Age of Nations | A "Rise of Nations" Machinima (ABOUT)

First Machinima 'Rise of Nations' Endeavour and 'Real-Time Strategy' Series

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It's the dawn of recorded history. Intense agricultural techniques mean that farmers are producing a surplus of food not necessary for their own subsistence. A significant portion of the population no longer devotes the majority of their time to producing food, leading to a division of labour. The gathering of many of these non-food producers has led to the founding of a permanent settlement. But this new society is far more than the sum of its physical parts.

A specific set of ideas and customs lead these people to seek to spread, to have more, to expand... and they have the means by which to do so at their disposal. Their cultural identity is cherished in and of itself, an ongoing expression standing testament to their goals, accomplishments and ambitions. How best to express this identity is open to debate and interpretation. Competing economic, political, military and diplomatic interests threaten to undermine all that is and all that could be.

Then come the others.

With the occasional exception for the sake of simplicity or "creative license", Age of Nations (AoN) adheres to the 'rules and conventions' of Rise of Nations (RoN) in its writing and structure. All characters to appear throughout the series will represent a category of the game's land units whose nature is defined in-part by that unit's existing in-game characteristics. All episodes will be linked together in one or more ways including primary and secondary story arcs and multi-part installments.

AoN is created using a combination of hardware and software. Personal computers, microphones and digital camcorders are the pieces of hardware in use. Besides Rise of Nations itself, the software combination of HyperCam from Hyperionics, Adobe Premiere Pro 7 from Adobe Systems Incorporated and Video Edit Magic from DeskShare is used in the technical production of the series. A number of audio editing programs are also being employed, the most prominent of which is Audacity, an independently collaborated program distributed via SoundForge. It is used in the editing and compilation of each episode's soundtrack, as well as the recording of dialogue of some voice actors.

Due to the inability to zoom close-up on any given unit or other object in RoN, 'live' action footage is incorporated within the pilot and has the potential to be present in degrees in future episodes. Permission to use this game's copyrights and trademarks for the purposes of creating and distributing AoN was secured by its development team at Apolyton Civilization Site (ACS) from RoN developer Big Huge Games (BHG) prior to the series' development.

Machinima is a blend of machine and cinema. It is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre, or film created by such production techniques. As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) using 3D engines found in video games. As a film genre, the term refers to movies created by this technique. Machine refers to a computer and/or video game system, while cinema can refer to a number of elements including genre and production practices.

"Machinima" was spelled slightly differently when first-born: "machinema". Due to a number of assorted reasons, including pronunciation concerns based on its spelling, this was soon changed to the more commonly recognized and adopted "machinima" spelling. For more information on this evolving media form, visit Machinima.com and Wikipedia's entry.