Machinima

            So while watching Second Skin last Thursday, there was a couple examples of a type of film making called machinima. As everyone may not be introduced to this small part of gaming culture, I thought that I would give a short overview of it and show off some of the best examples of the media.

To the uninformed, machinima is a type of film that utilizes video games for animation. As such this allows aspiring film-makers or hobbyists to film in a high quality 3d environment with special effects and props, all while staying on a small budget. Two popular games for this are Halo 3 and Garry’s mod, due to their extensive in-game map editing utilities. 

The practice of machinima emerged from recordings of speed runs of the FPS game Quake in the 1990s, which with the addition of storylines and voice acting evolved to a new media known as Quake Films. But this medium hit mainstream success from the team at Rooster’s teeth who created the massively popular series Red vs Blue. 

The series Red vs. Blue is a comedy and science fiction machinima series with footage from Halo: Combat evolved and its sequels. The first episode in the series was put online in April of 2003, and the series is currently on-going with 10 seasons thus far. To measure the success of the series Red vs. Blue, one may look at the fact they have sold over one million dvds of the series, or have had over one billion video views.

To watch Red vs. Blue simply check out the video

Source of metrics: http://rtxevent.com/info/pr

Strickland, Jonathan.  "How Machinima Works"  24 May 2007.  HowStuffWorks.com. <http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/machinima.htm>  05 August 2012.