Machinima

http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=346

2003 first machinima music video aired on MTV. Zero7's "In the Waiting Line"

Fountainhead Entertainment produced this beautiful video together with Tommy Palotta for British band Zero7. They developed their own machinima software tool called "Machinimation" based on id Software's Quake3 game.
The four most common machinima production techniques are: straight recording, the ‘puppetry’ approach, ‘recamming’ and scripting.

Straight recording: a game’s characters are left to their own devices and the machinimator simply records their activities.
The series "Red vs. Blue" from Rooster Teeth Productions.
http://redvsblue.com/home.php

Puppetry approach: game characters are manipulated to perform actions on cue according to a screenplay, which is recorded in real time for later editing.

Recamming: builds on the puppet approach, and combines it with re-recording. Additional characters might be added, lighting changed, or cameras moved

Scripted technique: programming the game’s characters to perform in particular and specific ways.

- lose the live-action immediacy of the puppetry approach, but gain the capacity to bypass the game interface, to expand a character’s basic repertoire of moves, or precisely plot a virtual camera’s motion through space (see: Journey)


Glossary

Clan
A clan is a group of people who play the same computer game as a team.

Massively Multiplayer Games often use the term "Guild"
FPS - First Person Shooter

- being perceived through the eyes of the virtual character that the user is directing with his input device (mouse/ keyboard, joystick, data glove).

-simple goal to get to the next level alive through killing lots of aliens/ zombies/ terrorists, thus the naming of the genre.

HUD - Heads Up Display

- part of the game interface
-shows basic game information (player's health, ammunition and the first person weapon model)
-information is vital when playing the game but distraction when you want to use your view as a camera.

-Most games have built in commands or options to make the HUD invisible.

MOD - Modification

Most games come together with toolsets to customize the game content or to create extra content. Using those tools, users can create their own levels, characters or even their own rules. These changes to the original game are called "MODs" or "Modifications".

Movies are usually produced in three subsequent stages:

1. Pre Production

2. Production

3. Post Production

Pre-production includes raising funds, writing the story, casting actors, producing storyboards and searching for locations. Basically, everything that needs to be done before a film can be shot is done in Preproduction. At this stage, traditional and virtual filmmaking aren't that far away from each other.

Production is actually shooting the movie; working with your actors and crew on location.

Post-production describes all the steps needed to complete the movie with the footage produced during the production stage. Editing and application of special effects, additional dialogue recording (ADR), titling and musical score generally all happen during this stage.
Making Machinima:

Jib jab tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrUrAcBdrpw
"[Games are] the most powerful learning technology of our age"

Henry Jenkins, Professor of Education at MIT
Games for learning: three different camps

1. using mainstream games in school;

2. creating 'educational' games (with both new and existing software);

3. pulling games to pieces and using them as a tool for young people to create new games or films themselves.
In machinima, we see a whole different approach is emerging that sees the technology on which games are built being used to enable children to create their own games, stories and dramas.

Challenges:

First - the 'violence' debate.

Second: what 'exactly' children are learning through games play and how this mesh with the current priorities of the education system.

Third: how young people themselves will respond to the introduction of their popular culture into the classroom


Bernstein (1999)
Vertical and Horizontal discourse:

Vertical Discourse: hierarchically organized and formally pedagogic, delivered instructionally and carefully sequenced

Horizontal discourse: relative free-for-all of discoursal practice in informal contexts; regarded in relation to media texts.

Horizontal discourse includes ‘computer literacy’ and ‘games literacy’ and the skills and competencies gained and practiced through interaction with these interfaces.

Prensky (2001) idea of digital natives: children born into these interfaces.

Suss (2001)
children have formed rich exchange networks in which artefacts and dialogue are always circulating between peers, adding continuously to the knowledge of the peer group as a whole;


Rheingold (2003)

Peer-to-peer web technologies help these exchanges to grow ever richer
Literacy:

1. a set of skills and competencies

2. a cache of linguistic resources or discourses for describing the experience of mobilizing them.

Donna’s Questions:
What kinds of literacy practices surround video game play?
What forms of literacy are relevant and important to discussions of children’s learning with digital and multimedia devices?
What is meant by ‘games literacy’ and its implications for children’s formal and informal learning?
What implications do 3D design and games aesthetics have for children’s construction of multimodal meanings and development of “multi-literacies”?

Bakhtin (1981)

Ventriloquism and parody
New London Group (1996)

Programmatic manifesto for change in literacy teaching:

Their theory of ‘design’ in learning:

Learning to formulate meanings is an active an dynamic process.

Learning and productivity are the results of the designs (the structures) of complex systems of people environments, technology, beliefs and texts.

Learning occurs through interaction with ‘available designs’ and include the grammars and modalities of semiotic systems such as film, TV, photography, or physical gesture and the conventions associated with semiotic activity in a given social space

Available designs: are both grammars of varied media, or semiotic systems, as well as a ‘socially produced array of discourses, intermeshing and dynamically interacting

Designing: a process of emergent meaning-making, of transforming available designs through re-presentation and re-contextualization, re-using old resources in new ways and re-articulating the possible combination of the available resources.

Learning is based around a continuous process of ‘appropriation’ of resources from former designs and their re-articulation for new purposes.

Appropriation: How individuals learn to interpret skills by socially interacting with others and transforming them for their own uses, creating new ways of working.
Bahktin (1981) refers to language as a continuous chain of utterances that we appropriate and re-use, re-shaping it according to context

E.g. “No” from a toddler

Engestrom (1987) appropriation, and thus development are driven by the contradictions and tensions between an individual and the sociocultural influences, which in part can be resolved in the creation of new artefacts and social practices.

Wertsch (1991) refers to these tensions as‘mediation’ or ‘mediated action’

Gibson (1977) the ‘affordances’ of the object or tool and the individual in a specific context

**the tensions between language and individuals and the tools they use are fundamental to understanding how people appropriate and carry out an activity.**

Bahktin: dialogue as a dynamic process in which ‘any utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication’

Bahktin’s theory of dialogism:

a speaker is always speaking through someone else’s words until they have transformed them to their own purposes
Prensky (2001) defines ‘games literacy’ as the ability to process information, often from different sources and in parallel, very quickly to determine relevance to explore information in a non-linear way and presented in different modalities and to communicate across non-geographically bounded networks.

Video games: simultaneously multimodal and intertextual, remediating the representational resource of older media as well as drawing on the strategies, patterning, implied values and subject positions demanded of readers or viewers of the spectrum of available texts.

Gee (2003) defines specific games genres, such as first-person shooters, as semiotic domains with their own internal and external design grammars.

Internal design grammars: representational resources incorporated into a game, and with the typical ways in which the content of a game is design that lend it similarity with or difference to other games within the same genre

External design grammars: the complex of social activities by which players develop greater understanding of the mechanics and representational strategies of the games in question.

Individual’s understanding of these grammars cannot develop in isolation. Players develop ‘affinity groups’ around specific genres.

Real knowledge about games exists not in individual nodes, but in the interconnections between them as a network as a whole.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/cable.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y50k2sAXaRo