16 12/08
16:39

Machinima movie: Blahbalicious (1997)

HI, in the first chapter of my thesis I wanted to do a special mention to Blahbalicious (1997) by Avatar & Indigo, however right now is somehow not fixing in the text. So I just decided to use this short words here.

This movie was not only of the most awarded of Quake movies but also took skinning and parodying to an upper level. Its directors Avatar & Indigo used in Blabalicious a unique game-character specially designed for this movie (the fat guy). They identified themselves as puppeteers rather than film makers. It is easier to recognise in machinima the techniques and well established conventions of film grammar like camera angles, camera positions and camera movements; particularly because of its output as movies that are shot inside a 3D game engine. However, it is more foggy to identify that in machinima there is no actors, and that what occurs in machinima is rather an extended performance of puppets, a sort of supermarionation [Kelland 2005, p.76].

A machinima maker utilises the game characters or avatars as marionettes. The game models are dressed, made up and their movements controlled externally by the player. Strings are replaced either by keystrokes or scripts and voices are synchronised externally in the same manner is done puppet theatre. This feature permitted Avatar & Indigo a high degree of parody, irreverence and caricaturisation, an aesthetic rarely seen in mainstream animation nowadays.

Here the movie.

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