Former
MÖTLEY CRÜE drummer and sometime Internet video star
Tommy Lee is getting back into the vid business, in a manner of speaking, this time with film director
Zach Snyder of
"300" fame. Seems the duo are avid video gamers and fans of "machinima," the new genre of filmmaking that uses video games and their engines as virtual backdrops for user-generated videos, most notably displayed in the
World of Warcraft-themed 10th season premiere of
"South Park".
Lee was the first rocker to use this novel form of filmmaking in the video for his tune
"Good Times".
Lee and
Snyder are serving as the head judges of
Lifeskool TV "Show Us Your Sickest Trick Contest," a machinima filmmaking competition created in partnership with the web central for this new flavor of moviemaking, www.machinima.com. The grand prize is a 12-day trip to New York to meet
Jonathan Drubner, host of
Lifeskool TV's video game series
"Gamers Dojo", and to work with
Chris Burke of
Bong + Dern, the creators of machinima's hottest property, the
Halo talk show
"The Spartan Life".
Aspiring machinimites have until January 31, 2008 to get their game-driven film masterpieces together and to submit them to
www.machinima.com/lifeskool.
