Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association

I took my students into ACMI for the Machinima workshops on Tuesday and we all had a lot of fun. Basically, the students were taken through some of the history of machinima, the current trends, improvements and festivals that were now happening around the world devoted to this new form of machine and cinema (hence the name machinima). The students were given a couple of hours to put together a film in a game called Moviemaker. Basically, this game is based on running a movie studio and looks a little bit like The Sims. There is a setting in the game that just allows you to make movies, giving you lots of scenes, genres, actors, set designs and options for various scenarios. Once the students make the movie they then put it into post production where you can add subtitles and audio, including narration or voiceovers. The students came up with a mixed bag of films but they really enjoyed messing around with the softwareare. I can see a lot of uses for this software as an educational tool, not only in Multimedia but in the humanities area as well. One of the movies that was on display was set in World War 1 during the amnesty on Christmas Day between the allied soldiers and the Germans. The story involved a bit of the history of the war and then how the amnesty affected the soldiers. IT was a really moving piece. Obviously a story like that couldn't be done in a couple of hours but nonetheless my students came up with som funny stories. It was well worth the $16.00 a head and I also got to make a short film (bonus).