Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m mesmerised by this hefty chunk of Peter Jackson-esque machinima, using Skyrim and some mods. There’s thankfully no story: just a set up of 500 Draugr, 200 skeletons, 500 Dwarven Warriors, and a dragon all lined up to beat the undead hell out of each other, for a movie that’ll go down in history as The Great Battle of Skyrim. It’s well-shot, nicely edited, and has lots and lots of kapwow. Video herein.
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Two years for a little less than two hours: those are the numbers behind The Trashmaster, a feature-length machinima flick made entirely using GTA IV PC and its video tools. Owing a hard-to-miss debt to Scorsese and likely to be pulled from the internet by the Rolling Stones’ copyright lawyers any day now, this veritable labour of love is the flashy, violent tale of a vigilante garbageman, cleaning up whatever (i.e. whoever) the police can’t…

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I’ve dithered about posting this, because the acting and dialogue is… well, let’s go with “enthusiastic”, but the concept and the special effects are pretty stonking, by and large.

Beyond The Real Life is Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Warcraft, essentially. WoW machinima overlaid onto and blended with real-world footage. “Almost every shot is a combination of in-game items, characters, or environments with real life footage and special effects,” it says here.
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Choose your own adventure! Only instead of scribbling pencil notes into a paperback copy of Deathrap Dungeon and cheating by keeping your finger tucked into the last page you were on, reflect your decisions by clicking through to different Youtube videos! It’s Dragon’s Lair starring TF2′s Heavy as he attempts to navigate the deadly 2Forts! It gives you the choice of being friends or not being friends with people, just like in real life! It’s very funny! It’s below, if the embedding’s worked properly!
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I’ve been playing with (semi-)free auto-machinima-maker app Xtranormal this morning. This is the result…
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Here’s the finest piece of machinima I’ve seen in a while, created by Lag Spike Films. Called Top FPS, it’s a spoof of American reality television, pitting eight FPS characters against each other in a series of tests of skill. With HL2′s Barney playing the part of Jeff Probst, they’re given trials from shows such as Survivor, Top Chef, Scrapheap Challenge and American Idol. It’s pretty damned funny. Watch it below.

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Thanks to Jun Shen Chia for sending in a link to this first episode of what proposes to be an ongoing series made in Fallout 3, which I’ve posted below. Further episodes can be found here. I have to admit it’s been a while since I’ve paid any attention to the machinima scene, so do feel free to send in other efforts that are out there on the web. This particular piece is by Drakortha Productions, a chap who has done a whole bunch of game movies before now.
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Is Team Fortress 2 the lord God’s greatest gift to machinima? The video beneath the cut rather suggests it is. A tiny part of my brain curls up and dies when I try to guess at just how much time the chap behind this mass slaughter/domino effect experiment spent on it, but the explodey, spectacular results speak for themselves.
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Rockstar, in preparation for the PC release of GTA IV on 2nd December, have released some sample movies to show off the in-game video editor. And they’ve gone bonkers.

Clearly a dream for the machinima crowd, the in-built tool will let you create your own mini-movies, which will then be shared on the Rockstar Social Club site.

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…or so machinima of this calibre makes me think. Splendid, Looney Toonian stuff.

Thanks to Matt Slim (if that is indeed his real name) for the tip.