Machinima? Don't be embarrassed if you've never heard of it. A month ago, Alex Chan hadn't either. But that was before Chan, a 27-year-old French designer, made a hot underground film that's introducing mass audiences to machinima -- a technique that involves using video game software to make movies (see BW, 12/19/05, "France: Thousands of Young Spielbergs").


Working on his laptop with a $70 video game, Chan produced a powerful 12-minute animated film about the recent riots in French suburbs in less than a week. The film, The French Democracy, is winning plaudits from critics who say it could finally push machinima into the mainstream.


WHAT IS MACHINIMA? Broadly speaking, machinima means using characters, scenery, and sequences from a video game to create a film. The earliest machinima films, which date from almost a decade ago, were made by gamers who simply planned and recorded sequences from their games. One such creation, made in 1996, was a silent film called Diary of a Camper. It was a produced by a group of gamers calling themselves The Rangers, who captured a 90-second sequence from the popular game Quake.