The line of research on video games aims to address critically video games and art, as installation, performance, digital painting in motion, gaming, interactivity or” video. The workshop on machinima opened with a screening of film clips showing the variety of games used to design films or videos, as well as the variety of approaches, from the fan fiction to the most experimental artworks.

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From Machinima to game art : which art practices?

The workshop began with a screening of machinima and game artwork, from the best fan fiction to the MOST experimental artworks.

We watched the interviews between the two rounds of presidential elections in 2007, reworked in machinima by Alex Chan in « World of electors », the video blog on the net neutrality Chris Burke « Don’t buy me web », the monologue of a woman taxi in GTA Eddo Stern and Jessica Hutchinson with the video « Lord Vigilante », “Hotel”, a work of Banjamin Nuel that brings us in the backstage of a fighting game and finally, the « Intimate Confessions » of Systaime that diverts the voices of reality TV shows in a very minimal way in machinima.

I also showed videos of game art with works by artists such as « Can you see me now » a pervasive game of Blast Theory, the video game documentary by Eddo Stern, « Wacco Resurrection », « Sam 5 year old killer » or « Free Fall 2011 », videos from games modified by Palle Torsson and contemplative installations by Tobias Bernstrup,« Mario is sleeping » by Miltos Manetas, or « I shot Andy Warhol « and « Super Mario clouds » of Cory Arcangel.

Following this presentation / projection, I showed the different production techniques of machinima, with dedicated softwares like Moviestorm or Muvizu or with video games, like GTA or Fall OUT using FRAPS to capture video in real time. Some students who already had a project related to a particular video game have appropriated the idea of starting the game machinima studied in their research area.

Glitches

Thus, Florian Dieudé working with Fall Out game, went on the idea of an overlay of game footage, with “FallOut Bitsplit” representing duels and especially featuring dialogues of players talking about the game and comparing different versions of the game. Characters appear, disappear, bugs and the accumulation of several sequences of Play creates superimposed images and effects traces.

Adonia Urian, who addressed the practice of digital painting has developed two proposals from his paintings: the first by embedding in an image sequence of the horse in the game Skyrim and the second by integrating the character of Limbo in his painting . Video pop-up appears to give body and texture to the digital image.

Camille Marino diverts the idea of the “point and click “ game to lead to a blank screen, amid which a character reveals the decor and the storyline through clicks on the image white.

Artivism

Hugo Malterre who works on language and discourse has used the voice encoder to create a robotic voice, like those used by the group Anonymous in their videos. A “complex system” is a video made with Moviestorm, which offers a world of difference between day and night, P2P and intellectual property.

Quoc Doan Kim, meanwhile, after working on Anonymous, decides to use Moviestorm to represent the 1% opposed to the 99% motion of Occupy Wall Street.

Laura Vermeulen, is working on gender issues, uses the interface of Moviestorm, to design avatars and to create an animation that passes from male to female and vice versa, with reference to various stereotypes expected on the construction of each face type.

Samantha Leflon, who works on the game Ghost Recon, but who wasn’t able to create a machinima from the engine decided to use Moviestorm to play a scene referring to a sentence of Tom Clancy, the writer of the game Ghost Recon, “it would be easier , if we could just go to people and ask them to leave in order to kill them. “

Machinima installations

Both installations are born during this machinima. workshop The first is an installation of Quentin Miternique, which uses the game Vib Ribbon for the “mise en abyme” of the game and the player. The game is filmed, then re-screened and re-deployed by the set of mirrors and Plexiglas on all surfaces of the walls that surround the player. The player at the center, becomes a projection surface and play and eventually play itself.

The second installation, Collisions, by Carolina Wroblewski, is a video projection of 9 seconds set by Caroline in loop. She is interested in one of the limitations of Moviestorm software that does not handle the physicas and implies that the characters can go through walls and through objects or other caracters.

Contemplative Machinima

The series of three contemplative machinima in GTA, Drive, Walk and Stay Jean Dennetiere is working on repetition, stillness in motion and on the remix.

Each video is accompanied by an original music composed by Jean, dub music, dub being chosen as best reference to the idea of remix.

All proposals from the workshop are not present here because they weren’t enough finalized, but I was delighted with the varied proposals of students, each having hijacked the idea of machinima or video game for the twist so that it meets looking for him.