With the airing of the pre-Superbowl machinima promotion of CBS’s TV show Two and a Half Men and the Star Trek machinima spot CBS commissioned for State of Play and CES, machinima is obviously getting attention from the “massive media” outlets. This may be due in small part to the interest surrounding Second Life, but I suspect it is more due to exposure to some outstanding machinima that TV and film talent scouts are finding on various video sharing sites.
Machinima actually has its roots in the 1980’s (yes, it pre-dates Second Life) on the earliest of personal computers, but the first “modern” machinima was in 1996, and were often referred to as “Quake movies.” Moo Money of The Grid Review in a Second Thursday meetup presentation about machinima talked a bit about the history, saying that players of Quake first started recording their in-game matches, which then evolved into creating story lines, acted out in-game by the players.
Machinima is indeed picking up steam, moving from a highly niche media format and audience to a wide number of interest groups. Academia has embraced it as a serious medium for several years. The University of Kansas is just the latest to announce a graduate course in their theater and film school called New Media and Cyberculture. John Hopkins offers a course through their Digital Media Center; Harvard in their extension courses, and the University of South Australia through their (yay) communications department.
Why should machinima interest you? Because it is exactly where web-based communications and marketing is moving to within 3d spaces like Second Life - where content and performance art collide. As more immersive spaces become more accessible (to both the user and the content creator) content becomes animated, 360-degree, un-flat, multi-dimensional and multimedia.
Communicators will need to move toward thinking in visuals, about auditory experiences – and about how space (props) communicate the message. Eventually performance art will be a required course for that communications, marketing or journalism degree.
Take 5 minutes and watch this machinima, The Regenerated Dante Hotel. It documents work going on in Second Life to animate an archive housed at Stanford University. The project is ambitious and utterly fascinating, but to my point it examines: “innovative technologies to investigate archives and develop new digital models for introducing new forms of active engagement with them. ..The usual static notion of "document" is replaced by co-creative remaking."
By the way, this machinima sits in The Machinima Archive, which is being jointly created by Stanford University, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Internet Archive and Machinima.com for the historical preservation of this emerging media. I encourage you to go there and browse through a sampling of the outstanding 500 or so machinima there produced in Halo, The Sims2, Doom, Half-Life, Second Life and more.
Photo credit: Netribution
Februrary, 11, 2007
- Add new comment
- Read original article.
- Reset vote
- -1 points
