The video Making Short Films with Strangers set the stage for what a cinematographer in real life wants to do inside a video game: continue shooting, inviting strangers to be actors in his “machinima” films.

When playing a video game the last thing you expect to hear is someone saying “we’re filming here” … but that’s what happens if you cross the path of the “director of gametography”, who has been creating short films inside ARC Raiders, a multiplayer extraction adventure, set in a lethal future earth, ravaged by a mysterious mechanized threat known as ARC. Some of those crossing the filmmaker’s path have also been asked if they can become actors in the short movies, an odd invitation that players apparently accept without hesitation, rapidly following the instructions given by the director.

If you’re not familiar with video games (and how they are being used to create films), you’ll need to watch the short movies made inside ARC Riders to fully grasp what’s happening. Suddenly the chaotic multiplayer game is the stage for what, some moments, appears like a real-world scene: a camera operator filming the front line of a battleground, trying to get the footage to tell a story. Although filming inside videogames is not new, and the machinima era years are gone, the passion for those movies created inside video games never vanished.

The golden era of Machinima

It all started in the 90’, when ID Software added gaming recording tools to the popular Quake title, leading to the creation of the first short film made inside a video game, “Diary of a Camper”, released in 1996. Suddenly gamers and would be cinematographers discovered that they could do more inside  video games than simply killing monsters.

Machinima, a term that mixes the words “machine” and “cinema” and relates to the use and manipulation of video-game technology to create animations, entered the mainstream in 2000, even appearing at small film festivals, in Emmy Awards or the Sundance Film Festival, and New Media Film Festival. Video games as Unreal, Half-Life, Halo, The Sims became production stages for machinima titles.

One title that got me into experiencing machinima was The Movies, created by Lionhead Studios. Released in November 2005, The Movies allowed players to run a Hollywood film studio, designing the studio itself, managing the careers of film stars and creating films using in-game assets. The movies created could be exported from the game. The Movies allowed Alex Chan, a French resident with no previous filmmaking experience to create a “machinima” documentary, The French Democracy, about the 2005 civil unrest in France, which started a trend that lasted for a while.

The machinima fever is, apparently, gone, and even the website “machinima.com”, launched in 2002, vanished in 2019, three years after Warner Bros. Digital Networks group bought Machinima for under $100 million. The fever may be gone, but machinima demonstrated that commercial games can be used for more than the distribution of the original content created by the developers of the game. With the right tools, players can create new stories inside those games.

Even without the right tools, too, apparently, as the “director of gametography” is using the binoculars available to the player when on-foot to film the sequences for his short movies inside ARC Raiders. Despite the simplicity of his “camera”, as he calls it, he has managed to capture some unique moments. The comments on YouTube are unanimous. Here is one that makes absolute sense to publish at PVC: “Dude! I just randomly gave this video a chance as it was recommended by the algo and I’m glad it did! I also work in the industry (I’m a commercial and TV gaffer professionally) and your video was such a unique and refreshing concept for a video game video. Keep it up!”

The reaction from the public has led to the creation of a new movie, entitled ”STREET CINEMATOGRAPHER in ARC Raiders vol.0”, which compiles the shorts published previously and some BTS (behind-the-scenes) that reveal how the filmmaker works… inside ARC Raiders. Volume 1 was published before, though, and in it the author explains the reasoning behind the project: “as a cinematographer in real life I just can’t ignore how beautiful ARC Raiders looks. So today I am grabbing my camera and heading into the buried city to shoot a few short films with strangers.”

Now, and following comments left on the YouTube channel, the “cinematographer in real life” turned “gametographer in ARC Raiders” is working on the next episodes, that will be based on the story ideas suggested by the public. With 33 videos published until now, the YouTube channel gives us a glimpse of the universe in ARC Raiders and how a cinematographer sees it. One of the early videos,  STELLA MONTIS | ARC Raiders Cinematic Tour, is a short that tells a lot about  the skill of the author behind the camera. As someone commented on YouTube, “Can’t believe every shot in this clip is made by a single in-game binocular. Absolute cinema.”