The winners of the 2005 Machinima Awards were announced at the annual Machinima Film Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, on November 12th. The Machinima Awards, or "Mackies," as the awards are informally known, were created to award excellence and visibility for outstanding Machinima.
The Best Picture award went to Game On, the first attempt at machinima by NYU student Ethan Vogt. The short, funded by Volvo and spotlighting one of its new V50 cars, also won Best Commercial/Game Machinima. Other multiple winners included Freidrich Kirschner, whose "person2184" won Best Visual Design and Best Technical Achievement, and Rooster Teeth Productions, which won separate awards in Best Editing for 'Strangerhood Studios," Excellence in Machinima Screenwriting for "P.A.N.I.C.S.," and Best Independent Machinima for "Red vs. Blue."
Other notable awards were Best Direction, which went to Jake Hughes for his compilation of the cinema scenes in 2003's overlooked Crystal Dynamics-developed console title Whiplash; Best Machinima Series, which went to Chris Burke for "This Spartan Life;" and the Academy Honorary Award, which went to David "crt" Wright for his efforts developing KeyGrip for Quake.
In addition, this year, a new award entered the competition - Best Off-the-Shelf Machinima - awarding excellence in a Machinima film that was made with a game as it was purchased (no custom content). This was won by the World Of Warcraft machinima Return: A Warcraft Saga, written and directed by Ezra "Voldigar" Ferguson and Terran "Liadov" Gregory. A full list of the winners and nominees is available at the Machinima Film Festival website.
