Note: It will take a little over an hour to watch all videos linked in this post.
Video games are a convenient place to film. There’s no need to rent trucks and expensive camera equipment. Just have your friends log in to your favourite game and meet at the virtual filming location. As long as you can screen capture your game, you can make a machinima.
What is machinima?
Machinima is the art form of making films using video games. The word itself is a portmanteau of machine and cinema. Traditional machinima is essentially an in-game performance filmed using a game’s real-time graphics engine. Machinimists puppeteer game characters and record footage that is then dubbed over in post-production. Over time, machinimists have expanded their toolboxes beyond simple in-game capture to include more elaborate methods of manipulating game assets. This post aims to outline some broad production paradigms, but let’s first provide some motivation.
Why make machinima?
There are many ways to tell a story and film is an effortful way to do so. You can absolutely start shooting with just a modern smartphone, but I’d argue that machinima is an easier approach to film production for the following reasons:
- Existing game assets can be selected instead of creating or renting props and sets
- Virtual logistics are significantly easier than in real life allowing you to collaborate regardless of geography
- Puppeteering is easier than acting so you can recruit fellow gamers into your production crew
Among many reasons, the most notable advantages machinima has are related to its low barriers to entry. Though it’s more accessible than traditional film, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to make. You’re still carrying out the full video production process with some unusual drawbacks.
What are the drawbacks?
There are some critical restrictions on machinima studios:
- Machinima is not monetizable because it is derivative work without licensing frameworks
- Viewership is limited to game’s player base as machinima seldom appeals to the mainstream
- Expressiveness is constrained by the game’s capabilities (e.g. limited character animations)
The nature of machinima being fan labour means this medium will likely fail to gain traction beyond a games’ player base. More importantly, no machinimists can make money from their work because their use of games’ intellectual property is not protected under fair use. Most production teams stop because it’s not possible to financially sustain the project and justify production time. Thus, hobbyists will often use this art form as a stepping stone to greater endeavours. With a few exceptions, machinima has been and will always be a passion project.
As a personal passion, I’ve studied machinima and its methods for a long time. Over the years, I’ve seen many different approaches to get more expressiveness out of game assets. The main motivation for writing this post is to share my framework for organizing these approaches.
Production complexity tiers
I have devised a hierarchy to categorize machinima based on the how advanced their creation process is. I sort videos into their respective tiers based on what I perceive to be the technological complexity of their production pipeline. Each tier builds on the toolbox of the level below it and compounds in difficulty the more one advances. There are no hard boundaries as you can have productions situated between tiers. Higher tier productions are not necessarily better than lower tier ones. They look may more polished, but technical execution is only one aspect of a successful video. My organizational theory is gleaned from years of watching machinima and my own cringeworthy attempts of making them. It has been a useful tool for grouping works with their peers and comparing apples to apples.
Tier 0: Gameplay Footage
Gameplay footage is a precursor to machinima. Unscripted content like let’s plays and e-sports fall into this category. It is raw or lightly edited footage from the player camera that often has the game UI overlaid on top of it. It isn’t until we start using the game as a tool to serve a narrative that we start getting into the first tier.
Tier 1: In-Game Shoots
Traditional machinima is shot in the game environment. The production team puts together costumes and meets at the in-game film location. On set, a player camera captures character actions acted out by puppeteers. The captured footage is then edited in post-production with dubbing from voice actors. This is the most straightforward approach to making a machinima.
Tier 2: Asset Compositing
Machinimists can rip assets from the game and composite them into their video. Often, extracted assets are captured in an asset viewer and then chroma keyed on top of in-game shots. Some machinimists even use solid colour backgrounds found in the game environment to shoot their subjects. Asset viewers are particularly popular for games where no one is allowed to host their own game servers so that film crews don’t need to procure props through the in-game economy. This technique also allows for perspectives of models that are not normally accessible in the game. Beyond this tier, videos become significantly harder to make.
Tier 3: 3D Animation Suites
3D animation suites allow machinimists to tweak all the aspects of their shots. In addition to skeletal animation controls, these programs allow directors to adjust lighting and camera settings. Game assets are imported into a 3D animation tool or virtual studio environment and laboriously animated. The virtual studio environment might utilize the game engine for rendering, but a lot of the advantages of simplicity in traditional machinima are lost at this tier. At this point, machinima is more akin to animation than film.
Tier 4: Experimental Tools and Mods
This tier pushes the limits of machinima. Few have ventured into this territory as it requires a lot of research to carry out. Techniques like using match moving to make a live-action hybrid or motion capture for skeletal animation are rare tools in an animator’s toolbox. Anything involving a mod that alters the game rules or hacks modified assets back into the game would be part of this category because of the technical wizardry required. Each one of these will challenge what you thought was possible from a machinima.
Examples
To illustrate my point, here are some examples videos from each tier for popular games:
Other production methods
The game community makes videos using many creative production methods, but I would not consider them machinima unless they use a game’s visual assets. For example, traditional animation and live-action videos are not machinima even though they use a game’s likeness. They appeal to a similar audience, but their use of the game has more to do with leveraging the games’ conworld rather than using the game software as a storytelling tool. I will acknowledge that this definition does get blurry because some tier 3 machinimas are actually modelled in the likeness of the game with no actual assets being used. If the animation looks like the actual game, I will label it as machinima. Conversely, a machinima does not have to be set in the game’s story universe. All that matters is that the games’ assets are used in the production.
These are arbitrary boundaries I have drawn based on my observations of the machinima community. I had plans to plot a pyramid graph of the tiers to show how the higher tiers tapered off, but the task proved to be too large an undertaking. In a more technical follow-up post, I’m going to outline how I planned to gather these statistics in the hopes that someone else picks it up.
The future of machinima
Machinima will remain a niche art form. Its viewership declines as the player base thins out. It’s inspiring to see small pockets of machinimists still practicing their craft in old games, but they will never receive the same viewership they did at the peak of a game’s popularity. Many move on to pursue more financially sustainable endeavours. Even if licensing agreements were struck, I suspect machinima will have a hard time competing in the attention economy because it is no where near as cost effective as live-streamed game content. Part of the charm of machinima is that almost all of them are passion projects. Nobody makes machinima for profit – they do it to play with friends, sharpen their production skills, garner internet fame, or tell stories they’ve been itching to share.
The growing and waning of machinima communities is inevitable. The next generation of machinimists is making videos right now on the games de jour. I think my organizational theory would still extrapolate out to these new games, but this framework might break with the emergence of new tools for VR and games with cinematic quality graphics. That said, I hope this post gives you some idea of the different ways to tell stories through machinima. I also hope this has potentially sparked a curiosity to watch or make machinima. As long as there are games and the desire to tell stories, there will always be someone making machinima.
anthologen 
A very interesting read indeed. I do agree, there used to be a lot more Machinima in the past, especially in the 2000s. I remember actively watching Red vs. Blue, and much of the Halo community did as well. Sad that it has somewhat died out (although there has seemingly been a minor resurgence in the Animal Crossing area 😀 )
Interestingly, one area of what could still be seen as still a thriving are of Machinima, is of course, pornography.
For better or worse, there is a seemingly strong and devoted audience.
https://kotaku.com/the-people-who-make-brutal-video-game-porn-1690892332
LikeLiked by 1 person
I knew of its existence, but didn’t know it had such a strong following. I’m not really surprised though. It’s an interesting subculture that operates outside game developers’ approval as that kind of content likely violates the game EULA.
Yeah, I did notice a resurgence in the Animal Crossing community. Another trend I recently learned about is live machinima which I am dubbing “machinimprov” where they essentially perform theatre in-game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fEDnlVPOWA . With the rise in accessibility to VTubers tools, I think we’re going to see the lines between Let’s Play and machinima blurring.
LikeLiked by 1 person