Understanding Machinima

Jenna Ng is Anniversary Research Lecturer in Film and Interactive Media at the University of York, UK. She was previously a Newton Trust/Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, UK.

• AcknowledgementsPreface Henry Lowood Introduction Jenna Ng I. Thinking Machinima1. Machinima: Cinema in a minor or multitudinous key? William Brown and Matthew Holtmeier 2. Beyond Bullet Time: Media in the knowable space Chris Burke 3. Be(ing)Dazzled: Living in machinima Sheldon Brown 4. Moving Digital Puppets Michael Nitsche, Ali Mazalek and Paul Clifton 5. Facing the Audience: A dialogic perspective on the hybrid animated film Lisbeth Frølunde 6. Dangerous Sim Crossings: Framing the Second Life art machinima Sarah Higley II. Using Machinima7. The Art of Games: Machinima and the limits of art games Larissa Hjorth 8. Playing Politics: Machinima as live performance and document Joseph DeLappe 9. Virtual Lens of Exposure: Aesthetics, theory, and ethics of documentary filmmaking in Second Life Sandra Danilovic 10. Call It a Vision Quest: Machinima in a First Nations context Beth Aileen Dillon and Jason Edward Lewis 11. World of Chaucer: Adaptation, pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity Chris Moore and Graham Barwell 12. A Pedagogy of Craft: Teaching Culture Analysis with machinima Jenna Ng and James Barrett Agency, Simulation, Gamification, Machinima: An interview with Isabelle Arvers Isabelle Arvers and Jenna Ng Notes on ContributorsGlossaryIndex

This welcome anthology helps usher machinima out of the gamer niche and into the nexus of digital animation, cinema, and art video. As the chapters of this book demonstrate, machinima realizes new ways of documenting and archiving the mediality of our set-up, far beyond the early ambitions of entertainment convergence.