(9) MACHINIMA

MACHINIMA

Contents:
Introduction
History
Advantages & Disadvantages
Noteable Examples from Game Genre
Notable examples by genre
Question-Answers

Machinima is the art of making real movies in virtual worlds. Movie scripts are run or rendered on game engines to view the movie. Machinima is a machine cinema or machine animation. It is both a collection of production techniques and a film genre techniques. As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using real-time, interactive (game) 3D engines, as opposed to high-end and complex 3D animation software used by professionals. Engines from first-person shooter and role-playing simulation video games are typically used. Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms. As a film genre, the term refers to movies created by the techniques described above.

Usually, machinima productions are produced using the tools (demo recording, camera angle, level editor, script editor, etc.) and resources (backgrounds, levels, characters, skins, etc.) available in a game.

Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation. It can also produce more professional appearing production than is possible with traditional at-home techniques of live video tape, or stop action using live actors, hand drawn animation or toy props.

As machinima begins to break out of the underground community of gamers and becomes more widely recognized by mainstream audiences, tools are being developed to allow for faster and easier creation of machinima productions. A number of upcoming machinima products are expected to provide machinimators with original assets, as well as advanced features such as a timeline, gesture and sound creation, and precise camera tools.

Although most often used to produce recordings that are later edited as in conventional film, machinima techniques have also occasionally been used for theatre. A New York improvisational comedy group called the ILL Clan voice and puppet their characters before a virtual camera to produce machinima displayed on a screen to a live audience.
Movies made in Machinima use the world's building, scripting, and avatar customization tools, working in real-time collaboration with people around the globe. You can use Machinima as your own virtual back lot, soundstage, choreography studio, costume and prop repository, and special effects house.
Image: A scene from the popular machinima series “Red vs. Blue”


1. History

The earliest roots of machinima can be found in the demoscene, a computer subculture that became established in the 1980s. The demoscene demos are non-interactive software programs containing graphics, music and visual effects animated in real time. The technological basis for demos is similar to computer and video games, and early demos could even use elements, such as music and sprites, that were directly copied from games. Unlike machinima, however, demos are nearly always stand-alone programs that are preferably created from scratch.

In 1992, the game “Stunt Island” was released, which allowed users to create movies by placing props and cameras, flying stunts, and splicing together takes. Communities emerged on CompuServe and the Internet, where users of the software were able to trade props and movies with each other.

This relatively new artform has attracted some interest in the media in gaming magazines, such as Computer and Video Games and PC Gamer, as a "sign of things to come". But the number of machinima artists is rather small, as of 2005, and they have not achieved widespread success. As the quality of game engines, tools and 3D hardware improves, however, the popularity of the new medium continues to grow.

When Doom was released in 1993, it included support for the recording and playback of gameplay demos. This resulted in the eventual creation of Doom speedruns, where players recorded rapid traversals of Doom levels. Machinima as such arrived with the advent of true 3D game worlds and controllable cameras, from late 1993 to 1996. The 1993 Star Wars game X-Wing featured a limited recording feature with a controllable camera system, but the camera was controllable only during playback of recordings, not during gameplay itself. While Quake is commonly credited as being the first to introduce these, that honor technically belongs to MechWarrior 2, which was published a year ahead of it and possessed most of the same capabilities.

Even though Quake may not have been the first game to utilize demo capability, what Quake is correctly accredited for is the wide range of resources available to creators. This allowed for "movies" with custom-built sets, special effects, graphics, sound (including While many of these features are not original to Quake, it was the powerful, vast freedom and easy modification of Quake C code that allowed these movies to be brought to life. Essentially, it was Quake that introduced a more sophisticated form of machinima which is still used today. The first movies appeared in 1996, and the term was coined at the start of 1998. At this time, the term "Quake Movies" was used in most situations. Around about mid 2000, this Quake community died out somewhat, due to the movement of players to newer games.

Things picked up in the following two years or so, however. With the improvements in 3D game engine technology many developers added in-game cut scenes to their games. This led to improvements in animation capabilities and soon most game engines had the functionality (although often available to the developers only) necessary to produce machinima.
Quake II, Unreal and Battlefield 1942 are examples of video games which are currently used to create machinima. Use of the original Unreal Tournament was possible through the third-party tool Unreal Movie Studio (UMS) by UnFramed Productions, and later Real-Time Movie Studio (RTMS) by Mod* team reactor 4. Understanding the future potential of machinima, Epic Games, the developers of Unreal Tournament 2003, included a tool called "Matinee" with the game, and sponsored a contest for US$50,000 to create a machinima film with the video game. The Unreal engine was used by director George Lucas for pre-visualisation of the later Star Wars movies and by some other directors.

The video game The Sims, which had a "photo album" feature, was used by players to stage elaborate "comic book" stories. For example, over several months in 2003, Nicole Service, a Sims player known online as "nsknight" staged a highly-rated photo album telling the story of three sisters whose mother is murdered. (Wired News) Other players have staged stories of abusive relationships, drug addiction, and interracial adoptions. The Sims 2 has a built-in movie making feature.

The Movies is a game developed by Lionhead Studios that puts the player in the role of a movie director and allow them to create short feature films using the game engine. A similar technique is used on the MTV television show Video Mods that shows music videos, rendered using characters from popular video games and Demos, including The Sims 2, BloodRayne and Dawn. However, the creators of the show only re-use the models, which are manually animated using 3D-animation software, not the game engines.

Besides the first-person shooter (FPS) and simulation genres mentioned above, other genres of games, most notably the sports games (like EA Sports' FIFA, NFL, and NHL series), already had the features and tools required (such as instant replay, customizable camera angle, recording, playback, save, and load) to make machinima for a long time, though it appeared that no one had attempted to make machinima using those games.

Image: A scene from the DDay Sound Archive movie, created using The Movies editor. This scene is rendered at the "online" resolution for streaming from the company website.

1.1 Demoscene demos as machinima

During the 2000s, machinima communities have become increasingly aware of demos, another form of real-time non-interactive computer animation. Some demos have been featured and discussed on machinima-related web sites, where they are classified as machinima based on self-built or "other" 3D engines.
The demos that receive attention among machinima enthusiasts tend to be storydemos, or ones that focus on consistent narrative rather than pure "eye-candy". IX and Halla by Moppi Productions are notable demos in this category.
It should be noted, however, that machinima is still a rather unknown concept among the demoscene, and some demosceners dislike the idea of classifying demos as "machinima".
In recent years, demo authoring tools have diminished the amount of specialized technical skill required for producing demo-like works. This has brought demoscene slightly closer to machinima by making some demoscene techniques available to people who are less willing to build everything from scratch.


2. Advantages and disadvantages of MACHINIMA



2.1.1 Advantages
• Possibly smaller distribution size: To distribute the movie, the producer only has to distribute the movie scripts (and any new resources used in the movie), which are much smaller than the entire rendered movie, though this requires both parties (producer and viewer) to have same rendering engine (same game, that is) and hardware capable rendering the movie. Further to this, if the engine and hardware allow it, the movie could be watched at extremely high resolutions, beyond what the average computer was capable of rendering smoothly at the time of release. The size of a rendered video of comparable resolution could put most viewers off, even those on very fast connections.
• Lower cost and production time: Because of lower hardware requirements (movie can be made and rendered on desktop computers), lower software costs (games cost much less than professional 3D animation software), and lower production time (because low-end 3D engines can render animation quickly, if not real-time). Moreover, mistakes in the movie can sometimes be corrected quickly by simply editing the script and because of the lower rendering time.
• Arguably easier movie making: Because most games' interfaces are very simple and easy to use, it is easy to make simple movies, though it can be more frustrating to make complex ones because of the limited movie-making capability .

2.1.2 Disadvantages


• Limited capability: The possibilities (what can be done in a movie, that is) are limited by the genre of the game and the flexibility and (movie-making) capability of the game engine itself. Also, because game engines were primarily designed for game-playing, not for making movies, the movie-making capabilities of game engines (and, consequently, the quality of the produced movies) tend to be limited, when compared to 3D animation software used by professionals. It is important to note that, because of the technical limitations, most machinima uses sharp writing in order to make up for the lack of visual flair (even this depends on the game being used to make the machinima).
• Possibly high playback hardware requirements: Unless the entire rendered movie is distributed, in order to play a movie (run movie scripts), the viewer needs the same rendering engine as the one used by the producer, and a computer with capable hardware (to run the movie scripts to view the movie), depending on the complexity of the rendering engine (the game, that is) and movie. Consequently, this prohibits low-end machines and machines without rendering capability (e.g.: cell phones, PDA, low-end computers, Video CD players) from displaying the movie.






3. Notable examples by game engine


Machinima productions are usually categorized by game engine or by film genre (drama, comedy, action). The following examples are organized using the former method.

3.1 Portal

Portal (TV series) was the first television experience to machinima. It aired on G4 for two seasons largely playing on comedy It also had the main host in live action.

3.2 Quake machinima

It was with Quake that machinima truly took off, and it was for this game that the first true machinima film was made. Released in 1996 by United Ranger Films, an off-shoot of a then well known Quake clan named The Rangers, Diary of a Camper was the first true piece of machinima. A short silent film, lasting less than two minutes, it told the story of The Rangers rooting out an embedded player (the camper) within DM6, a popular Quake deathmatch map. At this point in time, the term "machinima" had not been coined, and these films were being touted as "Quake Movies". The piece became very popular within the Quake community, and soon spawned other Quake Movies, such as Wendigo and Avatar's Blahbalicious and Clan Undead's Operation Bayshield.
One of the more famous Quake machinima groups is Quake done Quick, or QdQ. QdQ produced several speedruns for Quake, and reworked them into movies, using special tools to show speedrun in third person. Their most famous movie by far is Quake done Quicker, and the group itself believes that their movie Scourge done Slick (which requires the Scourge of Armagon expansion pack) is their best work thus far
The ILL Clan is known for their series of shorts featuring Larry and Lenny Lumberjack. Their first movie (and one of the earliest notable machinima pieces) was Apartment Huntin', and was created using Quake. Their award-winning short, Hardly Workin, was created using Quake 2. They have also made three to four live performances in front of audiences in recent years.
Also one of the most notable Quake machinimas is The Seal of Nehahra, which details the story of the original game and expands considerably on the backstory. With a run time of 3:53:34, it's also one of the longest machinima feature movies.
Borg War is a feature-length movie created using the variant of the Quake 3 engine used in the game Elite Force 2.

Image: A scene from Diary of a Camper

3.3 Halo machinima

The most popular and well known Halo machinima is Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles, a comedic machinima series filmed within the Halo series of Xbox games. Created by Rooster Teeth Productions, and premiering online on April 1, 2003, the show has so far released four seasons on DVD. The series has also further inspired a fan tribute series called Sponsors vs Freeloaders, based in the forums of the Red vs. Blue website.
Another popular Halo machinima group are Fire Team Charlie, who started production in Mid-2003. Fire Team Charlie has made a name by delving into the code of Halo and modifying it to increase their movie making possibilities. Their most notable change is removing all on screen displays, making each video seem less "in-game" and more like a movie. This makes for more unique videos from a console game, though these types of modifications are extremely common in computer based machinima.
The Codex, Episode 1 debuted on 9 February 2005. Unlike any previous Halo machinima series, The Codex is a drama, and is set within the universe of the Halo games. While previous Halo machinima series focus almost exclusively on comedy, The Codex has a definite story, and has often been described as a movie divided into episodes, rather than a series proper. It is also one of the few series to be set within the confines of the Halo universe, dealing with situations described in the games and happening concurrently with other well-known events.
This Spartan Life also differs from other Halo machinima in that it is a talk show, similar in concept to The Late Show with David Letterman. Every episode of the show is divided into parts that are uploaded on the show's site in a sequential fashion. Every episode features an opening monologue, interviews with guests as well as two fixed features, the Solid Gold Elite Dancers, a group of Covenant Elite dancers, and Body Count, a debate segment featuring players killing each other as they debate their points. Some of the comedy in the show itself is derived from the fact that often, players not involved in the show's making are unaware that the show is being filmed at all, and thus fire upon show contestants as they try to act out their parts.

3.4 Rome: Total War machinima

While Rome: Total War's engine has been used relatively widely commercially, there has been much less player-made machinima. The first, and most notable use of Rome was a show made specifically for the History Channel called Decisive Battles, which used the engine's ability to show vast numbers of characters to reconstruct some of the most historically significant battles in history. The game turned out to be an excellent way of visually representing the fight for a mass audience, something traditionally difficult to do. In the UK, the game was also used for the show Time Commanders, which aired on the BBC. This was a kind of game show, in which contestants playing Rome were pitted against an enemy AI in a simulation of an ancient battle, in an attempt to see if the player could reverse history.
The most significant player-made example to date is Nicholas Werner's Potentior, a forty-minute long reconstruction of the Battle of Alesia. Despite its relatively recent release date, it has already sparked controversy on the Internet Archive's Potentior page.

3.5 The Sims 2 machinima

The Sims machinima started with the photo album concept in the first Sims game. With the photo album a person could create full stories using all the game's resources. The Sims 2, which came out in the 2004, included a built in movie making utility for players to film what their Sims do. After the release of The Sims 2, Maxis, The Sims games creators, held contests hosted on their website for the best movie makers. The most notable examples of The Sims 2 machinima are listed below.
Rooster Teeth Productions, the authors of Red vs. Blue, have also created a serial production, The Strangerhood, using The Sims 2. The initial installment of the series introduced eight occupants of a neighborhood, who wake up one morning with no memory of who they are, where they are, or how they arrived. The characters have diverse, quirky, and intense personalities. Owing to the limitations of the simulation engine it was necessary to create a number of clones of each character, each with a different expression (happy, sad, angry, etc.). The unused versions are herded into an out-of-viewpoint room and exchanged as necessary to obtain the various facial expressions.

3.6 Company of Heroes machinima

Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes, a 3D real time strategy game for the PC, with some built in machinima capability, was released in September 2006. Relic produced an eleven minute in game machinima piece to publicise the game, which subsequently won the award for Best Virtual Performance: Custom Animation at the 2006 Machinima Film Festival.

3.7 Anachronox machinima

In response to favorable input about the game's story, the developers of Anachronox independently combined the game's many cutscenes into a Machinima movie of 2 hours and 30 minutes length. The movie has since won several awards at the Machinima Film Festival 2002 (MFF2002), where it was first presented. Machinima.com had to say about the film: "Anachronox: The Movie is a tour-de-force, one of the finest Machinima films produced to date, and probably the most accomplished Machinima feature to date. It managed to hold two over-worked jury members in a room for two and a half hours before the MFF 2002 - what more can we say?".

3.8 World of Warcraft machinima

Image: A scene from one of the machinima portions of the South Park episode titled Make Love, Not Warcraft.
Blizzard Entertainment's popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft has also spawned many machinima productions. Notable amongst the plethora of fan-created machinima are films such as Illegal Danish: Super Snacks!, Tales of the Past I & 2, Not Just Another Love Story, Zinwrath: The Movie, Return and The Internet is for Porn. Perhaps most famous is the Leeroy Jenkins film, featuring a character of the same name causing the downfall of his party. Parodies of Warcraft machinima, and films that poke fun at aspects of the game well known amongst avid players, are also wildly popular on Blizzard forums and web sites. For example, Further Proof That Shamans are Overpowered mocks the bombast and clichés of another Warcraft machinima. The Most Horrific Act of Ninja Looting Ever, shows the frustration of players who are robbed by a Thief looter in a humorous light. Xfire, a company that has created a popular internet communications and file sharing tool, has sponsored several contests which have provided incentive for many producers to use the WoW engine. The South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" uses World of Warcraft machinima for some in-game sequences and was made with the full support of Blizzard.

3.9 Half-Life series machinima

While there have not been many machinima made with Valve Software's first game (Half-Life), there were a few that achieved popularity over the internet. Those include Militia II and ClanWars.
But the power and versatility of the Source engine coupled with Valve Hammer Editor and Faceposer have made Half-Life 2 very useful for quality machinima. A notable example is A Few Good G-Men, a machinima produced from the famous courtroom scene from the Rob Reiner film A Few Good Men. One of the most notable features of the Source engine is Faceposer's ability to take any voices in sound form and have an ingame character automatically lipsynch to the words. Faceposer is also used for various choreography functions, such as having ingame characters move to certain positions or play a certain animation. Another fairly known example is Still Seeing Breen, by Paul Marino, set to music by Breaking Benjamin.


3.10 F.E.A.R. machinima

Not many machinima productions made with the F.E.A.R. - First Encounter Assault Recon game engine have gained widespread popularity to date. The best known one is a mini-series called P.A.N.I.C.S., produced by Rooster Teeth Productions (creator of the Red vs. Blue series). P.A.N.I.C.S. spoofs both the F.E.A.R. game that it's filmed inside of, as well as supernatural thriller/comedy movies like Ghostbusters.


3.11 The Movies machinima

The Movies machinima films are generally simpler to create, as the game contains all the tools required to produce the final movie. As of October 2006, more than 110,000 movies have been uploaded on to the "The Movies Online" website, altough most movies are not much different from the random movies created by the game itself. However, more serious machinima makers have been continuously striving to make better movies, and their output has become more and more visible within the machinima community. The promise of combining the ease of access to such a large library of scenes, with better outside post-production tools, spell an interesting future for this type of machinima.


3.12 Second Life machinima

A number of machinima have been created using the game engine of Second Life, which supports in-world editing of character appearance, object creation and skinning, and the recording of events. See Second Life Community: Media.

3.13 Sam & Max machinima

During the release of Sam & Max Season One, developer Telltale Games also released fifteen short machinima cartoons in between episodes. The shorts range from one to two minutes in length and typically feature Sam and Max interacting with locations and characters from the most recent episode, though the shorts are not part of Season One's storyline. Telltale Games also created several machinima shorts for the 2007 Independent Games Festival in which Sam and Max greet the attendees and make cracks about game design.


4. Notable examples by genre

The following machinima examples are organized by film genre.

4.1 Abstract machinima

Machinima works that eschew a narrative structure, instead focusing on experimentation. Gene Youngblood refers to this type of filmmaking as Expanded Cinema.[citation needed] A handful of exemplary works[citation needed] would include:
• Butoh Cone (Julian Oliver)
• Carmageddon data-bending
• The Pellucid World



5. Question-Answers
------------------------
What is Machinima?

Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.
In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence.
By combining the techniques of filmmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films, with a large amount of creative control.
---------------------------------

How is Machinima produced?
Machinima can be produced in a couple of ways.
It can be script-driven, whereas the cameras, characters, effects etc. are scripted for playback in real-time. While similar to animation, the scripting is driven by events rather than keyframes.
It can also be recorded in real-time within the virtual environment, much like filmmaking (the majority of game-specific Machinima pieces are produced in this fashion).
While both of these approaches have their pros and cons, they are both Machinima-making techniques.
------------------------

What are the advantages of Machinima?
Machinima provides:
• the real-time recording of human/scripted performances and events - akin to shooting film; eliminates the rendering process.
• the creative flexibility of artistic assets moved over time – akin to animation; allows total control over visual representation of characters, events, etc.
• an interactive environment – provides a space where characters can interact and real-world physics can be reproduced.
• Hardware driven playback is resolution independent.
Because Machinima can be shot live or scripted in real-time, it's much faster to produce than traditional CGI animation. A live action director should feel right at home and an animation director will be able to direct without having to rely on key frames. Multiple takes can be made in real-time or just a few takes while the rest is adjusted in post, dependent on the director's style.
Additionally, instead of rendering frames of animation or video streams, some Machinima is recorded at the data level – only capturing positions, orientation and other pertinent pieces of information for the 3D assets to be drawn and animated during playback. Data-recorded Machinima also allows for editing at the data level – where you can add characters, adjust camera angles, create camera moves, fine-tune animation, etc. It's much like doing a reshoot without having to call back the cast and crew –further blurring the lines between production and post-production.
-------------------------------

What is so significant about shooting live Machinima?
Shooting live Machinima can produce a considerable time and cost savings - up to 30-40% and is a radical departure from the traditional key frame animation process. Now animation directors can direct puppeteers as they manipulate the character models in real-time. A live action director can also relate as what happens is in real-time.
--------------------------------


How does it save time and money?
It saves money by eliminating the time intensive processes of software rendering. In addition, live-produced Machinima can be created similar to a producing a live action film - the camera records performance, action and events as they take place.
------------------------------------


Sorry, I'm a laymen, can you explain that a little more?
Two-dimensional (2D) animation, like Disney's Tarzan or a Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoon, is drawn, inked & painted by hand and then shot frame-by-frame for the final animation. This is obviously labor and time intensive. A half hour cartoon could take six to nine months to draw and is usually done overseas to minimize labor cost. A feature could take two to four years to complete.
3D Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) animation was pioneered in the 80's and put on the map by Pixar's Toy Story. Instead of each frame being drawn by hand, a computer "renders" all of the characters and backgrounds.
But a team of computer animators have to animate each character model individually for each scene. Once done, a "compositing" bank of computers, renders all of the characters models and objects into the 3D background, making your complete shot. But because of the large amount of 3D model, lighting and animated information in each frame, it can take a very fast bank of computers hours, if not days, to render each frame. Some frames of Pixar's Monsters Inc took over 90 hours to process using over 400 computers ganged together in parallel. With 24 frames per second of footage, you can image how long this process can get. Subsequently, Monsters, Inc. took four years to produce.
Naturally, because of Machinima's real-time aspect, the production approach takes significantly less time.
---------------------------


What a minute, are you saying you can produce Pixar level animation in almost half the time?
Well, no, not yet. A company like Pixar will always push the boundaries of what's possible in animation. But, with the advances in computer hardware coming in the next few years, it looks pretty good that we can get much closer.
-----------------------------


How do you use a computer game to create animation?
A number of ways, actually.
First, if you've ever played a computer game on a network (LAN) at work or seen others play it, each person in the game is using their computer to log into the server computer. Each computer represents one character in the game, usually running around shooting at each other. Everyone playing can see each other's character in real time in the game world, from their characters viewpoint on their monitor. In Machinima, the roles shift: the characters, instead of shooting each other, are actors in the scene, and the server doubles as the camera, recording everything that happens in the virtual world.
Second, people sometimes produce Machinima on their own (not using a LAN) by using tools the game developers publish for a particular game. These tools often allow the end user to create new levels, import new characters and create scripted events. While the game developer produce these tools often to extend the replayability of the game, Machinima developers have used them to create their films. This essentially turns the off-the-shelf game into a small Machinima studio.
Lastly, some teams use a combination of these approaches - recording their custom assets in real-time. These recordings take place at the data level (as opposed to capturing multiple gigabytes of video footage). This recorded data approach yields the most flexibilty as editing at the data level creates a final Machinima that can playback within the game engine itself.
-----------------------------------


Where can I watch some Machinima?
There are a number of sites that show some Machinima work. However, the most centralized site for Machinima is Machinima.com. While the site isn't the most polished, the level of information it holds is unrivaled.
Additionally, some quality Machinima works can be found at:
• Red Vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles – http://www.redvsblue.com
• The ILL Clan: http://www.illclan.com
• GameSpy's hosting of the Machinima Awards 2003 nominees: http://www.fileplanet.com/features/machinima_awards/
• Nanoflix Films - http://www.nanoflix.net
-------------------------------------


Where can I find out more about Machinima?
Both the Academy's site, http://www.machinima.org and Machinima.com carry a wealth of information about Machinima.

In addition, the Academy offers membership, which includes a demo version of Fountainhead Entertainment's Machinimation tool, a great tool to get started with Machinima.
--------------------------------------------


How can I get started creating Machinima?
There's two paths to creating Machinima of your own.
The first involves recording the output of your favorite game to video (ala Red Vs. Blue). This approach has you record the output of the game to a video source (camcorder or VCR), and then to capture this footage back into your computer for editing and post-production.
The Academy offers a demo version of Machinimation (by Fountainhead Entertainment) - a great tool for getting started in Machinima - as part of its membership offering (click on Membership to the right for more info).
The other path is bit more ambitious as is involves using an underlying 3D game engine but creating entire new characters and sets (similar to the ILL Clan's and Foutainhead Entertainment's work). Once these assets are created, the production looks very similar to the first path - recording the engine output, capturing the footage into a computer and editing it with editing software.
Naturally, the first is much easier path as it requires less asset development. Machinima.com has a few articles highlighting the recording process:
Machinima.com also hosts a number of tutorials on the more advanced Machinima development approach.
Additionally, a couple of books have been released about Machinima:
The Art of Machinima (Paul Marino, Paraglyph Press, Aug. 2004)- a hands-on book showing you both the artform and the basics of how to get started in your Machinima production.
Machinima : Making Animated Movies in 3D Virtual Environments (Dave Morris, Matt Kelland and Dave Lloyd, Ilex Press, Aug. 2005) - which gives a great overview of the medium and its filmmakers.
--------------------------------

Where do you see Machinima in the future?
We feel Machinima will eventually become yet one more way to produce visually-based stories.
Also, as hardware-rendering becomes more powerful and accessible to the end user (next-gen consoles, PCs, etc.), Machinima films can be rendered via broadband right to the end user's display screen – delivering the Machinima film as data right to your set-top/console.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

.