·~{dRNn}~·

HI,
one part of my recent thesis discusses fan and amateur video productions in the context of machinima and DIY media. Star Wars holds a large fan community all around the word, only comparable to trekkies, that has made it to achieve its status as cult film. These are very active communities whose members usually get involved in organising festivals and conventions, and in publishing fanzines and other forms of DIY media.

Fans, independent of the cult media, appropriate the original media content to extend its diegetic world. These activities can be read as either participatory or resistant towards the media. The story lines, characters, and aesthetics of the media cult are unfolded in order to fill gaps, or to accommodate them to personal, political, and social issues. In all cases, fan’s productions are deviations of the cult media (film, TV series, video game, and pop bands) that the producers do not support officially, but that in many cases they encourage as long as these productions increase the popularity of their cultural text.

The access to nearly inexpensive tools for media production has brought a proliferation of these fan’s (di,-sub-, and per-) versions with a decent and even high quality. Fanzines, fanart, music videos, mash-ups, disguises, parallel narrations, mods, machinimas, and online forums are part of a huge realm in media production that currently is garnering as much attention as the original productions in the Internet.

Recently, I found via Wired the following videos by Mike Horn, an enthusiast of Star Wars. His DIY productions combine the amateurish style of camcorder video with CG animations. He places the universe of Star Wars in contact with San Francisco and in one of the videos in narrative collision with Star Trek.

Hi, next week I will present and defend my master’s thesis in Bremen. The colloquium is public and everyone interested on is hearty welcome, for details click on the image below.

Title:
Machinima Fictions. A do-it-yourself practice to produce narrative movies from video games.

Abstract:
This thesis investigates the growing phenomenon of the moving image form of machinima, which has been defined as a technique that utilizes 3D video game environments to produce narrative animated movies. The main argument centers on the hybridization of media languages that machinima exhibits, allowing a cultural appreciation of this phenomenon. Two productions that promote machinima qualities such real-time and film language are examined in order to observe how these features mold the expressive potentialities machinima as a hybrid moving image medium. The metaphor of a rhizomatic, tangled surface (maraña) streams throughout the document and fosters a multifaceted view of this moving image medium.

Through my research, which encompasses the critical view of terms, the development of concepts, and a review of relevant literature, I argue that machinima is more than a technique that imperfectly imitates the conventions and codes of mainstream film and television. Instead, machinima is considered a cultural phenomenon that stems from a persistent contact with machinic entertainment media and subscribes to the current widespread do-it-yourself (DIY) mentality in media production that emphasizes production over consumption.

Contents:
Chapter I. The phenomenon: machinima
A. Describing machinima
B. A hybrid form
C. Machinima’s tangled history
Chapter II. Fiction making: real-time
A. Machinima techniques
B. Real-time
C. Marionettes: A Puppet Play
D. Conclusion
Chapter III. Fiction making: The Monad
A. Hammer and Faceposer: the means
B. Virtual worlds: the context
C. Narrative form in The Monad
D. Film Style in The Monad
E. Conclusion
Chapter IV. Context: DIY mentality
A. Video games and popular culture
B. DO IT YOURSELF!
C. Aesthetics of DIY
D. Conclusion

Soon to be available online.
Ricardo Cedeño Montaña.

HI, in the short history of machinima some people have already made a name because of a remarkable piece. It is the case of Katherine Anna Kang, below an excerpt from my thesis in which one of her productions is mentioned.

The founders of AMAS are active machinima producers with commercial interests. Katherine Anna Kang founded Fountainhead Entertainment in Mesquite, Texas in 2000 and maintains a close relationship with id software, which eventually helped her to develop and produce Machinimation™, the first commercially-available functional tool for machinima based on Quake III Arena™ [1, p.92]. In 2003, she produced Anna (2003) using Machinimation™.

1. Kelland, Matt, Dave Morris and Dave Lloyd. Machinima: Making Animated Movies in 3D VirtualEnvironments. East Sussex, UK: Ilex Press Limited, 2005.

Hi,
my first chapter finally has reached a draft status, meaning it is in its final revision. Soon, I will share my conclusions, currently my ongoing work deals with a film analysis of one machinima that later I will comment it here, too. By now I want to open 2009 with two definitely worth watching machinima pieces from AFK pl@yers, a machinima studio from Taiwan. They work with World of Warcraft to produce their movies. Though right now I’m not going to mention their productions in my thesis they have shown me a completely different aesthetic of machinima, one closer to junk-TV than to film making. A sign of the irreverent potential hidden in this rhizomatic movement.

Junk TV and WoW
Is it a Remediation of junk TV in World of Warcraft or a conversion of World of Warcraft in junk TV?

An answer not as easy as it seems at first glance. On the one hand anyone who has wasted time watching TV would agree that most of it is rather similar to junk food, deliciously insipid and brilliantly empty. World of Warcraft is a baroque MMORPG game with hundred of thousand of players and guilds. In any case both are massive entertainment media being hybridized in AFK’s movies.

Wrath of couch potato

Azeroth Movie Top 3, this one was nominated for the “Best Short Film” in the Machinima Film Festival 2008.

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.

In 1994 Lapham derived the following pairs from McLuhan’s Understanding Media (Link broken, new link: here – update: 03.07.2009)

As all comparisons do, they seek out to separate and differentiate aiming at better comprehension—especially when put on a table; its logic is more similar to a well rooted tree-like structure rather than to an interconnected mesh of elements in perpetual change.

HI,
recently for n-time I watched again (yeah I know) Blade Runner. I cannot stop finding meanings and inspirations, being awed and getting scared by this film. A couple of sequences made me think again about the nature of the images and its artificiality. Images, in Blade Runner attested both authenticity and proof. In this fictional world there is concern about what is authentic and the humanity of artificial beings is under question. The replicants are perfect simulations of living creatures, they simulate everything at the more finest details, but as simulations they are meant to be something they are not, to possesses something they were denied to have. However, paradoxically they want desperately to be.

The Voight-kampf test.

[...]you are talking about memories

Images, memories, self-imposed references of a source. The production, circulation and consumption of images is a kind of paranoia. Just by looking at my hard drive I came to discover the amazing amount of pictures, images, memories I’ve stored. Some of them are so far away in the time and the space they simulate, that they have become something totally different from my memories, they have life by themselves. Even though I know I’m doomed to continue producing and consuming images. I have to recognised that after a while they are any longer about me and my selfish attempts to save imperceptible moments to live my past again. They replicate themselves and threat me.

A world constructed of images is the final triumph of a chain of simulations to separate ourselves of the alien nature surrounding us. The more clean, immaculate, pure the images the better, this is very well known by Roy Batty, his (its) entire world is an outside-imposed image. Why do we identify much more easier logos, trademarks, people’s images than trees, flowers or mountains? Why do we want to frame everything? Why do we continue believing about the actuality, reality, and neutrality of images? Images are any longer about reality, the world is not the images. Why do we, with anxiety, follow the beauty impose by the generators of images? The meaning-machines are doing a great job, ruling the meanings. We are not away from the images, we are trapped in the images, they one of the new gods. Even worst, as in a Huxleyan nightmare we are happily filling in our world with millions of images every millisecond, all the same, all with an endless replicated selfish meaning(less). The person of the year is you! screamed a big machine, but the picture was empty, nothing in there just a mirror and we looking narcissistically at ourselves, this is our brave world, just a mirror we are too afraid to look beyond it. All these framed moments, are dying like flickrs under a rain of images…

[...] it’s time to die.

[...]you won live, but than again, who does?

While researching for concepts about animation for my thesis work I found this a great old animation referred in The technique of film animation by John Halas and Roger Manvell. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

More Info about Tuslava here, and a short review here:

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrates, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved. Written by Stewart Naunton {snaunton@online.ru}

HI,
Starflyer a short clip I did with some other fellows is being shown, this time in the Freimarkt Bremen web-site. There, under Freimarkt Videos is the link to Starflyer and to Our youth another clip done last winter term. In the picture you can see where to click.

For more information about starflyer and the youtube version please visit here.

Many thanks for any comment!

P.D. Freimarkt web-site has been updated from now on the videos are available here

Hi,
my thesis topic and a word cloud draft scheme of my first chapter.

Machinima has a weird origin, and a weird definition too: machine+cinema. But basically it means producing video real-time recordings using 3d game engines. It is a cultural movement that assemblage three conceptual forces: Puppetry, cinematic language and video game simulations; and dissimilar communities: video game players and film makers. Machinima also exemplify the DIY mentality in our current media production.

Its origins:
Using video games as source material for video existed before the name was coined. Here two examples of mid 90′s. Check them out . Both pieces release in 1996 but in two different contexts: an art gallery and a game community. Weird isn’t it?

Miracle, Milton Manetas, 1996

Diary of a camper, The Rangers, 1996