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David Frazier

The release of Terminator Salvation in late May marked a dubious first:  it was followed by the online release of a 72-minute downloadable animated film, Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series, which was 'filmed' entirely inside the brand new Terminator Salvation video game.
The project marked the first time that a major studio - Warner  Bros - has spent serious money on the geeky enterprise of in-game filming, or machinima, a genre that, until now, has been the domain of a geeky tribe of PC gamers. But machinima might not be underground for  long.
Machinima is an amalgam of 'machine', 'cinema' and 'anime'. It dates back to the mid-1990s, when 3D shooter games Doom and  Quake first included software to let players record bouts of monster slaying. It didn't take long for gamers to use video-editing software and add voiceovers to these saved sequences.
The result was machinima, a narrative form unique to the personal computer.
Like many machinima series, Salvation Machinima was released in parts, and the sixth and final instalment  went on sale only recently  (available to US audiences from iTunes and Amazon). While the series may mark new levels of photo-realism - machinima only really loses out to CG movies such as Shrek or Wall-E in its  ability to create facial expressions - mainstream exposure may also herald  the death of machinima.
Salvation Machinima is not very good. Its storyline is just another wonky Terminator plot tangent, this time a prequel to Terminator Salvation.  It tells how a major character in the new film, Blair Williams, came to join the resistance against the machine conspiracy to destroy all humans. All of the cool conundrums about cyborg identity, circa the first Terminator, are lost. The result offers little more than what you'd expect of a video game - fighting robots.
From a machinima standpoint, the main problem with Salvation Machinima is that it treats machinima as just another type of animation, so it can only  succeed as a mediocre action film. 
This is not where machinima  has proven effective. The genre's paragon  is Red vs Blue (roosterteeth.com), five-minute shorts  updated weekly that have been logging at least 500,000 downloads since 2004. Archly satirical and seen as machinima's first crossover to non-gamers, it chronicles the antics of two groups of fighters in a standard scenario of the  Xbox 360's  Halo 3, a futuristic shoot-'em-up. Instead of fighting each other,  the two teams ruminate on the absurdity of their circumstances, and question the value of engaging in battle.
Not all machinima is parody, but  good machinima requires strong writing. Red vs Blue  has that - but it may also be the last of its breed.
Recently, Microsoft and other game makers have inserted machinima clauses into user licenses that prevent users from selling machinima. Red vs Blue received an exemption from Microsoft and can sell DVDs and has a production team, but  with increasing corporate interest in and control of the genre, others may not be so lucky.




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