there’s a glow

  This is the music video for the song ‘There’s a glow’ by the band NO, a Los Angeles-, respectively Echo-Park-based Indie sextet, which just published its debut album ‘El Prado.’ Filmmaker Johnny Agnew almost entirely filmed the video within the computer game ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ (GTA V | Rockstar North 2013)—my, my, how ↵machinima has developed since I first posted about it in 2005 or so. I especially do like the ironic, humoresque ambience and narrative of the video, very gamer-like. And as we are already at it: not that I’d have time for it, but where are … Continue reading

Share

frags with love

  ‘Im just five hours old … Truly beautiful to behold …’ Fresh from the mint, here is KerLeone’s very first frag movie—high quality definition, editing, and frags, plus a gorgeous soundtrack. It was he, my old on- and offline pal, who brought me to ↑Quake more than a decade ago … and it took him that long to create a frag movie :) Enjoy! … Continue reading

Share

shell of ghosts

Here is a snippet from the recent ↑interview with William Gibson, which Bryan Alexander (who ↵pointed me to it) ↵liked especially: It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve … Continue reading

Share

delayed access

  Just another ‘little’ rant on economized politics reigning academia—skip it if you can’t stand it anymore.  Last night I woke up around one o’clock in the morning and couldn’t find sleep again. So, in trying to catch up with my personal reading schedule, I spent the rest of the night by burning through Steven Poole’s “Trigger happy” (↵Poole 2000) and especially ↑Henry Lowood‘s “High-performance play: The making of machinima”. I ↵already knew that the latter is a real gem, but somehow shifted it from desk to desk in didn’t come around to read it till last night. Already after … Continue reading

Share

lepus

  BizoO in S3DF4 Another one, ↑“Lepus” (2005) [18:39min | .ogm | 440MB] by fei of ↑Shaolin Productions—he says:  Movie was done in a few days, it’s not a 1 year project like Get Quaked 3 but this was a real joy to make, no pressure and one of my favorite game types: CPMa defrag runs. (with some vq3 thrown in.) This movie is not made for the fans of Speed trail or even Cetus the Movie, but more for the likes of KOS-RUNS :P fast and pretty! This was a nice coffee break vid, inbetween GQ3 and my next … Continue reading

Share

more infinite trajectory

deathmatch is to tricking as kumite is to kata    Just recently ↑Cory Doctorow voiced his fondness of “Tricking iT2” [see below] by ↑Team iT: “Even if you’re not a Quake player (I’m not, particularly, though I live with a retired member of the UK national Quake team) this is every bit as engrossing as any parkour video or Olympic demonstration sport.” Very well said, but, I am afraid, I have to mention that this is not simply a “20-minute video of a virtuoso Quake III player doing the most amazing “rocket-jump” acrobatics”. Rather it is the audiovisually most impressing … Continue reading

Share

censorship’s bloody spell

  Although the matter meanwhile ↑has been settled for good—more or less—I nevertheless will recount a portion of it, as it delivers some insights into various issues, namely the computergames and violence debate and the perception of ↵machinima by insiders of the movement and by outsiders.  ↑“BloodSpell” is a feature-length machinima-movie by ↑Strange Company based on the computergame ↑“Neverwinter Nights”. It is released on the Internet piecemeal in the shape of five to seven minutes long episodes every two weeks or so. Until today all in all ↑seven episodes can be downloaded, the eigth being on the verge of release.  … Continue reading

Share

event horizon 2

  There are always the prophets of doom [pun not intended]—cyberpunk has been declared dead and to be a forgotten relic of the 1980s, ↵Q3A has been labelled accordingly, and trickjumping … now someone even has called a vote at Wikipedia to delete the entry ↑Strafe-jumping, and that in the face of articles like ↑“Strafing Theory” by injx being online. It already went so far that even I sometimes thought that ↵my being concerned with Q3A stuff meanwhile is purely of historical interest. Far from it. Nothing is dead. Just recently Team Event Horizon’s second team tricking movie has been … Continue reading

Share

the making of machinima

↑LOWOOD, HENRY E. 2006. “High-performance play: The making of machinima.” To appear in: Videogames and Art: Intersections and Interactions, Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.), Intellect Books (UK), 2006. Also to appear in: Journal of Media Practice: Videogames and Art issue (2006).  Machinima is the making of animated movies in real time through the use of computer game technology. The projects that launched machinima embedded gameplay in practices of performance, spectatorship, subversion, modification, and community. This article is concerned primarily with the earliest machinima projects. In this phase, DOOM and especially Quake movie makers created practices of game performance and … Continue reading

Share