Over at the online gaming website Bioware, Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director of the Strange Company, provides a great “how-to” on the making of his Machinima game BloodSpell. For those interested in making a film using a video game engine, Hancock walks you through concept, script, building sets and characters, creating animatics and more.

BloodSpell itself has a site here, and below is a quote from the piece:

Around about August 2003, a mad Frenchman named Francoise said that Strange Company needed to “get the punk back.” The day after that the folder on my hard drive called “Gettin The Punk Back” (still the main hub of BloodSpell development) was created.

We didn’t have a firm idea of what we wanted to do with BloodSpell when we started it. We just knew we wanted to make a fantasy film because we were sick of aliens and space marines. We figured we wanted to use Neverwinter Nights. And that was about it.

We spent a little while playing with Neverwinter Nights to figure out what we could do with the engine, what would work well, and what wouldn’t. Then I sat down with a whole bunch of people (the “Creative Consultants” you see in the credits) and started brainstorming ideas. And we kept brainstorming…

Eventually, we narrowed our ideas down to a concrete story, which we then “broke” into acts (we were originally intending BloodSpell to be 6 acts of 5 minutes each), and then down to scenes within those acts. About now, we were starting to figure out that maybe this story we’d developed was a little bigger than we had intended.