Newswise — The movie studio at Rooster Teeth Productions, in downtown Austin, Texas, is underwhelming, a tiny windowless room with a lumpy couch at the end of a hallway, in what used to be the restroom of a burger joint. No sign of the usual trappings of Hollywood moviemaking: no actors, no stylists, no catering table, no trailers. Also missing are sets, costumes, and props. And yet, with little more than a video game and a desktop computer, Rooster Teeth makes movies viewed by millions all over the world.
Rooster Teeth is one of the leading practitioners of a new genre of filmmaking called machinima (a mashup of "machine" and "cinema," pronounced muh-SHIN-ah-muh or mah-SHEEN-ah-muh). The genre is made possible by the latest crop of popular video games and Internet environments, like Halo 3, the human-simulation game The Sims, and the virtual world Second Life. These products all have deeply immersive environments powered by sophisticated real-time three-dimensional graphics engines, and they usually come with free video-editing software and other tools that let players modify the games' characters, environments, and sound, and then create and record their own scenarios. Machinimators exploit those free tools to produce animations that span the gamut of film types, from short comedic riffs to serial sitcoms to feature-length films.
In recent years, machinima has blossomed into a tech-centric international subculture that represents the bleeding edge of home-brewed animation. With little more than a video game, a computer, and some imagination, anybody can create machinima.
Of all the start-ups making a commercial go of machinima, Rooster Teeth is the most highly regarded and may be the only one to generate consistent profits. IEEE Spectrum contributing editor David Kushner visited the Rooster Teeth studios to watch the team in action; his article "Machinima's Movie Moguls" appears in the July 2008 issue of Spectrum.
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