Jeff, I’m still fuzzy on machinima. There doesn’t seem to be much of a definition towards what makes machinima ‘machinima’ other than how it’s made with the tools of a videogame or something similar. Otherwise, the rest of machinima is similar to animated shows/movies. Right? So it seems, to me, like any other animated way of telling a story.

I disagree that reading novels only helps the writing of novelists. Most of the A-list writers I know or work with are very, very well read.

I’m talking about it in a much broader sense, both as a tool for people who work in the “real” film and television industries to prototype a concept before putting it into production and as an art form in its own right.

The tools that I’m talking make machinima more like digital puppetry, and less of an exercise in skillfully editing screen captures and then doing a voice-over.

My experiences with it have been primarily centered on what people are making with “The Movies,” but I am also familiar with Red vs. Blue from Machinima.com. I only discovered machinima because of my interest in politics, specifically the story of the Paris riots as seen through the eyes of a French-Algerian teen. It was in French with broken English subtitles, but because of the medium it could be understood by just about anyone regardless of whether they understood either language. It also gave a teen, who was not described as an activist or writer, a very powerful and expressive medium to work with.

Anyway, I’d like your opinion on either aspect. Personally, I think there’s an audience for machinima for machinima’s sake, but (again, my opinion) the bigger audience is for film maker wannabes who don’t have the money, connections, looks, or whatever to get a real shot in the industry.

With all that said, it’s clear that many novels are must-reads for almost any writer. 1984 is one of these. Actually, I’d go as far to say they’re must reads for anyone living in today’s society, but that’s besides the point.

So no, I’m not well read persay, but I will definately read the must-reads. I’ve read some of them already (shakespeare, 1984, etc). Otherwise, I simply prefer the theatrical experience as I prefer experiencing a story with somebody else. I love critiquing and discussing and so forth, even while the movie/show is playing (though I sometimes have to press the pause button :P ).

– Jeff O’Connor, Machinima. The only machinima I felt has made a significant breakthrough is Red vs. Blue. Otherwise, it seems like many other machinimas are clones of red vs blue. However, I’m definately not too familiar with the scene so I can easily be proven wrong. I can’t say whether or not I feel it’s legitimate. Shows like Beast-Wars and Reboot are obviously a step-up from machinima, though I’m not too sure what machinima is even trying to be. If they were trying to be like Beast-Wars and Reboot, then I’d say Machinima is simply a poor-man’s 3d tv show. However, if a machinima based on Half Life simply extends a ‘half life’-esque story, then it’s quite different from a 3d animated tv show in that it’s fan-fiction.

So, are you asking me about 3d animated shows? Or are you asking me about a videogame’s graphical engine being used to tell a story that pertains to the same genre/theme/universe as the initial videogame (fan-fiction-esque)?

3d animated shows are obviously an alternative. However, I do feel sour about videogame machinima that are based on their videogame. Red vs Blue is slightly different because it’s not a halo-esque story that is told with the elements of the video game Halo. It is, however, geared towards halo fans because of the undertones of the game. What I mean is it’s not fan-fiction of the halo story, it is fan-fiction of the halo game.

I guess I’m not the best person to try and explain this as I’m not into machinima and I haven’t watched a Red vs Blue episode in a long, long time. I do remember that Red vs Blue is well written and entertaining, which makes it impossible for me to see it as an amateur fan-fiction machinima.

So I guess my question to you is how different is machinima from 3d animated shows?

To the rest of you (and John August), my writing dilemma is still in the air.

Most graphic novelists are actually very well read. Writing and reading go hand and hand. Good luck.

I’ve been subscribing to this post hoping to get an answer to my question about machinima as new story-telling medium and your post seems topical enough for me to bring the topic back up again as a question for you – have you ever considered it as an alternative to to established media and the entertainment industry?

There’s a lot of exciting development in the space, even since I posted here just a couple of months back. A new tool is being released called MovieStorm (www.moviestorm.co.uk) that’s not a game that can be hacked or modded to be a virtual studio, but is instead a toolkit for actual machinima development from the get-go. The other thing that’s intriguing about it is that it is apparently going to be released for free, and that the company making it is going to attempt to finance it through the sale of expansion packs rather than the core product (source: http://www.machinimafordummies.com/)

My interest in screenwriting began after reading parts of someone’s fan-fiction-ish script for a television show I enjoy watching (it’s a long wait until the next season begins :P ). It sucked, to say the least, so I decided to write my own. I wrote the first act/teaser and really worked on it for a while. It’s a very complex show and season premieres are definately the most ambitious and groundbreaking episodes of each season for the series, so I was very picky and perfectionist when it came to my approach and execution. I never finished the script for the episode only because I enjoyed writing it so much that I decided to learn more about the screenwriting process/rules/and so forth. I’ve been reading a lot about writing for the past while and, while I’ve always taken an interest i creative writing, I’ve never looked into it seriously. I’ve been learning more about the things I’ve ‘touched upon’ in my high-school ‘Writer’s Craft’ class, as well as other things I’ve been familiarized with bya watching tv/movies. Watching dramas on television – such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica – definately teach me a lot about good character arcs and so forth. And, of course, there are some television shows that have taught me a lot of what ‘not’ to do.

However, I’ve been reading more and more about the tv/film ‘industry’ and it isn’t looking like the place for me. It’s not that I don’t feel I can compete, it’s just that it’s not my type of game. I’m sure you can fill in the rest as I’m sure you know many other people who feel the same about the screenwriting industry.

Anywho, I have considered writing novels in the past, but have said ‘no’ to that idea simply because I don’t read. It’s not that I don’t ‘like’ books, I just don’t want to read one. I have read books, of course, I just don’t enjoy the novel format. Likewise, I don’t enjoy writing in the novel-format. I tend to lost my ideas and passion for a scene/conversation/whatever because of how novels are structured or whatnot.

Through educating myself about screenwriting and fiction-writing in general, I’ve also taken some time to try and find a way to tell a story that works for me.

Graphic novels and Comic books are brilliant. I will read one no-problem – I’ve actually recently read a Wolverine comic book (where he’s a spandexless leather-jacket-wearing badarse in the city who fights thugs) and I really liked it. I’ve also read one where Hulk kicks the crap out of the Avengers which was cool. I don’t read comic books, though – those two are the only ones I’ve read in a long,long time (besides the horrendous Sonic comics I ‘looked through’ as a kid). Thing is, I don’t draw. On top of that, it doesn’t feel up my alley as far as I know. I don’t see myself writing a comic book or graphic novel. I’d like to go ito more detail, but I’m not exactly sure what those details are. Writing a graphic novel just doesn’t seem ‘me’.

Then there’s something that I learned about on Finn Harvor’s blog (http://screen-novel.blogspot.com/) called the Screenplay-Novel. You may be familiar with the concept. It’s new, of course, and I’m not sure how I’d approach such a thing. Do I write a screenplay-novel (a screenplay with the freedom of a novel, basically), or do I bite the bullet and write a screenplay? The formatting in a screenplay-novel is also free-for-all (like a novel, for the most part), so I’m sure reading a screenplay novel could be similar to reading Shakespeare. But then it comes down to the fact that I don’t necessarily enjoy reading Shakespeare. I respect his work as a great writer and so forth, but I don’t take too much joy in reading.

Anyways, I’m just caught in the middle of a crossroads. Well, maybe not a crossroads, but an open field with screenwriting on one side and something else on the other. The ’something else’ is something I’d rather take on, but I just don’t know what it is yet. Television/film is definately the medium I enjoy watching, but it doesn’t seem to me, at this moment, as the industry I want to work in. I know getting anything published is hard work, but the Hollywood-writer lifestyle definately doesn’t look up my alley or within my tastes.

Carlo

I believe almost nobody ever sells a script with high-six figures here, but then again you can probably do a movie where action is mostly internal and stakes are low.

Not that I have (almost) any first-hand knowledge about European film industry, except for the films that are released theatrically. And those kind of films get made here.

And, occasionally, someone even goes to see them.