Last week in a small city in the Ruhr area of Germany, a film that I made inside the video game Grand Theft Auto was screened at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, as part of an extensive overview of machinima.
“Machinima” is a linguistic mash up of machine, animation and cinema. The term has been defined as “films made by real-time three-dimensional computer graphics rendering engines”, but it essentially means films made using video games.
My own machinima film is titled We Are Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On. I recorded gameplay footage of myself playing Grand Theft Auto while trying to perform Shakespeare to other gamers, without getting blown up. I then edited that footage to make a ten-minute film.
