SIGRADI 2010 announcement here

Machinima Fictions: A DIY practice to produce animated movies from Videogames
Ricardo Cedeño Montaña

Building: Edificio W.
Room: Classroom 101
Date: 2010-11-18 04:20 PM – 04:40 PM
Last modified: 2010-11-03

Abstract

ABSTRACT
The mixture of playing videogames and producing movies has produced a new kind of moving image, a hybrid that, in the underground realm of videogames, has silently lured thousands to enter its territories. In the late 1990s, devoted players started to use videogame software for movie production. Their activity molded a narrative medium called ‘machinima’. Two recent productions are discussed to describe the various facets of this phenomenon in order to present the features that make up machinima and how it is relevant to popular culture.

KEYWORDS: machinima, videogames, hybrid, real-time, do-it-yourself (DIY).

Update (28.feb.2011)

This seminar titles: Do-it-yourself media: about machinima and other hybrid beasts and tackles DIY, machinima, and hybrid media as means to research in grass-roots digital media practices.

• Do-it-yourself (DIY) the low budget practice with high expectations, is a form of both media resistance and participation. Nowadays, DIY has become a de-facto attitude towards media, everyone is utterly a media producer and operator of machinimas, game mods, mobile apps, blogs, wikis, online radios. All these expressions have steady challenged the traditional mass media structures of content’s control. DIY addresses at the cultural impact that concepts such as appropriation, repurposing, openness, and remix have on the nature of digital media.
• Machinima describes a relatively recent species of moving image that results from the mixture of playing video games and producing movies, a hybrid that silently in the underground but massive realm of video games has lured and inspired thousands to enter its territories. In the late 1990s, devoted video game players started to use video game software for experimental movie production. This is a marginal practice that utilizes recordings of gameplay to make short and simple narrative movies.
• Hybrid media. What has made possible the apparition of the hybrid media? Which role plays the automation of several media languages and techniques in the computer, in the appearance of such hybrids? How could be described the aesthetics of these hybrids? Should we be afraid of them? Thus, this stream looks at the machinic combination of media in rhizomatic surfaces.

Movement under thousand eyes

As any scientific work, mine is open and free, therefore, today I share and publish an electronic version to anyone who wants to read the entire document, here the pdf. I hope to receive soon your critical comments.

1. Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. Movement under thousand eyes. 2009. Hochschule Bremerhaven and Universität Bremen. Germany.

The 1K Project II from BlackShark on Vimeo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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