Mike Jones Digital Basin
cinematic media rinse cycle

Machinima and what might be...

Machinima is an rapidly emerging artform that has the potential to cast profound influence well beyond its own parameters. On one level the art of producing, staging and 'shooting' movies using the environments of computer games - a kind of real-time animated digital puppetry - represents a logistic liberation for movie makers. Physicality is defied as productions can be staged anywhere with any desired feature that can be created in CGI.



Machinima likewise has an infinitely evolving base of development - Gaming already represents the bleeding edge of media technology with massive leaps forward each year, so Machinima in turn is poised to always take advantage of the latest technology with negligible cost outlay.

But the aesthetic and conceptual impact of Machinima is potentially far wider than just Machinma works themselves, stretching influence across all other cinematic forms.



Machinima redefines by hybridization the traditionally distinct elements of Live-Action and Animation - being simultaneously both and neither. And whilst Machinima may currently wear the aesthetic hallmarks of Animation from being not Photo-Real - as film or video are - this must be seen as merely an in-between phase. The realization of Photo-Real computer game graphics are simply a matter of time.

And the impact of that evolution will be two-old; the first is that once computer games are Photo-Real and indistinguishable from photographic sources the core expectations of viewers are forever altered. Photographic Live-Action becomes just an option among many options and without a distinctly tangible aesthetic difference linked with the 'real' and the 'actual', may loose its primary status altogether to become a second best, least flexible, most expensive option.



The second is the inevitable step beyond Photo-Realism that comes once the Photo-Real has being attained. Just as the invention of the Camera liberated painting from pursuing 'realism' and cast it free to explore all manner of visual styles, so to will Machinima pass through the same evolutions. The pursuit of the Photo-Real is ever present but once attained the possibilities from what a Machinima Aesthetic might become are endless and almost unimaginable.

Further from this we might also speculate on conceptual aesthetics ingrained into viewers themselves. If we have photo-real computer games then we have photo-real Machinima (in other words, machinima that doesn't present as Animation but as simply Cinema - indistinguishable on viewing from film or video). And if we have photo-real Machinima then we have a near zero cost environment where quite literally Anything is possible - no effect, no scale, no environment, no mechanics, no logistics, no spectacle that can't be made on a laptop by anyone with enthusiasm. What this does for viewer sensibilities might be speculated as a Stealing of Spectacle.



The thrill of large scale effects driven cinema can be likened to the Circus mentality - the thrill of 'seeing' that which cannot be seen elsewhere. The seeing of the extraordinary with knowledge of its actuality. But if we have a culture and common practice of zero-cost cinematic production on any scale and of any thing within the limitless expanse of a computer game VR, then we rob 'spectacle' of its value. It becomes the equivalent of the mint printing more money - no one gets richer as the money looses value exponentially to how much is printed.

What could, would this do to cinema as a whole?

Well presumably it would force viewers to look to cinema for different set of experiences. The spectacle on its own devalued by commonality, we perhaps invoke a broader pursuit of those elements of cinema that are beyond and outside of technological shifts - character, narrative, emotion, philosophy, investigation, exploration, ideas, language, atmosphere and thrill.

Machinima might be just the medium that rescues us from Michael Bay...

Whether you're interested in Machinima or not there is much that Machinima as a process stands to exert upon all the extant cinematic media we know. This article from the BBC points towards some of these ideas and machinima's ever onward move to the mainsteam.

A particularly good website, blog and podcast that explores the ongoing evolution of machinima, as well as presenting some fabulous examples of Machinima films,  can be found at z-studios.com – Zarathustra studios and the Overcast podcast run by Phil Rice. Time spent on this rich site is time very well spent and may just change what you think cinema is....

 

Posted at 12:00AM Nov 20, 2007 by Mike Jones in 3D graphics & gaming  |  Comments[2]