The truly talented Paul Marino came to talk this afternoon about Machinima, and I'm looking for volunteers to help me with "Property Law: The Video Game."  Seriously, folks, this is big.

Paul (and many others) are working on and using tools that make film-making within a real-time 3D environment easy for the rest of us.  They're using game engines (like Quake) as a way to produce movies.  This all started with teenagers recording what they themselves were doing in the game -- so they could show their friends -- and has amplified into a new way to make animated movies with a real director's touch. 

Paul (who is writing a book that will be coming out soon) says that Machinima was coined in Scotland and means "machine cinema."  At this point, people are deep into building post-production tools that provide all kinds of control.  There are some breathtaking films on this site.  Watch the one with the flower.

Basically, the Machinima tools take a game environment (many different game environments) as a given, and allow directors to choose camera angles, lay down "tracks" of different characters (so they appear to interact), add music -- you name it.  Game developers have mostly been quite receptive to Machinima, because it provides another channel for their engines.  So far, the licensing part of all this is a little ad hoc, but will likely become more standard in time.  This may be the way the next blockbuster animated film gets made.

Paul pointed us towards Red v. Blue, a group in Austin that's making very funny films using Halo.  Guys just talking and standing around in a multiplayer game, talking about standing around.  Take my word for it -- it's funny.

You can imagine all the gamer sorts of things that can happen in these films -- characters gathering together to be directed (people playing characters who are playing actors), avatars wandering on to the set, killing/maiming (but not really in what Paul showed us)..

He showed us some very realistic character work for which the interface for human directors would be sliders.  Raise a slider, raise an eyebrow!  And if you have a .wav file of someone speaking, that will drive the character's speech.  Really neat (words fail me at this point).

If you join the Machinima Academy, you can get a tool that allows creation of these things for a modest yearly fee.  As long as you don't make commercial films.  Paul did a demo for us in about 3 minutes -- very impressive.

So the law professors started asking questions:

can we load documents in and make this a course?

can we modify the environments?

can we use this to stage reenactments of accidents?

Paul pointed us to Adobe Atmosphere, a virtual world tool that allows for documents to be involved.  I'm most interested in the course applications.  What if you walked into a property course, and it was a game like one of these films?  (This is a lot of work for the professor.) 

But it might just be the future.