As machinima has gotten bigger, so has the business around it. Both Toyota and Coke have produced commercials that merge game animation with real life advertisement. The ILL Clan, a leading producer of machinima, has become a production studio whose clients include SpikeTV and MTV, and was recently purchased by the Electric Sheep Company.
But despite professionals getting in the game, machinima remains a medium in which almost anyone can play. Drawing on resources gamers easily have at hand, making machinima requires no major investment in equipment. So where should you start if you want to use this machinima to channel your inner-director?
Machinima.com is the best place to survey the field. The site's founder, Philip DeBevoise, compares the advent of machinima to that of digital video recorders, allowing a wave of new talent to emerge as the cost of creating films dropped. Other sites of use to the aspiring machinima maker include the Academy of Machinima Arts of Sciences, Machinima Premiere and Machinimag.
One rule of thumb to keep in mind when choosing the setting for your machinima is to pick a game you love - preferably a love other people share - as well as one you know well. Mike Booth said about his World of Warcraft machinima, "By using WoW, I get a built-in enormous fan base of millions of other people who already love the WoW world, which no other game gives me. In addition, the WoW world and characters have so much character that it's kind of like I get to use a kind of shorthand - if I have a character be a dwarf male, the viewer can instantly understand that he's a likeable, loyal, but not-too-smart hero. If I use a night elf female, the viewer understands that she's a hot, slightly self-absorbed foil. WoW does such a great job of tapping into archetypes that it makes my videos richer without me having to do anything extra."
Recording gameplay will depend on the game engine; some have recording capability built into them, while others will require an add-in. Depending on how complicated you want to get, you may need to learn the art of "recamming" - decompiling, editing and recompiling game files in order to change the camera view.
Perhaps most importantly, consider how you want to control the characters within the video. Will you rely on game-supplied actions, using socials such as /shrug, /sob and /lost to convey nuances of emotions? Or will you recruit actors, each directing their own game character, a technique that is more complex and time-consuming but allows for greater control?
Or perhaps you want the most complicated but precise form of machinima, one controlled by scripting. Scripting, which game companies use to create cut-scenes, allows a machinima creator to specify precise actions for everything in the film.
No matter what you opt for technically, you'll want to figure out your storyline before you start shooting, and for this task, you may want to glance at a screenwriting site beforehand or borrow from an existing story. Booth uses folksinger Jonathan Coulton's music as inspiration for his videos: "I try hard not to just re-tell the story that Coulton's lyrics already tell. That would be boring. I try to find the story lurking right behind the lyrics. When I do a good job, people tell me that it's as if my story was there alongside Coulton's story the whole time."
That is, perhaps, what makes machinima so exciting: discovering the stories that were there all along, the ones that could only be told within the game itself. The stories created by the very act of play.
Cat Rambo is a freelance writer based in Redmond, Washington who devotes an obsessive amount of time to Armageddon MUD. Her recent collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, THE SURGEON'S TALE AND OTHER STORIES, is available from Amazon or her website, http://www.kittywumpus.net.
