"Machinimation"

As computer games become more complex, developers of many of these games, such as Halo, Half-Life, Doom, Quake, The Sims, and Second Life, are providing tools to enable users to record the game they are playing. This has subsequently led to the new development of Machinima -- machine + animation -- which involves the recording and subsequent editing of game playing to make movies. The emergence of Machinima (which now has it's own Blog) is attributed to the fact that many gaming engines provide quite complex environments for movie making, reducing the need for specialist graphics software to generate movie sequences. Enthusiasts are now able to create short movies simply by recording and editing the games that they play on their video consoles -- using either tools directly built into the game (that enable a user to view their recorded game from multiple camera angles -- after the recording process), or third party tools that can work alongside specialist game engines. Rooster Teeth's Red vs. Blue provides one of the first series built on such animated productions. There is even now an Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences -- which now brings together enthusiasts in this genre in an annual festival. As an example, check out the 100 minute long War of the Servers (or the shorter 3 minute trailer) from Lit Fuse Films. Impressive stuff.