-none- 2004-09-22 - By -not available-
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Computer graphics: Hollywood movies increasingly resemble computer games.
Now a growing band of enthusiasts is using games to make films
PAUL MARINO vividly recalls the first time he watched an animated film made
from a video game. It was 1996, and Mr Marino, an Emmy award-winning
computer animator and self-described video-game addict, was playing
"Quake"-a popular shoot-'em-up-on the internet with a handful of friends.
They heard that a rival group of Quake players, known as the Rangers, had
posted a film online. Nasty, brutish and short, the 90-second clip, "Diary
of a Camper", was a watershed. It made ingenious use of Quake's
"demo-record" feature, which enabled users to capture games and then e-mail
them to their friends. (That way, gamers could share their fiercest battles,
or show how they had successfully completed a level.) The Rangers took
things a step further by choreographing the action: they had plotted out a
game, recorded it, and keyed in dialogue that appeared as running text.
Pretty soon, Mr Marino and others began posting their own "Quake movies",
and a new medium was born.
Is it a game or a film?
Eight years on, this new medium-known as "machinima" ("machine" crossed with
"cinema")-could be on the verge of revolutionising animation. 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". There is an annual machinima film festival in New York,
and the genre has seen its first full-length feature, "Anachronox". 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 machinima.com, hobbyists have posted
short animated films with dialogue, music and special effects.
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