![]() ![]() But it still has a long way to go to match Pixar's “Monsters, Inc.” some frames of which (there are 24 per second) took 90 hours to generate using over 400 computers. The production quality is good, and will only get better with the next generation of video games, such as “Doom 3”. This is not to say that machinima is ready for prime time just yet. It is affordable, allows for a great deal of creative freedom and, when compared with conventional forms of manual or computer-based animation, is both faster and, says Mr Marino, more fun. Animation studios' desire to cut costs and production time, coupled with advances in video-game graphics technology offering the potential for photo-realistic “cinematic computing” could, he believes, eventually allow machinima to take over the animated-film business. He points out that a 30-strong animation team at Pixar took four years and $94m to create “Finding Nemo”. Could film-production technology also be overshadowed by games software? “Machinima can be considered Hollywood meets Moore's law,” says Mr Marino, the author of a new book on machinima * and executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, which holds an annual film festival in New York. Those in the video-games industry are fond of quoting the statistic that sales of games now exceed Hollywood's box-office receipts. It became the first machinima music video to be widely shown on MTV last year. Fountainhead Entertainment licensed “Quake III” to create a point-and-click software package called Machinimation, which it used to produce “In the Waiting Line” by the British band Zero 7. Conversely, machinima creators have built movie-making tools on the foundations of games. ![]() Later this year, Valve Software plans to release “Half-Life 2”, a long-awaited game that will include tools specifically geared toward machinima: in-game characters will have realistic facial expressions with 40 different controllable muscles, and eyes that glint. Epic Games has built a movie-making tool into its spectacularly successful “Unreal Tournament” series, for example, and many games include level-design software that both gamers and machinima artists can exploit. Games publishers have now begun to incorporate machinima into their products. The same games also allow virtual environments to be created quickly and easily, which allows for elaborate sets and props. Machinima exploits the same notation to describe and manipulate the movements of characters and camera viewpoints. Without an efficient means of transmitting this information to other players across the internet, multi-player games would suffer from jerky motion and time lags. Spike TV, an American cable channel, hired machinima artists to create shorts for its 2003 video game awards, and Steven Spielberg used the technique to storyboard parts of his film “A.I.” At, hobbyists have posted short animated films with dialogue, music and special effects.Īll of this is possible because of the compact way in which multi-player games encode information about different players' movements and actions. There is an annual machinima film festival in New York, and the genre has seen its first full-length feature, “Anachronox”. Around the world, growing legions of would-be digital Disneys are using the powerful graphical capabilities of popular video games such as “Quake”, “Half-Life” and “Unreal Tournament” to create films at a fraction of the cost of “Shrek” or “Finding Nemo”. ![]() Eight years on, this new medium-known as “machinima” (“machine” crossed with “cinema”)-could be on the verge of revolutionising animation. ![]()
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