Machinima Extra Credit

As the second extra credit assignment, Roger, and the majority of our class went to the machinima showings at the end of our last class day. I knew what machinima was, but had never actually seen any, or bothered looking it up online. From what I understand, all of the projects shown when we went were made using the Half Life 2 engine. The thing that I thought was odd, is that some of them clearly took a long time to make, then had terrible audio/audio editing; I don't get it. You would think that if someone where to put this much time into a project like this, they use a mic better than the one they found in the bargain bin at Wal-mart. One project in particular, had it's audio so varying, that at times it would hurt my ears and sound distorted coming out, and at other times, would be nearly inaudible because the mic couldn't handle it. Audio issues aside, some of these were quite neat. One video in particular, Villains Anonymous, I found especially funny and creative. It was about help group meeting for villains, which ranged from Darth Vader, to an enemy from id software's Doom. One part in particular, where a linguistically superior demon tells his story, was hilarious. He tries to do some shopping at a grocery store, and despite using great manors, and, in his head, sounding like a perfect gentleman, all anyone can hear is his screeching and yelling; he can't understand why everyone is so afraid of him. Another machinima that I enjoyed, not because it was funny, but because I thought it was well done and entertaining, was one based upon Edger Allen Poe's The Tell-tale Heart. I liked the way in which the poem was depicted, and the narration was superior to a lot of the other works. It was an interesting way to hear the poem, and gave visual entertainment along-side it. I had seen this done many times with The Raven, but not this one. This overall was a fun experience, and gave me a better understanding of what machinima is, and what it takes to create it. The interesting thing with this type of movie, is that the acting seems nearly as important as in a live action movie. When there was sloppy voice acting, it took me away from the movie, just as much as when there is sloppy acting in a regular film. Something else I noticed while watching these, is that the more serious ones didn't seem to work as well as the comedic ones. This could be the same reason as with live action movies, where it's harder to make a drama than a horror movie, or it could be that this genre of film just doesn't work as well with drama, I'm guessing it's the first. Anime, and CG seem to work just fine with drama.