Machinima discussion

My site: http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/wburke/Surveillance/splash-surveil.htm

I came into this having seen a small amount of machinima, and what I hadn’t realized is how well it was done. Machinima clearly takes much more time and effort than I had previously realized, especially when you consider the time it takes to come up with a quality creative script beforehand, and then combine that with well planned and carefully laid out filming, which often requires working around obstructions that are inherent to working within video games or virtual worlds. One thing I took for granted in the machinima I had seen, Red vs. Blue, is the work that is put into making the illusion of speaking. Every time a character speaks the people controlling them have to move their heads up and down in conjunction with their talking. That is in fact what I find to be impressive about the good machinima, and lacking in the less well made machinima. In Red vs. Blue and others, the focal points of production are the dialogue, and camera work. Almost no movement occurs due to the clumsiness of the characters in Halo, where they options for movement are so limited. The other huge strength I see in their machinima is the theme of playing off the art form of machinima. Often jokes or plotlines are built around the fact that these characters exist within ridiculous conditions and constraints, and are unable to do many basic things. With camera work that gives the characters and surroundings a good feel, all they put into it is character development and humor, focusing on the intricacies of the dialogue, and they come out with an excellent and entertaining machinima. For my own machinima script, I would like to aim for this same sort of goal. While I realize this may conflict with the goal of keeping Little Brother central to the machinima, I think it can work very well. In my machinima I plan to displace a number of the characters from Little Brother into Second Life into a neutral (maybe humorous) environment. Here they will engage in some sort of reconciliatory dialogue but will continue to run into their inadequacies, highlighted by the literal inadequacies of second life.