machinima

Lightning has struck more than once for Russell Simmons -- the man created successful TV shows like Def Comedy Jam and Def Poetry Jam and made himself an entertainment mogul -- but he knows he's losing out now because he's not creating content for every device.

"I'm really late, but I came to the party and there's still a block, there's still a hole in the market," he told an audience at CES 2013 today.

Simmons is gearing up to build a new network with new stars -- plucked from YouTube fame -- … Read more

People in the U.S. have an insatiable appetite for watching online videos.

According to new numbers released by market research firm ComScore, 85.5 percent of people in the U.S. with Internet access watched online videos in July -- that's 184 million people who watched a total of 36.9 billion online content videos in only one month. For comparison, that is equal to every single person on Earth watching at least five videos each.

And U.S. viewers' venue of choice is Google, which is not really surprising given the growth and popularity of YouTube. However, … Read more

Calling all Jedis! Grab your lightsabers, lace up your running shoes, and come embark on what's sure to be an epic journey to Comic-Con 2012. Even better, you'll get to use the Force to help some young Padawans in need.

Lucasfilm, Nerdist Industries, Octagon, and Machinima have teamed up to put on an Olympic torch-style relay race called Course of the Force that will help kick off this year's Comic-Con in San Diego and benefit the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

The 136-mile run/walk will begin in Santa Monica, Calif., on July 7. At every quarter-mile marker, participants will hand off the official Course of the Force lightsaber to the next runner until they reach San Diego on July 11, which just happens to be preview night for Comic-Con (the show officially kicks off on July 12). … Read more

Machinima.com announced Thursday it raised $3.85 million in funding from MK Capital and other investors, which will be applied toward its business expansion. This is the first round of venture funding the company has raised.

The company also noted it recently named five new board members: Yair Landau, former Sony Pictures Digital chief; Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons; Matt Coffin, LowerMyBills.com founder; Mark Terbeek, MK Capital partner; and Allen DeBevoise, CEO of Machinima.com.

The company provides tools to allow users to incorporate images from video games and apply them to movies, as well as generates … Read more

CHICAGO, Ill.--This might just be the perfect city for a Second Life convention. At least this out-of-towner thinks so.

When you think about it, a good number of Chicago's urban planning quirks have quite a bit in common with the aesthetics of some of Second Life's more popular "sims." It's because parts of the city are so planned--as though they were created with a few well-thought-out mouse clicks that could easily be tweaked and improved. The business and shopping districts are peppered with bright displays of greenery and flowers, the streets and gardens in … Read more

It's been a hectic week, but we didn't want that to deter us from recounting this cool event: Last Friday night Crave joined a standing-room-only crowd of geeks, artists, and filmmakers at Los Angeles' Machine Project art space for an overview and screening of machinima films. A compound of machine and cinema, machinima describes the art of making films out of video games. Bypassing both labor-intensive hand-drawn animation and computer-intensive digital animation, machinima artists instead use game engines as cheap animation tools, combining video sequences created within the game with original dialogue and soundtracks. The result is far … Read more

Considering the medieval-fantasy appearance of much of the World of Warcraft universe, I suppose it's not that surprising that WoW-obsessed high school students would start using the game to enhance their English and history class projects. And here we have it: some kid actually put the game to good use and turned it into a machinima platform for a re-enactment of the Pardoner's Tale from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

If you consider medieval humor to be unspeakably vulgar, well, then, ye be warned. And if old English literature isn't your preferred form of game video, you … Read more

One of the Wii features that people have been buzzing about has been the "Mii channel," the ability to create avatars that can look (to an extent) like whatever you want. Stephen Colbert used this to his advantage in a recent episode of "The Colbert Report" when he created a boxing match between Mii versions of himself and Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi. But I think the creative-Mii-use award goes to the guy at GameTrailers who created a Mii version of the entire first scene of the cult film "The Big Lebowski." The creation of … Read more