Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Deus ex machinima? (24 Sep 2004) Those in the video-games industry are fond of quoting the statistic that sales of games now exceed Hollywood's box-office receipts. Could film-production technology also be overshadowed by games software? “Machinima can be considered Hollywood meets Moore's law,” says Mr Marino, the author of a new book on machinima* and executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, which holds an annual film festival in New York. He points out that a 30-strong animation team at Pixar took four years and $94m to create “Finding Nemo”. Animation studios' desire to cut costs and production time, coupled with advances in video-game graphics technology offering the potential for photo-realistic “cinematic computing” could, he believes, eventually allow machinima to take over the animated-film business. It is affordable, allows for a great deal of creative freedom and, when compared with conventional forms of manual or computer-based animation, is both faster and, says Mr Marino, more fun. Article URL: http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3171417 Read 53 more articles from Economist sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Gadgets with a sporting chance     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy