About
About the Cinemanila Machinima Film Festival
The 2009 Cinemanila Machinima Film Festival is a brand new component of the Cinemanila International Film Festival, and is being held for the first time this year. It is the first ever Machinima event of its kind in the Philippines.
The festival begins accepting entries this July and culminates with an Awarding Ceremony in October during the 2009 Cinemanila International Film Festival.
Our mission is to unearth machinimators and machinima talents in the region and to recognize this growing filmmaking movement.
Festival date: October 20, 2009 (during the 11th Cinemanila International Film Festival)
Bonifacio Global City
Taguig, Philippines
About Cinemanila
The Cinemanila International Film Festival was founded in 1999 with the objectives of promoting Philippine Cinema to the world audience and of World Cinema to the Filipino, and the development of new and independent filmmakers. For the past 11 years, it has championed the spirit of independent filmmaking and has given tributes to master filmmakers and their groundbreaking films.
This year, the Cinemanila International Film Festival kicks off a new decade by recognizing another movement of filmmaking – Machinima.
About Machinima
Machinima stands for “machine-animation” or “machine-cinema.” This filmmaking process utilizes widely popular videogames such as Grand Theft Auto, World of Warcraft, etc. to produce short films and music videos, using avatars and characters as actors, and the maps and locations of the game as setting.
The key-concept of the process is the real-time recording of gameplay as video footage; or essentially, it’s animation minus the necessarily big budget, the tedious preproduction and the long hours – sometimes even days – of rendering a single frame. Also, the resulting footage can subsequently be edited using traditional postproduction tools such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut.
Thus, Machinima is every kind of gameplay that in some way becomes a video, i.e. narrative short movies, music video clips, avant-garde like experimental audiovisuals, and so on.
Machinima first received mainstream attention on October 26, 1996 through the 100-second short, Diary of a Camper. At present, Machinima is primarily promoted by the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS) in the United States. They have, since 2002, been giving recognition to exemplary machinima works by holding the annual Machinima Film Festival. And in recent years, international film festivals have also opened their doors to machinima-festivals such as the Sundance Film Festival in the US, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival in Canada.