Surveying The Scene
This week-end I was pleasantly distracted into downloading and watching the first season of Welcome To The Scene, an episodic drama/soap about supplying movies to the darknet.

The usual format of an episode simply shows someone's desktop with a small inset shot of the user at the keyboard. The action is mostly textual, taking place in IRC and IM windows, plus an occasional voiceover or telephone call. It is well-produced, pretty entertaining, and makes good use of the dramatic and story-telling possibilities of the format. This nerd enjoyed it.

Being interested in machinima, I couldn't help but notice that what we have here is people playing out a narrative in software not designed for that purpose, screen capturing the live performance, doing a little editing, and putting the result out in episodic format on the Net. Further, here's evidence in extremis that cutting-edge rendering engines and assets are not quite so vital to success in such a medium as is sometimes supposed.