The Sydney Morning Herald calls machinima “one of the most exciting and fastest-growing new art forms sweeping the world” and announces what sounds like a brilliant festival:

The art of Machinima is soon to be celebrated at a new Australian exhibition at the Queensland University of Technology.

The exhibition features over 60 Machinima works from artists including Australia’s Chris Howlett and Austrian Friedrich Kirschner. The exhibition begins with the first clunky films created using Doom and Quake in the mid-90s through to sophisticated contemporary films.

QUT says the exhibition “highlights a growing insurgency as contemporary art forms develop outside of traditional art fields, bringing brand new art forms to the fore”.

This is a very exciting time to be working on machinima, and it’s only a matter of a few years before it becomes accessible to all–not just as entertainment, but as a widespread form of expression. Wish I could make it to the festival this year! Here’s hoping it becomes an annual thing.

Article is here: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/blogs/screenplay/new-art-form-lifts-game/20100706-zz4k.html

This is art:

And so is this:

Roger Ebert has written a detailed retraction of his foolish April blog post claiming that “Video games can never be art.” I was surprised and happy to see this retraction. I think I was surprised because I’m not used to seeing ANYONE, even Roger Ebert, back down from such an emphatically stated position unless they’re somehow forced to (by legal/financial/political pressure, etc.). But on the other hand, I was even more surprised by the initial post. It seemed to me out of character for Roger Ebert to be so closed minded.

I personally don’t play video games. But machinima is most certainly an art form, one that relies upon the artistry of video game design principles and platforms. I’ve tried video games and they haven’t much captured my attention, but I’m very well attuned to the fact that they CAN BE, and OFTEN ARE, art. Ebert writes,

I had to be prepared to agree that gamers can have an experience that, for them, is Art. I don’t know what they can learn about another human being that way, no matter how much they learn about Human Nature. I don’t know if they can be inspired to transcend themselves. Perhaps they can. How can I say? I may be wrong. but if ‘m not willing to play a video game to find that out, I should say so.

I don’t play video games either, but I’ve seen and heard enough to say that they very much CAN inspire people in the ways described above. In fact, from what I’ve seen of Portal, it gets me thinking the same way many great films do. Same with regards to Fallout. The storytelling, imagery and metaphors in some games are simply brilliant. It really doesn’t take 40 hours of gaming to come to that conclusion.

The new post is here.

And this too is art (in a Star Wars kid type of way):

Gary Hayes at Personalize Media wrote a terrific post summarizing an introductory talk on machinima.

To help frame the intro talk too I also talked about the ecosystem of machinima as a simple matrix from non-real time to completely all-live capture on one axis and then the difference between professional creation and community on the other.

Hayes then maps out a chart showing the relative position of the “Pixars” of the world in relation to different types of animation and machinima, and eventually, points out some examples of “high production value machinima that rivals the best animation.” The graph is here, reposted with Gary Hayes’ kind permission:

It seems like each successive Pixar movie since “Monsters Inc.” has had a lower budget than its predecessor. Additionally, it’s telling that the top three most expensive CG animated movies of all time (according to this list) are so forgettable. It seems that somewhere between the “Pixars” and the “machinimartists” is a middle ground–even the biggest blockbuster studios will render in realtime, and the smallest indie productions will have a shot at competing with the biggest studios.

The embedded examples are terrific, and I was humbled to see that it’s possible to get such high quality out of Second Life… really raises the bar! I felt silly for not having already seen “Tiny Nation.” In “Nevermore,” we see an example of SL machinima that goes beyond comedy (refreshing!). The opening visuals are simply stunning and I had no idea it was SL until the “obvious signs” showed up!

Be sure to check out the whole post which is here: http://www.personalizemedia.com/machinima-rivals-animation/

The McComb School of Business at UT Austin had the foresight to include a segment on machinima as part of a series on “The Film Business.” The piece focuses exclusively on “Red vs. Blue,” which is a great example of machinima for the masses…

Video games and filmmaking collide in the realm of Machinima, an emerging medium dominated by the cult Web series “Red vs. Blue.” Series creator Burnie Burns pulls back the curtain for a look inside this brave new world where producers can reach their audiences directly.

Much of what is discussed in the piece has to do with online content in general (viral distribution, instant feedback). But my favorite part is when Burns says, “…we’re gonna see everybody’s story that they want to tell, because there’s  gonna be no barrier for them to stop and say, ‘I cant do this, maybe I’ll do it next year.’” I know exactly what he means. For example, in “Smell Memory,” there’s one sequence that I envisioned as being only 3 shots because I assumed it would be so difficult. It ended up being a whole 1.5 minute sequence where we were able to achieve everything we imagined. The result was our first battle sequence! We were actually able to do MORE than we wanted to do. So far, we’ve still encountered no limits.

Here’s the video:

Any serious discussion of where film is headed should touch on this revolution, so kudos to UT Austin.

Matt McMillan at Platform Nation asks about the Red Dead Redemption film airing on Fox this weekend:

What do you guys think? Are you going to watch it? Also, is this opening the possibility of us seeing more Machinima-based work on Television, or even the big screen?

Machinima is nothing less than the future of independent animated films. As computer systems get faster and more powerful and render time shrinks, this is where animation in general is headed. This goes way beyond video games and gaming engines also.

The trailer has even been enthusiastically posted under film discussion at Aint it Cool News, one of my favorite movie websites…

Wired also writes,

The short film’s trailer, above, suggests that the film will be a machinima, cut together using footage from the game. Considering the fact that Rockstar makes some of the best cut-scenes in the business, there’s a good chance that this could actually work.

Mark Hustvedt at Tubefilter news wrote about this new Dragon Age machinima:

In case you haven’t noticed, Machinima is booming lately—and starting to look pretty darn cinematic to boot. Those stories built entirely in video game platforms have come a long way since those early Quake movies or that couple of guys in Texas who spent way too much time with their copy of Halo and through their Red vs. Blue series introduced millions to this new storytelling format. Now the things in machinima land are getting epic.

Given the capabilities of the game engines and pre-existing game/virtual world content, its not hard to do “epic.” What IS great about this new Dragon Age machinima is the execution: the editing, voice acting, cinematography, music, and sound are all top-notch, making it a definite technical achievement. The narrative and storytelling are definitely compelling.

But honestly, YOU tell ME: while watching this, do you feel you’re watching something of which the world has never seen the likes before?

Absolutely not, but you wouldn’t know it from the online buzz lately… USA Today even quotes Machinima.com…

“Not only is there a cost advantage as you can create machinima a lot less expensively as other video content, but when you use a popular game series to create your film — be it Grand Theft Auto, The Sims, LittleBigPlanet or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 — you already have a built-in fan base of those who want to see something interesting in those worlds,” explains Allen Debevoise, CEO and Chairman of Machinima.com, a popular website devoted to the trend.

And where’s Second Life? iClone? Other realtime 3D rendering engines (such as Unity, discussed here recently)? (And no, Second Life is NOT  a video game) Machinima as an art form goes way beyond just video games, time to start recognizing!

The Salt Lake Tribune recently made the same mistake in their headline, “Machinima: games made this film”

Just found this post at Rezzable about a really exciting proposition: accessing, and editing OpenSim worlds via Unity! I’ve always preferred Unity as a game engine/world editor, and combining the interface with a Second-Life style world can be an incredibly powerful thing. The possibilities for realtime 3D animation here are just mindboggling–provided, of course, that this actually materializes. In theory, it’s possible, and it brings virtual world content creators (and machinimists) endless new possibilities. Let’s see it!

My initial view is that Unity is a very serious option. It works with OpenSim. We can use our OpenSim content without having to rework it at all. It is also really different from a Web App like the SL-viewer–and that is both good and bad. Unity isn’t trying to be that big a solution, but is more of a toolset.

I was pleasantly surprised to see machinima.com mentioned so casually as an example of online media success at CNet today:

They have names like Machinima, Next New Networks, and Demand Media. Collectively, they represent billions and billions of online-video views. And many have transformed their fledgling businesses into successful and profitable online brands.

In an article entitled “YouTube and the new creative class,” Kevin Yen gives some examples of “a creative class of budding, do-it-yourself media moguls–part distributor, part content creator, part producer, part entertainer…” I’m so happy to see machinima, itself an emerging art form, mentioned alongside other great artists who’ve reached new levels of expression through YouTube and other forms of online exposure. It makes sense that this new form of animation, so intimately tied to the online experience, is able to rise to the top on the web…

The article is here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20005166-93.html