MTV’s tapping Machinima artists to spice things up.

September 30th, 2005, 1:18 pm
Reported by Sam Bishop

Say what you will about the whole idea of remixing popular music video tunes with video game characters, you have to hand it to MTV for both continuing to air them, and actually convinced more than a few publishers to donate their games to the cause.

Take for instance the Video Mods episode airing tonight at 9 on MTV2. It’ll include X-Men Legends II characters doing their best Unwritten Law impression with the “Save Me” mod, Ciara’s “1,2 Step” gets jazzed up by DDR, “The Reason” from Hoobastank uses Dungeon Lords assets and Juiced helps remix Jimmy Eat World’s “Pain.” We’re guessing there probably won’t be any exposed boobies with that last one, but you never know.

Along with the familiar remade videos is something new: Machinima entries from The ILL Clan created just for Video Mods. Tonight episode will feature a short called “Cyborg Girl,” though we’re still unsure what the short will use as its base engine. See Machinima works by taking a game’s core engine (usually an FPS) and then tweaking it to use the built-in cameras and models to make a movie.

It’s an increasingly impressive medium for making honestly compelling short stories, and it’s great to see it finally getting thrust into the limelight – even if it is just on MTV2. Hell, we shouldn’t even use the “just” qualifier, at least it’s not something stuck at the bottom of the pile on a channel like G4, which we love dearly but doesn’t do much for exposure of Machinima as an art form.

Again, the newest ep of Video Mods airs tonight at 9PM (Eastern/Pacific, mind) on MTV2. Give ‘er a peek and see what we mean about how cool Machinima really is.