For all the lazy filmmakers out there, kidding. I just stumbled across this website, very cool stuff. Interestingly this could be a useful tool for indie's looking to storyboard and/or fleshing out ideas. Either way, check out a few of the films, there's some funny stuff.

http://movies.lionhead.com/


Wikipedia says... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

Here's an article from "wired" on this new craze.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70058-0.html?tw=wn_index_12

FireFox is having issues with the clips... anybody else?

Hey Keith, I'm a FireFox user as well. I had to turn off my firewall to view the clips.

Machinima is hardly a "new craze"; the ability to create movies with computer games has been around since the days of Doom, though it didn't really take off until the release of Quake (and even then not for a while). I've been a fan of the subject since 1998, if I'm remembering correctly, and it was this very field that led me to an interest in making films in the real world. An interesting point of trivia, regarding the use of this for storyboard purposes, is that Steven Spielberg used a modified version of the Unreal Tournament engine (circa 1999) to do animatics on the set of AI.

If you'd like a more indepth look at this stuff, go to http://www.machinima.com/ and look at some of the films (and articles, with introductions to the subject dating at least as far back as 2001). Some require a particular game to be installed, but others have AVI, Quicktime, Windows Media, or Real versions available. There's also a 22 minute documentary on machinima available here: http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=292

"The Movies" may make it easier to produce these films, but I hardly think "easy" is a prerequisite for "legitimate storytelling medium".