Machinima UK opens it’s doors today (yesterday)

Written by Ben on July 16th, 2008 and posted in Game News
Tags : competition, machinima

Machinima is the art of using computer games, in unintended ways, to tell stories. It’s something that has always intrigued me but I have never paid a huge amount of attention too - perhaps now would be a good time to take a look.

Bizarrely the site, and a brand new competition, are being sponsored by Rustlers - a microwave meal brand. Not convinced about the connection but the competition and site sound interesting so I’ll let it pass

I don’t normally post press releases but it’s late and I want to go to bed, so here’s what they have to say about themselves.

Today’s official opening of Machinima.com’s UK portal is being celebrated with the launch of a machinima music video competition featuring the work of genius geek troubadour of-the-moment Jonathan Coulton, the writer of ‘Still Alive’, the closing track in the Electronic Arts game Portal (as featured in Half Life 2 - The Orange Box). The man known to fans as ‘JoCo’ has supplied two tracks (Bacteria and Todd the T1000) for would-be music video directors to use, and both can be downloaded free of charge from the competition page.

Entrants will be able to submit their entries using Machinima.com’s video uploading tools, while users registering on the site will be able to vote for their favourite entries. When the competition ends on August 8th, the author of the music video with the most votes will win a top-of-the-range Alienware Laptop, pre-loaded with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. Runners-up will also be awarded prizes, as will a random selection of users who sign up and vote during the competition period.

But hold up a second - what the heck is machinima? If you’re unfamiliar with the art form, don’t worry, this is bleeding edge stuff. Machinima is the art of real-time filmmaking in a virtual environment. This virtual environment could be a place like Second Life, but more often it’s a video game - anything from World Of Warcraft to Halo 3. The playable characters are your actors, the game environments are your sets, and the games weapons and monsters are your special effects. Turning passive gamers into artistic puppet masters, machinima is essentially Punch and Judy on an epic scale.

Perfect for any wannabe film-maker who’d rather be making Hollywood blockbusters than talky indie films, machinima enables talented young Tarantinos to create special effects-heavy films that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars in Tinseltown - for next to nothing.

In the US, machinima is already big business, both commercially and artistically. The most successful product is Red Vs. Blue, a hilarious comedy series based the private lives of Halo characters. With over 100 episodes and several mini-series, it was described by Graham Leggat (former Director of Communications for New York’s prestigious Lincoln Center Film Society) as being “truly as sophisticated as Samuel Beckett.”

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