Machinima: A Future for Fan Films

This article from over at TheForce.Net came across the news wire this morning. It's a surprisingly in-depth article about Machinima and how it's well suited for making fan films. It does a great job of comparing creating machinima to other methods of visual filmmaking such as live action and animation and goes into the different machinima filmmaking techniques. It's a great primer.

There's a production technique out there, invented a few years ago, that meshes with fan filmmaking so cohesively that you'd think it was designed with fan films in mind (it wasn't). It addresses most of the aforementioned problems while offering additional, often surprising, advantages. It's not a panacea, but it's certainly worth a closer look. I'm talking about machinima, the process of making movies out of games.

Much like creating a machinima film using the original assets of a game and basing the story inside that game world, I think fan films offer a great way to quickly jump into an established world/mythos and get to the point of telling a story, i.e. not having to explain what a 'jedi' is allows one to really get down to the nitty-gritty of the tale at hand.