Bolty's Compleat List of Fun WoW Movies

[Trien]

Also added The Craft of War: BLIND, which, unless you're the one person on the Internet who hasn't seen this by now, should be of no surprise. This is one of those machinimas that just raises the bar for everyone else.

It's interesting how the 'machinima' scene has changed over the years, with techniques such as compositing wowmodelviewer characters into scenes... things are becoming a lot like the creation of modern films. You have the live action ... which would be like filming entirely within the game and no real post-processing other than editing cuts. Then you start adding special effects, inserting wowmodelviewer characters bluescreen-style, compositing, rotoscoping, etc. Then you have movies like BLIND which are created completely outside the game itself (in this case, within 3D Studio Max), using only the game models and sets... this would be akin to a Pixar movie, or maybe more correctly something like the Final Fantasy movie which was going for photorealism.

So my question is... what is 'machinima' and what isn't?:)A movie such as BLIND goes for the appearance and style of World of Warcraft, but was not done within the game at all... much like say, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (crappiness of that movie aside) was trying to portray the appearance and style of 'real life', but was not done in real life at all. When things get to this point... should you call it 'machinima', or use a different name altgether, or just say 'movie' and tack on different adjectives?

Back in the beginning days of machinima, they were recorded and created within a game engine such as the original Quake, with actors moving the characters around, activating custom animations if the creators went so far, and to view a movie, you would play it back within the engine. This in my mind, is sort of akin to 'theatre'... except the script (ie. demo recording) is performed the same way every time without actor variation. Nowadays, this is commonly seen with in-game cutscenes, so it's nothing new. But this imposes certain limitations, namely whatever the engine is capable of doing.

Things have come a long way.:)

Mind you, I have nothing against any of these techniques, since you can create works of art in any way, whether it be by in-game performances (theatre), recording and editing game footage (live action), with or without additional effects (bluescreen compositing, rotoscoping, etc.), or completely indepent of the game (pure CG movies). It's just starting to feel funny calling this stuff 'machinima' when the movies have more in common with modern movies instead (sort of like how 'film' doesn't really describe moden movies anymore either).

'WoW movie' works just fine for me though, since afterall, that is the look and feel that is used:P