Over at Venture Beat, Dean Takahashi has a post about one of the discussion panels from the Machinima-Expo. Dean was a panelist on the discussion, there’s a video in Dean’s article of the discussion. The future for Machinima looks bright, but will it ever make a mainstream breakthrough? That seems to be the crux of the issue.
Dean concludes that he is seeing little evidence of Machinima going mainstream but with lower costs for producing Machinima and an active indie scene, it looks sure to grow in popularity. This year’s Machinima-Expo does look to have been a roaring success, so from that point of view, the future does indeed look bright.
Machinima of course goes way beyond Second Life, there are apparently new tools for film making coming from Valve and the Unreal 4 Engine for game developers, the ability to make better Machinima is conntinually improving.
This doesn’t mean Second Life will get left behind in the Machinima stakes, far from it, Second Life has its own advantages for Machinima makers and it’s very nature means props and extras can be attracted to add to the art, but it also means that Second Life may be used for a different genre of Machinima, that is no bad thing.
The Machinima-Expo was of course held in Second Life, which is another good use case for Second Life. The event pretty much wraps up this weekend but you should be able to keep up with the news for a while yet, there are also videos of speeches, award ceremonies and the movies themself over at Livestream.
Will Machinima ever go mainstream? I honestly don’t know, but it does look like it will keep improving.