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What do a commercial for Toyota, TV programs such as CSI: New York and The Office, film festivals, and an organization that works with urban youth all have in common? They are at the forefront of machinima, a filmmaking genre that is helping to shape video for the 21st century. Machinima, a contraction of the words machine and cinema, is a genre of filmmaking that was originally created by gamers in the 1990s. Over the past decade, machinima has gone more mainstream, and creativity has entered a whole new dimension.

What is machinima?

Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3-D virtual environment, including video games such as Halo (used to create 100 episodes of “Red versus Blue” machinima series) and Neverwinter Nights (used to create the machinima series “Neverending Nights), and platforms such as Second Life. It combines the technologies of filmmaking, animation, and 3-D video games. Essentially, machinima applies real-world filmmaking techniques within an interactive virtual environment where characters and events can be controlled by humans, scripts, or artificial intelligence.

Video games most often provide the settings, props, costumes, and characters (which can be modified) needed to tell an original story. Some platforms, such as MTV Central and video games like Sims 2, have in-game recording options enabling filmmakers to capture footage; a screen capture software program is needed to import game environments where there are no built-in machinima tools. Remixing audio and video content is also popular among budding machinimists. [by Tabitha Tsai and Kelly Czarnecki - School Library Journal] UPDATE