Machinima

**Machinima** ( or ) is a type of animation and digital moviemaking style. It is the use of 3D computer graphics with a 3D video game or computer game to create the 3D animation. The creator who is making the video will record in-game animation and edit it with voice recordings. Machinima can be script-driven, meaning the cameras, characters, and effects are scripted for playback in real time. Unlike other types of animation, the scripting is driven by events and not keyframes.

*Machinima* limits the controls of other animation types.  *Machinima* videos can be shot live or scripted in real time. So it becomes much faster to produce than traditionally animated movies.

*Machinima* productions can remain close to their gaming roots and feature stunts or other portrayals of gameplay. Popular genres include dance videos, comedy, and drama. Some filmmakers attempt to stretch the boundaries of the rendering engines or to mask the original 3-D context. The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting machinima, recognizes exemplary productions through Mackie awards given at its annual Machinima Film Festival. Some general film festivals accept machinima, and game companies, such as Epic Games, Blizzard Entertainment and Jagex, have sponsored contests involving it.

## The Making of *Machinima*
The AMAS defines machinima as "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment". In other 3-D animation methods, creators can control every frame and nuance of their characters but, in turn, must consider issues such as key frames and in-betweening. Machinima creators leave many rendering details to their host environments, but may thus inherit those environments' limitations. Because game animations focus on dramatic rather than casual actions, the range of character emotions is often limited. 

Another difference is that machinima is created in real time, but other animation is pre-rendered. Real-time engines need to trade quality for speed and use simpler algorithms and models.

Like live action, machinima is recorded in real-time, and real people can act and control the camera. Filmmakers are often encouraged to follow traditional cinematic conventions, such as avoiding wide fields of view, the overuse of slow motion, and errors in visual continuity. Unlike live action, machinima involves less expensive, digital special effects and sets, possibly with a science-fiction or historical theme. Machinima filming differed from traditional cinematography in that character expression was limited, but camera movements were more flexible and improvised. Nitsche compared this experiment to an unpredictable Dogme 95 production. Machinima is a digital medium based on 3-D computer games, but most works have a linear narrative structure. Some, such as *Red vs. Blue* and *The Strangerhood*, follow narrative conventions of television situational comedy. Previously, such virtual cinematic performances with live audience interaction were confined to research labs which had powerful computers. 

Machinima can be less expensive than other forms of filmmaking. Strange Company produced its feature-length machinima film *BloodSpell* for less than £10,000. Before using machinima, Burnie Burns and Matt Hullum of Rooster Teeth Productions spent US$9,000 to produce a live-action independent film. The four Xbox game consoles used to make *Red vs. Blue* in 2005 cost $600. The low cost caused a product manager for Electronic Arts to compare machinima to the low-budget independent film *The Blair Witch Project*, without the need for cameras and actors. 

Comparatively, machinimists using pre-made virtual platforms like Second Life have indicated that their productions can be made quite successfully with no cost at all. Creators like Dutch director Chantal Harvey, producer of the 48 Hour Film Project Machinima sector, have created upwards of 200 films using the platform. Harvey's advocacy of the genre has resulted in the involvement of film director Peter Greenaway who was a juror for the Machinima category and gave a keynote speech during the event.

### Character and camera control
Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd list four main methods of creating machinima. From simple to advanced, these are: relying on the game's AI to control most actions, digital puppetry, recamming, and precise scripting of actions. For example, when Rooster Teeth produced *The Strangerhood* using *The Sims 2*, a game that encourages the use of its AI, the group had to create multiple instances of each character to accommodate different moods. The director can use built-in camera controls, if available. However, some games, such as the *Halo* series, (except for Halo PC and Custom Edition, which allow AI and custom objects and characters), allow filming only through puppetry.  In recamming, which builds on puppetry, actions are first recorded to a game engine's demo file format, not directly as video frames. Without re-enacting scenes, artists can then manipulate the demo files to add cameras, tweak timing and lighting, and change the surroundings. This technique is limited to the few engines and software tools that support it.

A technique common in cut scenes of video games, scripting consists of giving precise directions to the game engine. A filmmaker can work alone this way, as J. Thaddeus "Mindcrime" Skubis did in creating the nearly four-hour *The Seal of Nehahra* (2000), the longest work of machinima at the time. However, perfecting scripts can be time-consuming. In this respect, Kelland, Morris, and Lloyd compare scripting to stop-motion animation. Matinee, a machinima software tool included with *Unreal Tournament 2004*, popularized scripting in machinima. Rangers clan member Eric "ArchV" Fowler wrote his own programs to reposition the camera and to splice footage from the *Quake* demo file. *Quake* movie editing software later appeared, but the use of conventional non-linear video editing software is now common. For example, Phil South inserted single, completely white frames into his work *No Licence* to enhance the visual impact of explosions.

Machinima creators have used different methods to handle limited character expression. In the *Halo* video game series, helmets completely cover the characters' faces. To prevent confusion, Rooster Teeth's characters move slightly when speaking, a convention shared with anime. Some machinima creators use custom software. For example, Strange Company uses Take Over GL Face Skins to add more facial expressions to their characters filmed in BioWare's 2002 role-playing video game *Neverwinter Nights*. In some cases, some game companies may provide such software; examples include Epic Games' Impersonator for *Unreal Tournament 2004* and Valve Corporation's FacePoser for *Half-Life 2*. It may be possible to point the camera elsewhere or employ other creative cinematography or acting.

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## Other websites
* Academic machinima bibliography to 2007 
* Academic machinima bibliography to 2011
* Warcraft Movies, a resource for *World of Warcraft* machinima
* Machinima, a resource for *all * machinima works
* Blue Entertainment , a resource for *battlefield 2* machinima	
* T.O.M.B. The Online Motions Box , links to thousands of Machinima motions
* GamersTube , a resource for various machinima
* The Movie Vault , a competitive machinima video website
* Flight Sim Machinima , links to flight-sim machinima
* Machinination , a resource for machinima artists
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* Machinima Central- Machinima Community/Resources