Inside the Machinima


Machinima is the creation of film or movie content inside a video game. For those of you not playing second life until 5am in the morning, let me explain…

You can create sets inside a virtual world game which feature houses, landscapes, movie theatres or any kind of background you could imagine in real life. You can dress the avatars (characters inside the video game), have them speak in-game via a microphone and even have them act out a pre-prepared script just as you would in real life. In fact, professional machinima is more similar to real life than you might think.

You can shoot from any angle inside most games (if you have the right equipment), you can then edit & create effects in post product just as you would for normal movie content. Where multiple actors are employed, teams emply different real life individuals to play their avatars and follow the director’s script.

In fact, one machinima workshop we went to, a team showed us how they had built a series of cars & machines inside a virtual reality game :: when we looked at the sets we realised that even in-game they had only built two dimensional objects because they only needed to shoot them from one side!

Whilst machinima is gaining popularity amongst avid gamers it won't be long before mainstream cottons on thanks to the likes of Gofish.com and Youtube.com distributing the content to a wider audience.

Imagine if you created a whole TVC in-world . . No talent fees, cheaper location & post-production . . Not to mention a greater variety of distribution channels.
Sound crazy? I bet a mainstream brand will jump this puppy in no time.

Check out this video of a real virtual machinima studio.