Rise of the Machines
Once a toy for techies, machinima is now within the grasp of most filmmakers. Jasmina Kallay introduces this hybrid artform, which is proving a popular way to make ultra low-budget films.

For the average aspiring filmmaker, launching that first film is an obstacle-laden quest that ironically mirrors Joseph Campbell’s myth structure, boiled down for screenwriters by Christopher Vogler’s The Hero’s Journey. But what if there were a way of making films that would be cheap, quick, and with an end result bearing high production values comparable to anything out of, say, Pixar or DreamWorks?  Yes, it sounds too good to be true, and yet, if the emergent machinima is anything to go by, it’s a harbinger of things to come.

Cinemachine
The somewhat clunky amalgam of machine + cinema (or machine + animation, according to a few sources) refers to films made using computer game software. With its aural emphasis on ‘machine’, it’s not a term you instantly associate with a film genre. And yet, if ‘machinima’ has an awkward ring to it, it’s an apt reflection of the uneasy relationship between videogames and cinema that has pitted narrativists versus ludologists. The argument in the world of academia stems from the differing approaches to the still new field of computer game studies. Essentially, narrativists, such as the prominent scholar Dr. Janet Murray, believe that ‘all games are stories’, whereas the ludologist camp refutes this claim, insisting that games are older than narratives, and that their interactive, playful nature defies structure, which binds stories. Countering this, narrativists insist on differentiating between playfulness and gaming, and in this context machinima could be seen as bridging the dichotomy by demonstrating a playfulness while being narrative-led [1]; in short, they combine the two worlds of gaming and film narrative in a unique way.

Originally a pastime for the most ardent and tech-savvy gamers in the mid-1990s, involving hacking and complicated technical manoeuvres, machinima allowed fans to explore the gaming world in much greater depth. By creating short films, fans were demonstrating an inherent impulse to construct stories out of the largely simplistic and crude narrative world of games. One of the earliest and most popular examples of this new form were the Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles [2] , based on Microsoft’s Halo. Using Halo’s basic conflict of the Red and Blue soldiers as its departure point, the Rooster Teeth Productions team focussed on the soldiers’ thoughts and conversations in the downtime between combat, creating a hilarious world with existentialist tinges that shared a cinematic kinship with Tarantino and Kevin Smith. Rather than relying on visual bravura, the key to their continuing success is great writing.

1. Proving there are exceptions to every rule, some machinimas are indeed non-narrative, but they constitute a small minority.
2. You can download free Red vs. Blue machinimas at www.redvsblue.com or www.machinima.com

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 115.