Lights, camera, joystick

From TheAge (Latest news from Australia and the World):

A new wave of filmmakers is hacking into video games and using screen grabs of The Sims and Quake to make their own movies. Now machinima has hit Hollywood. Alex Krotoski explains.

Hugh Hancock is deep into the final throes of production on his first feature-length movie, BloodSpell. He has been mulling over this project since late 2003, after a collaborator said his work had lost that "punk edge". His response was to make a movie that defied most of the rules of traditional filmmaking. BloodSpell isn't even cinema - it's machinima. And as a result it is billed as "a truly independent, zero-budget, animated action-adventure feature film, combining the irreverent, aggressive, DIY ethos of punk with the epic scale and power of fantasy".

Good three page article thats good up to date coverage of the machinima phenomenon.