No longer limited to writing fan fiction, Star Trek enthusiasts can now make their own movies through machinima, an animated art form that allows users to tell stories with a video-game engine. One such ‘Enterprising’ filmmaker is Geoffrey James, whose feature film Borg War has become a bit hit in serialized form at http://Machinima.com.
“Making the movie only cost $200 in software and the time I would have normally spent playing video games,” says James, who directed and produced Borg War using visual assets and sound clips from various Star Trek video games. The film was nominated for the Best Series and Technical Achievement awards last year by the Academy for Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS), and is currently featured in the exhibit “Star Trek: 40 Years of Fandom” at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image.
In addition to serving as a creative outlet for crafty gamers, machinima can lead to actual work in the interactive entertainment industry. A handful of ‘machinimators’ whose work has appeared on Machinima.com have been recruited by major development studios and Atari and other publishers have been known to hire machinima artists to create promotional material.
Borg War has earned the respect of the machinima community by getting more views on Machinima.com in a single month than Red vs. Blue, Rooster Teeth Prods.’ hugely popular serial based on Microsoft’s Halo games. According to James, Borg War been viewed more than 100,000 times as a series of nine ten-minute episodes. The finale will be released on Nov. 3rd.
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