The concept of machinima — video clips, short films and even full-length movies made using a video game’s engine and assets as the basis — is something that’s fascinated me for a while, but I’ve never really gotten big into it.

In fact, as I alluded to in yesterday’s post, the last time I really did much with anything even remotely resembling machinima was back in the PS1 days, when the then-spectacular open-world driving game Driver came out and shipped with a cumbersome and clunky but hilarious video editor mode, allowing you to create custom replays from your last play session.

My friend Woody and I used to play nothing but “Survival” mode in Driver, which starts you in the midst of a challenging police chase in San Francisco, and tasks you with simply lasting as long as possible before the cops destroy you. More often than not, our attempts to survive were fairly short, but since the game pretty much went balls-to-the-wall crazy in this mode, even a ten-second clip could make for some hilarious footage. Particularly when, as often happened, the somewhat rudimentary physics engine that powered the game went a little awry, sending the player vehicle shooting inexplicably up into the sky and flying for miles before crashing to the ground and, if you were lucky, driving off relatively unscathed.

Some people over the years have done some amazing things with machinima. Shows like Red vs Blue showed that there was life in games like Halo well beyond simply playing them. Tools like Source Filmmaker have enabled people to create movies (and, uh, a frighteningly comprehensive amount of pornography) using beloved characters from games like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and BioShock.

But, for me, the most consistently entertaining thing about machinima — both making and watching it — is seeing things going horribly wrong in a variety of unexpected ways. It’s what Woody and I used to do with Driver, and it’s a proud tradition that numerous others have continued over the years. Here’s a great example from the Skate series of skateboarding games on console. I can’t take credit for this; it’s a popular (and, judging by the view count on YouTube, somewhat legendary) video by “HelixSnake”.

I mentioned yesterday that Grand Theft Auto V features a video editor mode, much like Driver did, and even shared my first attempt at a video. Since then, I’ve spent a little more time with the facility, and it looks set to provide a lot of fun times in the future.

The best thing about it is that it includes a feature called “Director Mode”, where you’re not tied to the normal rules of the game. You don’t have to play as one of the single-player protagonists or your Online characters. If you want to cause chaos without attracting the attention of the in-game police, for example, you can simply turn them off. You can adjust the time of day. You can make your bullets and even your melee attacks explosive. And you can turn down gravity.

Naturally, the first thing I did upon discovering all of these options was make full use of all of them to produce some sort of horrific monstrosity. And I proudly present the results of said attempts for you today: here is Unprovoked, a short film by me.

Part of the joy of doing something like this is simply trying things out and seeing what happens — a form of “improvisatory theatre”, in a way. In the case of this video, all I did was set the gravity to low and equip myself with explosive melee attacks, then walk up to the poor unsuspecting almost-naked gentleman in the video, kick him and take it from there. The addition of various “emotes” — which can be used in the online mode as a means of expression or simply messing around — makes for a surprising amount of flexibility, too.

Once the footage is recorded, it’s a case of editing it together using something that bears a strong resemblance to “proper” video-editing software, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. You can edit individual clips together into a longer movie with different scenes, and within a single clip you can set keyframes to change camera angles, apply effects and all manner of other things. It’s remarkably simple to use but very powerful, and I’m looking forward to getting to know it a bit better in the coming days and weeks.

Of course, we all know that the majority of the movies I — and, I’m sure, most of the other people who are fiddling with it — will make will involve people flying around in physics-defying, ridiculous situations. But I’m also quite interested to try some things like recording a race in the online mode, or a shootout, or something else “structured”; the level of detail in the graphics and animation in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V in particular makes for really good-looking movies, and I strongly believe, as I said yesterday, that the Rockstar Editor is going to be big for machinima — if only from a perspective of getting more people experimenting with it.