Fair Trade Machinima

Scottish machinima production outfit Strange Company have recently produced a couple of short films on the subject of fair trade, as part of their .Fair Game initiative.
There are two: one, made in The Sims 2 and developed in conjunction with a local high school, is a nice short piece, and the other is an elaborate World of Warcraft riff that I only barely followed since I don’t play World of Warcraft. If you have the WoW bug, then that one’s for you.
Download or stream them here.
What are machinima? In a nutshell, short animated films made inside computer games. It’s a developing field and I’m lucky enough to have one of the co-authors of Machinima for Dummies on my blogroll; he should be along to correct my nutshell description and any other misconceptions in this post before long. Whereupon I will harrass him for wedding photos, thus bringing everything back into balance.
Anyway, it’s great to see companies getting in behind the Fair Trade effort. (It is a much bigger thing in the UK than it is in New Zealand, sadly for us Kiwis.)
(Also of note: only a bit over a year out of Scotland and my ability to interpret the accent is fading… had to listen to the first line of the Sims film three times before I understand what he was saying…)

4 thoughts on “Fair Trade Machinima”

  1. It’s getting more popular here in the US as larger chains and commercial outlets are supplying fair trade products and their existence and benefits are finally reaching a larger demographic. Fair Trade is still not prevalent enough that people can easily support *only* those companies, though. That will be a nice change.

  2. What _does_ that first line say? Err… “Fair Trade [] try and see” I think I heard, but what’s the missing part? I sounded like point it out, or point and laugh… I didn’t have enough context to work it out. O_O

  3. No major misconceptions to correct, old chum – thanks for the plug.
    Thus far, the general accepted consensus seems to be that the word “machinima” is not applied as a plural. “Machinima” refers to the genre, but Leading Industry Figures (TM) such as myself don’t refer to “one or more machinima”, or indeed “one or more machinimas”. The best we can get to so far is “machinima films” or “machinima movies”. There was a big controversy a few months ago over whether to call ourselves machinima makers, machinimakers or machinimists. The debate still rages. It’s a thrilling and exciting time to be alive.
    The Warcraft film is definately aimed at WoW players. I have to confess to having sucumbed to the corruption of Warcraft – the game features heavily in two of the chapters of The Book (out soon kids! tell your friends!), so I had to actually learn to play. Utterly hooked now. It’s too late for me. Save yourself.
    Right. What else did we have to cover? Wedding photos. Right.
    I got back the dozen disposable-camera’s worth of films from the processing people today, finally. Unfortunately, all they sent back was the films. No photos. I’d ordered CDs with all the photos on, for ease of online distribution. Nothing in the envelope but negatives. So I rang them and shouted at them. We’ll see if they fix the mistake.
    Oh, and don’t worry about the accent. Nobody who lives outside a three-mile radius of the particular Glasgow suberb that these kids came from can understand them anyway. These kids are not just Scottish, they’re SCOTTISH. Belive it or not, that line was the best take of about half a dozen. For the record, the lines are as follows:
    “Fair Trade? Point in that?”
    “Try it and see.”
    “So I *can* make a difference!”
    The line “point in that” is (I’m reliably informed) Glasgow slang for “What is the point in that?”
    We’re blogging the process of writing Machinima For Dummies, incidentally, over at http://www.machinimafordummies.com

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