently he is the Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

So what is it? The various filmmakers of this genre utilize tools such as gaming engines to create movies/film etc. Imagine leveraging something like the Quake engine to create a movie. This is the type of stuff that they do. You may be thinking that it only applies to making movies like Aliens, but the Quake engine allows you to customize environments and scenery to make just about anything you can think of.

Why do I care? User generated content or any sort of edge of the network media needs to use platforms and tools that allow the costs to remain low. By cleverly repurposing tools such as gaming engines, these filmmakers can do some really crazy things at very low cost. I would highly recommend that you take a look at some of the projects that have come out of this group.