Machinima was one of the more prominent themes in the recent Edinburgh Games Festival, and promises to continue to build on its profile. How can Scottish content makers capitalise on this phenomenon?
The Economist's Technology Quarterly gives some hints on the potential of the Machinima. 

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.

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.

Games publishers have now begun to incorporate machinima into their products. Those in the video-games industry are fond of quoting the statistic that sales of games now exceed Hollywood's box-office receipts. Machinima can be considered Hollywood meets Moore's law,” says Mr Marino, the author of a new book on machinima* and executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, which holds an annual film festival in New York. It is affordable, allows for a great deal of creative freedom and, when compared with conventional forms of manual or computer-based animation, is both faster and, says Mr Marino, more fun.

This is not to say that machinima is ready for prime time just yet. Machinima movie-makers have been for the most part video-game nerds, their films have historically lacked two crucial elements: story and character. “There are no Ingmar Bergmans yet,” says Graham Leggat of the Film Society at Lincoln Centre. “Last year's machinima festival winner, ‘Red vs Blue’, was based on sketch comedy. Most other efforts are of the standard video-game shoot-'em-up variety.” It is, in short, a situation akin to the earliest days of cinema.

To read the full article, visit www.economist.com