PSA colleague Ed Lappin sometimes works with animated video using CGI. Often he uses the ability of certain “virtual reality worlds” such as Second Life, and others, to provide the 3D environment for his animated characters. Such work is a close relative to Machinima, which Wikipedia defines as “the use of real time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production.”
Most often video games are used to generate the computer animation. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are often fan laborers, by virtue of their re-use of copyrighted materials.
Machinima offers to provide an archive of gaming performance and access to the look and feel of software and hardware that may already have become unavailable or even obsolete; for game studies, “machinima’s gestures grant access to gaming’s historical conditions of possibility and how machinima offers links to a comparative horizon that informs, changes, and fully participates in videogame culture.”
There’s also a relationship between machinima and memes, where a meme may appear as a machinima…a character “acting” or “doing something” in some animated environment that is recognizable to gaming culture. Or to whatever culture might recognize Sponge Bob Square Pants situations.
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