WHEN we watch films, we escape into a world of fantasy, becoming enthralled by the moving pictures, the blisteringly loud sound and the engrossing plots.

There’s something magical about the movies – it’s why we adore actors and directors and pay billions of pounds each year to watch their end results.
But just as much as we enjoy watching the blockbusters, we also find fun in making our own films.

The huge sale of camcorders is testament to the fact that the general public likes to capture events – and non-events – for later viewing on the small screen.

Yet what if you want to do more than that and create your own blockbuster?

It’d be a costly process – you’d have to pay actors, scour for good locations, buy a camcorder if you don’t already own one and invest in decent editing software for your PC, as well as learning the basics of long shots and close ups and golden rules like not jumping the axis.

And if you plump for animation, then that too is also fraught with difficulties. Try to beat Pixar – makers of top flicks such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo – and you will need to, at the very least, match their in-house custom-built systems costing millions of dollars. And you’d still need huge, expensive crews.

A good alternative is to try the garage culture that is machinima. It’s a film-making technique that can be both creative and edgy, combining videogames with cinema and producing a whole new sub-genre of animation.

Machinima’s roots extend back to 1996 when videogame geeks engaged in self-congratulation, recording their gameplaying as they made their way through, predominantly, first-person shoot-em-ups.
Over time, it began to evolve, with videogamers arranging to meet up in massively multiplayer games environments. In these game worlds, each player took on a role and were ‘recorded’ by one of the players.
The director then downloaded these performances and used editing software to create a ‘film’.

By combining the high-graphics qualities of the game environment, with improvisation by players and editing software, these films have become increasingly sophisticated, often involving players working in different continents and time zones. Machinima is also popular using 3D action games such as Halo or Quake to create scenes, on top of which music and dialogue is dubbed.

For just as the Blair Witch Project spawned a surge in the number of camcorder-filmed movies, machinima is taking the world by storm.
The benefits of all of this are obvious. Machinima – quite simply, ‘machines meet cinema’ or machine animation – is cheap, requires no actors or huge crews and no locations.

Proponents of this new art carefully choreograph the action sequences. The in-game cameras capture the sweeps, pans and pulls associated with traditional film.
This trend is being picked up by both amateur hobbyists and semi-professionals. It has also attracted the eye of top directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg who are said to be fans. And machinima has been championed at independent film festival Sundance.

Of course, there are some limitations – the characters must look like those in the games so there is a plethora of machinima involving body armoured futuristic soldiers bearing huge and bulky weapons, although many use The Sims for human-based drama flicks.

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