Machinima in the Media classroom

On Friday I took part in a Machinima workshop held at Education Queensland's ICT Learning Innovation Centre. This was part of a special project being trialled in several schools by media teachers in Queensland.

In simple terms, machinima involves making animation using an exisiting video games engine. The most famous example is Rooster Teeth's Red Vs Blue machinima series made using the Halo game. It has exciting potential for media education classrooms for two reasons. Firstly, it allows the production of great looking animation without the need for high end animation skills, or the need to create an animation frame by frame. That means it's a much faster and cheaper method of production than traditional digital animation - which is ideal for the school situation.

Secondly, it allows students to use their high end video game playing skills for a purpose other than game play - to be creative, and to perhaps subvert the video game form - or at least to use the form in a creative and unexpected way.

Of course, their is still much skill required to make good machinima, and we should not expect it to be a given that successful game players will inherently make good machinima. Of course, much of the success of any machinima will come down the development of a good script. Furthermore, to manipulate games' characters in a convincing manner, to make them come alive as charatcers with attributes not intended by the original game, is also a huge challenge.

We explored several potential processes for making machinima. The first was within virtual worlds like the Sims and Second Life. In this situation, the virtual environment is used like a virtual film studio - whole worlds and charatcers are purpose designed and built and then manipulated to "act out" scenes. This is then recorded using software like Fraps. The second was within the game "The Movies", which allows players to script and produce their own movies using a set number of settings and charatcer actions. This option appeared t be most suitable for use with lower secondary or middle years students. The third option involved networking three X-Box game consoles, with one hooked up to a computer to capter the on-screen action. Two players interact on screen, while the thrird acts as a "camera" - the charatcer's point of view becomes the camera and this is what is captured on the computer. It can then be editing, sound dubbed and so on. This is the method used to create Red Vs blue.

We had some lively discussion about the educational purpose of machinma and issues related to assessment of student work. For example, as with most production in media ed courses, there is a significant debate to be had about skills development Vs the exploration of issues and ideas. As media educators (for example, as opposed to technology educators), what would we want student to learn from making machinma, what attributes would we value in relation to student produced machinma and how would we identify these to assess them?

Machinima.com is a great place to start exploring different types and examples of machinma.