Putting Machinima in (or out of) Cinema: A Roundtable on Films Made in Virtual Worlds
Monday, 11 June 201217:15 - 19:00
Location: CRASSH, Seminar room SG1, Ground floor
Jenna Ng ((Facilitator), Newton Trust/Leverhulme Early Career, CRASSH) University of
Cambridge)
William Brown (Lecturer
in Film at the University of Roehampton, London)
Sarah Higley (Professor
of English at the University of Rochester, NY)
Abstract
'I am excited by [machinima] essentially because it can be personalised - it should perhaps become like letter writing used to be - one to one in abundance - where everyone had his or her own handwriting. Don't put it in the cinema - you will kill it.'
- Peter Greenaway
Machinima - films created in game or virtual worlds - converges cinema, animation, video games, television, puppetry, performance, music video and social virtual worlds, among others. No other media form in history pulls off such a smorgasbord of media in its makeup, or so defies placement in the mediascape. The challenge is to locate machinima's hybridity, preferably (as Greenaway implores) without killing it, in the process re-visiting our definitions and conceptions of cinema and, indeed, the future of the moving image. Beginning with a short reel of a few machinima films, this roundtable seminar features three speakers who will discuss machinima as an emerging media form. Does machinima provide a new visual regime for the digital moving image? Or might it provide new answers to what cinema is - or will be - in its slippery dialectic between the real and the virtual?
Twitter feed #machcinema12
For more information about the group, please visit the link on the right hand side of this page.
