Wildfire Riders

If you haven't seen this yet, you need to, not just because a lot of this happens in our beloved Pig 'n' Whistle. The animation is the best machinima I've seen. This is how the pros do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWgW3ogaV84

Every time I see that video, I realize just how brilliantly it set the bar for future machnima. While Wrathgate had a lot of amazing scenes to it, I'm hoping to see Blizzard adopt an approach like this for future cutscenes.

Most Machnima uses the in game capabilities of motion for characters... for instance if you've watched illegal danish or many of the other videos or music videos, they all use some sort of preset motion that's already in the game. They don't always do it in game, for instance they may use a blue backgrounded wow model viewer so they can make the models do things, but they're still limited. What this guy did, in addition to already being an excellent graphic designer, is took the WoW models and unhinged them from their presets and played with their limbs and all that good stuff with a completely separate program. Most Machnima people probably won't do that in the future as it's a lot of extra work, but you can see the quality it produces.

Also, a pretty funny machnima http://teaser.gamecreds.com/