Thrashmaster a full-length Machinima

By Mathieu Weschler


Synopsis:

Created entirely with images from the video game Grand Theft Auto IV, this stylistic feat makes all former attempts to turn machinimas into a fully-fledged genre look like child's play. The "trashmaster" divides his time between collecting garbage and cleaning up other forms of trash fouling up New York City's streets: dealers, small-time criminals, rapists... When the dancers in his favourite strip club are mysteriously killed, the trashmaster finds himself hot on the trail of a particularly twisted serial killer.

Via Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Montréal

Welcome to the seminar

The objective of the semimar is to closely explore along with students from digital media the vast territories of do-it-yourself (DIY) and hybrid media in order to garner a fairly understanding of the specific features that make them novel forms of digital media. Examples of such hybrids might include movie productions, mobile narratives, graphic digital media, life-online sharing, real-time performances and transmedia narratives. This course tackles DIY, machinima, and hybrid media as means to engage us in a daring and challenging research in grass-roots media practices, thereafter, we will (hopefully) emerge with a good foundation of the semblance of contemporary digital media.

• Do-it-yourself (DIY)/ We will be dealing with DIY, the low budget practice with high expectations, as a form of both media resistance and participation. Nowadays, DIY has become a de-facto attitude towards media, everyone is an utterly media producer and operator of machinimas, game mods, mobile apps, blogs, wikis, online radios. All these expressions have steady challenged the traditional mass media structures of content's control. From this stand point we will be addressing at the cultural impact that concepts such as appropriation, repurposing, openness, remix, and playgiarism have on the nature of digital media.
  

• Hybrid media/ What has made possible the apparition of the hybrid media? Which role plays the automation of several media languages and techniques in the computer, in the appearance of such hybrids? How could be described the aesthetics of these hybrids? Should we be afraid of them? Thus, from this stream we will be looking at the machinic combination of media in rhizomatic surfaces.
  

• Machinima/ This term describes a relatively recent species of moving image that results from the mixture of playing video games and producing movies, a hybrid that silently in the underground but massive realm of video games has lured and inspired thousands to enter its territories. In the late 1990s, devoted video game players started to use video game software for experimental movie production. This is a marginal practice that utilizes recordings of gameplay to make short and simple narrative movies.