Elizabeth LaPenseé and Jason Edward Lewis have contributed the “Call it a Vision Quest: Machinima in a First Nations Context” chapter to the just-published Understanding Machinima collection. The chapter uses the TimeTraveller™ series as a case study exploring how machinima can be used to tell stories from a First Nations perspective.
Understanding Machinima is a collection of essays and analyses that “brings together academics and award-winning artists and machinima-makers to explore the combination of cinema, animation and games in machinima: the use of computer game engines to produce animated films in cost- and time-efficient ways.”
Bonus: the book cover itself is pretty cool, being a still from TimeTraveller™ featuring Karahkwenhawi.
The publishers announcement for the book is here.
The Amazon.ca link is here.
Reviews:
“Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds, is personable yet edgy, conversational yet controversial. The chapters draw on personal reflection, Spinal Tap, mixed reality, Sesame Street, Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, Chaucer, Iraq, First Nations, and psychoanalysis, yet they are clear and lucid. I found much to engage with, and even more to debate with. The field of machinima scholarship is small but engaging, and Understanding Machinima is a worthy contribution.” – Erik Champion, Digital Humanities Lab Denmark, Aarhus University, Denmark“Understanding Machinima is a timely and much needed intervention in Machinima studies. Comprising an excellent range of contributors, this collection focuses on Machinima’s diversity of use at the same time as it considers its many media specificities, making it a necessary resource to any scholar working in the field.” – Leon Gurevitch, Senior Lecturer, The School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand“This welcome anthology helps usher machinima out of the gamer niche and into the nexus of digital animation, cinema, and art video. As the chapters of this book demonstrate, machinima realizes new ways of documenting and archiving the mediality of our set-up, far beyond the early ambitions of entertainment convergence.” – Peter Krapp, Professor & Chair, Film & Media Studies, University of California, Irvine, US
