Judging from the results of the European Machinima Film Festival it appears that the term machinima is being re-defined. It used to be that machinima was defined as movies made with games by amateurs on little or no budget. But at the Euro festival they had and selected movies which were made with 3d animation programs, as well as one made by professionals for commercial purposes.

Seems that machinima is crossing lines previously forbidden. Good thing, bad thing? I don't know. Moviestorm, iClone, etc have embraced the term Machinima to sell their products and the AMAS is moving in that direction.

What do you define as Machinima? The people would coined the term are the onces now moving into 3D animation. Should movies made with games in real time still be defined as machinima?

As a result of many of the past contests and festivals I am beginning to associate the word machinima with 'low quality'.
There are many great cinematic movies being produced. They are so good I gladly burn them to DVD and watch on the big screen with others and even non-gamers. They just don't seem to fit the current mold of what is being defined as "award winning machinima". They are simply so much more that I feel they require a definition that will aptly represent them.

Quoted from microsoft's machinima licence: "There’s still a way to do some of these things we’ve excluded, but you have to contact us for a commercial license. If you’re interested in doing that, send a mail to gamevids*at*microsoft.com. (And it’s not that we hate the word “machinima” and are trying to rename it into “gamevids” – this is related to a character limit issue on our server side for automated aliases, not a nefarious plot to rename anything.)."

'Gamevids', makes sense. Videos made with games even a non-gamer can grasp that and recognize what it is without a definition.

The tag GameVid's seems to me to be low end and does not match the work that some "Machinima" producers put into their work. To call what StRuPiE and Lil_Donkey simply a GameVid to me would be demeaning it. If we are to lose the definition of "machinima" we have to find/create a word that is more befitting the hard work and labour of love that many apply.

Perhaps a simple addition of the word Gamer in front of Machinima would suit. Or to suit our site Gamerz-Machinima.

Gamers don't own the word in fact the term was first used by the movie industry in 1993 and was used extensively in the storyboarding and production of Independence Day (1996) In 1993 Disney's Stunt Island game as the core engine. It was a television show called The Zone, which was later re-produced in Canada, without the video game imagery to become a show called, REBOOT. However, the original ZONE was created using video game imagery instead of CGI (computer generated imagery), but the only problem was the low resolution of the video games themselves, and the idea was short lived before metamorphosing into a totally different show, with the same theme - less the video games themselves. (quote from a Simanticus article)

So once again perhaps we should look at the term VGI .. video game imagery or VGM .. Video Game Machinima

The website VGI seems to have disappeared once again :-

Anyway .. nuff from Gas

The very first presentation at the festival was by Paul Marino and he defined Machinima as 'Machinima is filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies.'

So, a program like Moviestorm is included because you film in realtime. A program like Truespace would not be included because that is CGI that you render out after designing your set and camera movements.

Personally, I'm not that keen on that definition as it is too restrictive for making a movie, but I do see that Paul and the AMAS need to have some kind of definition. Later at the festival, there was a seminar with 4 top movie makers and the question was put to them. Hugh Hancocks first answer was 'I'm not touching that with a barge pole!' lol. He did try, though, and his explanation was good, IMO.

I managed to his answer on my digi-camera, and I put it on youtube. You'll have to suffer IL2 guys blethering first to get to it, hehe click me or just flick through to time 7:10

Pesonally, I have mixed feelings about a definition. I currently favour the definition by Johnny Ingram who said 'it's just a tool for making movies'. There is something very simple and beautiful with that, though it ain't much good for defining who can and who can't enter for a machinima festival!