Dogs, Climate Change Deniers and Machinima

Machinima is?

BPSDB

a) a technique for video production that progressives barely use;

b) a German cyber-goth band;

c) a name for pit-bull/doberman hybrids;

d) videos produced using computer game engines.

Recently climate blogger (and scientist) Michael Tobis posted Dogs and Deniers, a post illustrating the similarity between a particular Far Side cartoon and real life with the climate change Deniers (with their typical inability to detect irony, a Denier immediately posted comments illustrating the truth of the post). To illustrate his point Tobis had actually used a rather crude Denier produced example of machinima.

Machinima is of course both a) and d), that is it is a technique for film making using computer game engines that progressives barely use.

Machinima apparently began in the 1990s with game players simply screen capturing their play and then distributing it. From there someone had the notion to tell a little story within the game story and have the game characters act it out.

Then someone had the realization that you could control game characters to do more than simply hack and slash and kill everyone within the games’ storyline. If you had them strike a pose and say “To be or not to be, that is the question … ” and then hack and slash and kill everyone, you had Hamlet.

One of the earlier examples of non-game related Machinima (1999) used a game engine to present Percy Blythe Shelley‘s Ozymandias to a world that may have lost their relationship to text, but not to poetry.

In 2003 Free Range Studios released The Meatrix, a short flash animation parody of ‘The Matrix’ that critiqued industrial agriculture and the livestock industry, and it went viral.

This was amazing, essentially progressive educational material that people not only actually watched, but then shared with all of their friends.

I became fascinated by the potential of Machinima to allow citizens to make videos and movies that had narrative and story, but no budget, actors, animators, or access to relevant footage.

Whatever a particular communities’ message happened to be, whether it related to sexual violence, homelessness or rainforest destruction, a relevant, engaging video could be made and distributed. If it was done well it might even go viral.

Reinforcing this notion was the successful Halo based series Red vs Blue. This is a machinima based on one of the more violent first person shooter sci-fi games, and it is almost exclusively dialogue and narrative based … and immensely popular.

The popularity of the Halo game itself may be because you can make things blow up in graphic detail, but the RvB machinima series is mostly characters just standing there talking. What are they talking about? well that’s the question isn’t it? Without a good script and story machinima is just animated pedantry.

Then three weeks after the French civil unrest in 2005 the following machinima appeared:

Continue reading at News Junkie Post

We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.

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