For the past few months, New York-based programmer A.J. Loiacono and his buddies have been logging onto the popular online sword-and-sorcery game "World of Warcraft" a little more often than usual.
But they're not visiting the mythical realm of Azeroth to goof around and fight the game's virtual dragons like the rest of the game's 9 million subscribers. They've got work to do, you see. They're making a movie.
Using a high-end Mac to record the action, Loiacono's buddies log on from their computers and control their game-character avatars to act out scenes from the team's original script, a sci-fi comedy thing about a guy who travels through time to save his people. The film, still in production, is set for an online-only release next spring.
The project, called "MMOvie," is one of the more ambitious projects of an emerging online film trend called "machinima." (The film's title, in case you're wondering, is a slightly nerdy pun on the game genre that "Warcraft" inhabits.)
Machinima films started out a few years ago as a way for fans to amuse each other by poking fun at the game world, but the form has started to emerge into the mainstream. La
