Recently, Ill Clan had another reason to celebrate. On February 13, 2007, Ill Clan announced that they have joined forces with the Electric Sheep Company, the largest 3D and virtual reality architecture company in the world. The Electric Sheep Company has worked with big-name clients such as CBS, Nissan, NBC, and AOL, creating virtual worlds for marketing purposes. Ill Clan has become the machinima division of Electric Sheep.
Dominianni, now the "Grand Poobah" of Machinima Direction at the Electric Sheep Company, is thrilled with the merger, one reason being that Ill Clan now has access to Electric Sheep's vast resources, such as Second Life, an online virtual 3D community. According to Dominianni, the old way of creating machinima was a tedious, time-consuming ordeal. "It's a whole process that gets in the way of creativity," remarked Dellario, now the Director of Machinima Production at Electric Sheep. However, since they've joined Electric Sheep, work is much faster and easier. "Doing machinima in Second Life is great because the experience is very immediate. Instead of creating an object or set in Maya and going through the steps of exporting it and then bringing it into a game engine, in Second Life we can see the changes as they are made, right there in the virtual world. It's like being on a film set with an art department and crew." said Dominianni.
A second reason for Ill Clan's excitement over their new relationship with Electric Sheep is that it further legitimizes the role of machinima in the entertainment and advertising industries. "It's a viable medium in itself," commented Dellario, who has 19 years of experience in real-life film production. Dominianni added that they had envisioned that machinima would expand beyond computer gamers and be experienced by television viewers as well.
When asked to compare between live-action film making and machinima creation, Dellario explained that the two mediums are actually similar, but each presents its own challenges. "The only difference here is that there's no camera; everything on the set is virtual...One of the main things that's easier is that live action is very expensive. The hard part is this convergence of live action film making and 3D graphics," explained Dellario, who provides a lot of insight on machinima creation on his personal blog.
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