At some time or another everyone's had an idea for a movie – probably an epic inspired by something like Star Wars or The Matrix. But, unless you happen to be a Hollywood mogul in your spare time, it's unlikely you'll have had the spare $20 million or so to make your dream into reality.

But now there's a new kid on the block of independent filmmaking, and it's offering everyone who wants to try the chance to make their own Matrix: a thing called 'Machinima'.

Machinima's a new form of filmmaking that uses computer games technology to shoot films in the virtual reality of a game engine. Rather than picking up expensive camera equipment, or spending months painstakingly tweaking even more expensive 3D packages, Machinima creators act out their movies within a computer game. We treat the viewpoint the game gives them as a camera - “Shooting Film in a Virtual Reality”, as we've been known to put it in their more slogan-high moments – and record and edit that viewpoint into any film we can imagine.

You don't need any special equipment to make Machinima movies. In fact, if you've got a computer capable of playing Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 or even Quake, you've already got virtually everything you need to set up your own movie studio inside your PC. You can produce films on your own, or you can hook up with a bunch of friends to act our your scripts live over a network. And once you're done, you can upload the films to this site and a potential audience of millions.

But surely, you might say, these films will look amateurish, made inside games? Not at all. Machinima movies like “Hardly Workin'”and “Red vs Blue” have already won awards at film festivals across the world. Machinima has been shown on television. And several Machinima films have clocked up well over a million viewers.

You're not going to be taking Pixar or Final Fantasy on just yet, but you're not going to have to spend $100 million on your lead character's hair, either – and like any artform, what will make your movie shine is the story. What you get out of it is what you put in – and if you put enough in, you can indeed make your own cinema-worthy feature film in your bedroom.

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