Professional Machinima Making

The new Overcast talks a lot about professional machinima making (mostly those who went to work for a game company - ie. got sucked up by the giant production machines).

There's two things to mention:

1. How the hell did my home town become a machinima center? Edmonton, Alberta, home to Bioware (Gateway to the North, City of Champions - although not in quite some time), has 'obtained' a large number of machinima artists (see Overcast for list of the hirees). Strange. That makes two centers, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and Cambridge, United Kingdom (home to Moviestorm and Antics3D - iClone is in California). One is cold and snowy, and the other is cold and rainy (although if you moved to Edmonton in the last 5 years you really haven't suffered a true 'winter' - as in -40 Celsius winter with 7 feet of snow - I can't speak for Cambridge, although I've been there 3 times - seems nice - great pubs). Odd that these two places have become centers of excellence for machinima.

2. The discrepancy between how mod-making and machinima is received, treated, discussed, produced, and distributed, etc (by the game companies, not the general public). This pisses me off. Mod-makers have been embraced since at least the time of iD software's games and there are numerous examples of amateur mods becoming professional (ie. paid gigs - CounterStrike, Day of Defeat, Red Orchestra, Team Fortress, Garry's Mod, etc.) or even student game makers (Portal) joining game companies. But in most of these cases, the original 'mod' (the original vision of the mod maker) was released. Except for Red vs. Blue, and my Second Life, there are very few examples of machinima being picked up after the fact and released 'as is' or left alone. Perhaps game companies are not the best distributors of machinima (no surprise, they're game companies - the big reason they use machinima is for the cut scene or character interaction - not for the films themselves). Even with the recent thaw in the 'rules', this seems to be an overlooked exploration of both games, art, and film, as well as a potentially lost revenue opportunity (perhaps Uwe Boll needs to stop making films for awhile).

Like I said before, whoever moves first in this arena will win. I was hoping for Valve, but they, as always, are strangely quiet (and off promting Steam - which is quietly becoming the Walmart of online distribution). That leaves Blizzard and Microsoft (ugh). Anyone else out there with vision or are all of these game companies stuck in the last century? Time for a revolution?

BTW, does there need to be a 'Machinimators Guild'?