Friday Fun #19 Let’s Make a Movie

A recent post reporting on the 2008 Machinama filmfest on the Game Set Watch blog (The State Of Machinima, Part 2: The Machinima Filmfest Report) mentions, in passing, how in certain respects machinama – films made using game engines – can “be best described as digital puppetry”.

So for the budding digital puppeteers out there, why not wind down this Friday afternoon by having a go at putting together your own digital puppetry performance using xtranormal?

This online application allows you to select a “film set” and then place one or two characters within it. The characters actions can be defined from a palette of predefined actions:

and facial expressions:

Dialogue can also be scripted – simply type in what you want the characters to say, and it will be rendered to speech when the scene is “shot”.

You also have control over the camera position:

To get you started, here’s a quick tutorial:

If you don’t want to start from scratch, you can remix pre-existing films… Here’s one I made earlier, a video to the opening lyrics of a New Model Army song: White Coats.

The following clip shows a brief demo of the application, along with a sales pitch and a quick review of the business model.

Based on the demo pitch and some if the ideas raised in Ad Supported Gaming, how do you think xtranormal might be used as part of an online, interactive or user-engaged advertising campaign?

PS For a large collection of machinima created using the Halo game engine, see Halomovies.org.