Kyle + Rosemary

I’ve been hardcore dabbling in machinima for over a year now, as those who have visited my website have perhaps figured out. Since Floyd recently shared a Sims machinima he found, I would like to share with you some of the great World of Warcraft machinima pieces that I and my fellow filmmakers have created, that, if you’re not tapped into the machinima community, you may have missed. World of Warcraft is not only a hugely popular online MMORPG worldwide, but has one of, if not the, largest machinima communities on the internet.

First off, here is a silly 2 minute piece I created, a fictional movie trailer for a 60’s teen beach type thing.

Next, another trailer, this one dramatic, from Terran and Ezra at Rufus Cubed Productions. They really show what you can do with the medium. Terran went on to work at Blizzard, and also on the South Park Warcraft episode.

A commercial for Xfire, from Clint and DW at Dementia/Myndflame, a couple of very popular machinima creators.

Jason Choi’s Edge of Remorse, a multiple award winner.

“The Ballad of the Noob”, a music video in a Johnny Cash folk style that I threw together. It has a few WoW gaming in-jokes, but most non-gamers seem to get it anyway.

While these films are officially classified as machinima, they all have been enhanced with programs like Adobe After Effects and extra added frame by frame animation to bump up their production value. Does this start to push their classification into actual animation? I have a feeling that the lines will become blurred.

The advantage of machinima is that it is, so far, a medium that is accessible to everyone. Even if a person doesn’t feel like they have the artistic or design capability to create animation from scratch, they can still create a machinima. For filmmakers like myself, the advantage is time and money – so long as you accept the limitations, capturing pre-rendered animation in real time is fast, and cheap – I can get an idea out into the world very quickly. And for the people who play these games – when they see a film made with a game that they play, they feel a sense of familiarity and interest when they watch said film. In other words, there is a built in audience, just like when a film is created from a popular book or graphic novel.

So, what do people think? Is machinima a viable new medium?