technoculture314-09

In the lecture yesterday when Anna was talking about prosumers, it got me thinking about machinima. Machinima is, according to Berkeley (2006) the "convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development" (66). A machinima film will take footage recorded within a game (such as Halo) and edit it together to make a coherent narrative. One of the most well-known machinima series is 'Red vs. Blue'. This series takes footage from the hugely popular game Halo and makes it into a sort of TV show. The characters don't do much, they are in the Blood Gulch canyon, and the characters are not exactly sure why they are there. This results in some hilarious situations between the two different teams.


So how exactly does this relate to the lecture. Well, as Berkeley (2006) highlights, this form of film-making offers opportunities to people who do not have the resources to produce big budget films. Anybody who owns an XBOX, video editing software, and a sense of humour could have made Red vs. Blue. In fact, when trawling through Youtube, it is possible to see many different forms of machinima, be it mini films recorded in World of Warcraft, or other work done by Rooster Teeth, the creators of Red vs. Blue. Creators of machinima can fit into both the categories of producer/consumer and produser, as games are becoming increasingly supportive of recording gameplay. For example, The Sims has an in-game recording feature, and this aids in the creation of machinima.


Machinima is, I think, an excellent example of the prosumer and the increasingly participatory nature of the media.

Reference

Berkeley, L. (2006). Situating Machinima in the New Mediascape. Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, 4(2), pp 65-80