More on machinima

The LA Times (another tediously regwalled paper: use BugMeNot for a pword) has an article on machinima, with a nice quote from an MIT lady:

"There's a dorkiness to it that's charming," said Beth Coleman, assistant professor of writing and new media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's comparative media studies program. "It's not beautiful, fluid animation. There's a kind of roughness to this animation that's recognizable to those who play video games. But instead of it being a flaw, it's part of the joke, part of the charm."

Dorky! Brilliant. About sums it up.

Much of machinima, for example, is comedy, because it's easier to convey humor through clever writing. Creating sympathetic characters for a drama would require facial animations that are beyond the power of any existing game engine.

Very true...

"Can you ever get serious about using game engines as production tools?" Getson asked. "Eventually, yes. We believe you'll be able to do anything you can conceive of with a game engine…. Maybe not today, but definitely in a few years. Machinima will continually evolve. It's still a very young, very wide-open field."

Very exciting!

Comments

[Seb Potter]

"Much of machinima, for example, is comedy, because it's easier to convey humor through clever writing. Creating sympathetic characters for a drama would require facial animations that are beyond the power of any existing game engine."

Somebody has obviously not used Halflife 2, and played with the stunning facial animation system. If you're not convinced of its ability to reproduce the range of human emotion, check out "A Few Good G-Men": http://www.nailbiter.net/gman/

[Moose2000]

I hear Lionhead's "The Movies" is going to be AWESOME for machinima. And it's out next month.

[Alice]

Moose, you little monkey :)
Yes, it will.

[DeadMertz]

Unfortunately, while this article covers a wide range of people that know of Machinima, they've clearly interviewed people that haven't worked _in_ Machinima (hence the "sympathetic characters" comment)...save the RvB team, Marino, etc.