Just got turned on to Paul Marino's 'Thinking Machinima' blog over at Machinima.org - Paul runs The Academy Of Machinima Arts & Sciences, dedicated to narratives built in video game engines, wrote an excellent book on machinima, and is part of The ILL Clan, who we've written about before.

In any case, a recent post by Paul notes: "For those of you of are not steeped in the Machinima day-to-day, some recent controversies have stirred the coals within a small section of the community, which is both a bit uncomfortable yet to be expected. Ken Thain's always great 3DFilmmaker.com blog, details out some recent points of contention and gives them a proper overview.... In any case, I chose to focus this post on some of the current successes of Machinima."

And successes there are, from World Of Warcraft machinima Return ("The film showcased epic storytelling, post production polish and fine voice acting - moving on to win last year's Best Off-the-Shelf Machinima Award"), to Deviation's film fest success: "One of the biggest coups this year has been the inclusion of the Counterstike-based Machinima, Deviation, into a world-respected event, the Tribeca Film Festival." Lots more good info here.