Films of the future. (Film).(machinima )

A guy, a girl, and a car. Ah, the stories you could tell, the movies you could make, if only ... if only you could afford to hire the cast, crew, a director of photography, location scout, costume designer, and, and.... But wait! Maybe you can. Maybe anyone can--anyone, that is, willing to substitute animated characters for live actors.

That's the promise and, for some, already the reality of Machinima. A combination of the words "machine" and "animation," this new genre is frequently defined as filmmaking within a real-time 3D environment, although, in practice, it's usually filmmaking within a game engine.

"Machinima is the convergence of filmmaking, animation, and game development," explains Paul Marino, co-founder of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS) and of the Machinima-making studio, ILL Clan. An outgrowth of game movies and game mods, Machinima has been compared to puppet shows, animated films, improvisational theater and interactive fiction.

In fact, Machinima is all those things. "You can set up a camera and use the models in a game," says Jake Hughes, who made his Machinima movie Anacronox within a Quake 2 game. "It might take a half-hour to set up your first camera, but then it's quick. You can try a dose-up or a dolly or a zoom using models in the game. You can access the characters' animations, and after learning the process, you can create an entire scene. The levels are essentially different sets. It's a blast."

Hughes made his film from cinematics he created for and within the game Anacronox. "As you play Anacronox, suddenly your character is telling a story in the cinematics," he says. After the game was released, Hughes realized he could create a narrative from the cinematics. So, he output scenes to AVI flies, edited them in Adobe System's Premiere and produced the 2-1/2 hour animated film.

"It's a gift to be able to see new media being created; it's like watching Gutenberg as he invented the printing press," says Henry Lowood, curator for the history of science and technology collections at Stanford University Libraries. "One idea is that you can make movies without mortgaging the house, but it's interesting to think about it more as performance. Machinima offers a new production process for what is possibly a new medium."

That's exactly what ILL Clan is doing. At press time, the studio was planning a Machinima-based performance for the Florida Film Festival that would feature the animated characters Lenny and Larry Lumberjack from their award-winning short film Hardly Workin'. "We'll have a predetermined idea for a story, but we'll elicit suggestions from the audience," Marino says. "It will be animated improvisational theater."