Everyone has, by now, heard about lonelygirl_15. And if you do any surfing through Veoh, you’ve probably noticed all the “Prom Queen” entries. What I didn’t know about, until I saw it mentioned on Mashable (Link), was another webisode effort called “Afterworld“, a product of Electric Farm Entertainment.

So what makes “Afterworld” worth discussing?

Well, according to a comment by the “Afterworld Crew” (see comments for episode #4), it’s made using the budget animation tool Poser, Photoshop and AfterEffects.

It doesn’t get much more basic than that. You’d have to swap Gimp for Photoshop, find a substitute for AE and dig up an early Pentium PC to get more bare bones.

In spite of the limited production tools, it seems to be meeting with a generally positive reception (I’m not going to get into the recent issues generating some negative reaction from YouTube viewers as I suspect part of Electric Farm’s problems are time/finance-related and likely have at least something to do with YouTube’s uneven ad-revenue sharing plan).

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Late last week I took notice of a LinkedIn “Answers” question:

The Blair Witch Project stunned many with its humble production techniques and great commercial success. For those who may not be familiar, machinima is 3D moviemaking, using gaming engines or Second Life as the production environment. Do you see a breakout commercial success with machinima any time soon?

I was tempted to chime in, but didn’t have anything worth adding to what had already been offered. However, I think we may get a better sense of the answer to that question after seeing how “Afterworld” does, especially if it can get YouTube viewers to watch the videos on the project’s website.

I do believe at some point something will click with viewers. The big question in my mind is whether it’ll be sponsored or homegrown.

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Related posts:

– “Game On” (reLink)

– “InterMedia Dating” (reLink)

– “Machinima Revolution: The French Democracy” (reLink)

– “Singing Machinima’s Potential” (reLink)

– “Spiking the Content” (reLink)

– “You Can Give People Tools…” (reLink)

– “Architectural Viz Using Half-Life 2” (reLink)

– “Moving Pictures Three” (reLink)

– “Transmachinima Baby Steps” (reLink)

– “Market Vizualization Using Machinima” (reLink)