From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance

Moe Napoli writes "Machinima producer/author Paul Marino recently posted on his blog that he will be attending Sundance later this month (Jan. 26th to be exact) to moderate a panel discussion about the rising artform of machinima (using 3D games like Half-Life 2 for filmmaking purposes). Amongst the panelists will be Red Vs. Blue/The Strangerhood creators Burnie Burns and the Rooster Teeth team (also featured in the Jan. 2005 issue of Wired), who will also present a live demonstration of how they produce their hilarious RvB machinima series. Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking and even cooler to see how far it has come since some gamers started making Quake Movies."

Comments

Let's not confuse clever workarounds for ....

[popo]

Am I missing something? Why do we (the audience) care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original artwork? Why do we care that the film makers have managed to *not create* original sets? Why do we care that the original film makers have simply *made do* with limited camera angles and characters?

Over the past decade 3D animation has not only gotten ten times easier with powerful tools and extensive mesh libraries, its also become cheaper: A high end PC loaded up with RAM can easily render scenes far more complicated than these 'Machinima' sets. The amount of talent coming out of places like Eastern Europe is just phenomenal, and animation festivals have become truly unbelievable showcases for what people are doing on PC's at home.

So why do we care about some semi-talented film geeks who hack together serials from other people's creative and ip? It would be one thing if the writing and voice-acting was watchable, but really -- its not. So as an audience member I find myself thinking only: "God that's a nice trick to make a serial without doing any work". And then I think: "So why's that good?"

This is the entertainment equivalent of TinyP2P. Its a good statement. But not worth experiencing.

Move along. Nothing to see here.