Waaas up

Not much news worthy items around recently. What I'm having a difficult time with right now, and what I've been contemplating is that machinima has reached a difficult stage (as a viewer). Its getting widely enough known that many people are aware of the possibility of making films with games. So people are doing it, a lot. Whole communities are developing around specific games to be involved with peers in making machinima with that game. This is obviously very cool, but where in the past Machinima.com was the hub of much of the machinima community and you could pretty much keep up with it on an 'as released' basis, now its spread over a much larger (virtual) distance with piles of films showing up across all genres, topics and skill levels.

The problem here is with so much machinima being created now, and obviously when something that was much more difficult to obtain is obtainable (i.e. filmmaking) you are going to get a lot of...crap. So how do you get the most bang for your buck without spending hours a day downloading and watching machinima films hoping to stumble upon that really good film?

I really rely on word of mouth to bring those nuggets to the surface. But as noted above, the machinima communities are spreading far and wide. And with the more popular machinima communities (i.e. Sims and Halo), the signal to noise is even lower. So, there is no one stop shop for the creme de la creme. You gotta hunt for them or wait for the good ones to get brought to light.

I guess I just feel its a shame to see piles of films burn by in the machinima.com 'more shows' section without word or thought whether there is something well written, produced, or truly ground breaking being missed. I mean yes, we have the Machinima Film Fest, but thats only once a year.

So anyways, on that note, heres my word of mouth for today:

Borg War - A machinima project that combines output from Star Trek Elite Force II and Starfleet Command III. The entire project is planned to be over an hour and is expected be completed by the end of 2005. This is a fan made Star Trek story that is well produced.

Gladiator Evolved - This movie melds the of audio from Gladiator and content from Halo 2 to recreate the entire opening battle of the movie Gladiator. Becoming a more popular project style for Machinima films (I remember contemplating this when the game Tron 2 came out and thinking about recreating some of the film) this 'game meets and assimilates film' technique is a great way to test your machinima skillset.

fin.