Photo: Matthew Mahon

POP ART: Rooster Teeth’s Gus Sorola, Matt Hullum, and Mike Burns [from left] have turned do-it-yourself filmmaking into a business.

Who makes machinima? High school kids getting together in basement rec rooms, adults blowing off steam on weekends, and a few scrappy start-ups like Rooster Teeth. Nobody knows exactly how many machinimators are out there, but as a group, they are incredibly prolific, churning out hundreds of thousands of animated films over the last decade. In recent years, machinima has blossomed into a tech-centric international subculture. With little more than a video game, a computer, and some imagination, anybody can create machinima.

For most machinimators, it's more a labor of love than a moneymaking venture. But as video-game animation technology aims for Pixar-like quality, machinima is now finding a broader audience. Episodes of the popular TV series South Park and CSI: New York have featured machinima scenes. This May, the cable channel Cinemax premiered a machinima shot entirely in Second Life, reportedly paying the director, Douglas Gayeton, $200 000 for the broadcast rights. This fall, the grandiosely named Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, a group that nurtures the new genre and its practitioners, will host its biggest-ever film festival.

Of all the start-ups making a commercial go of machinima, Rooster Teeth seems to be the most highly regarded and may be the only one that generates consistent profits. It all started about six years ago, when Burns and a few buddies started making an improbably funny series based on Halo called Red vs. Blue, or RvB, as it's known to fans.

In the show, two teams of hapless soldiers stuck in a kind of wartime purgatory consider their existential place in the universe as they battle each other and the occasional alien. From the first episode in April 2003, the program proved an instant cult hit, and it ran for five seasons. Hundreds of thousands of fans worldwide eagerly awaited the uploading of each new 6‑minute episode to the company's Web site.

At the end of May, fans rushed to the site once again, as Rooster Teeth debuted a follow-up series, Red vs. Blue: Reconstruction. “We wanted the next phase of RvB to have more of a 'movie' feel to it,” says Rooster Teeth cofounder Matt Hullum. And so it does: the editing and pacing are crisper, the scenes and sound effects are more sophisticated, and the action and dramatic tension get kicked up a notch. But the trademark absurdist banter that made the original series a huge hit is still there.

Rooster Teeth is privately held and won't release financial details, but Burns says it now makes enough from DVD sales of Red vs. Blue and other productions, as well as commercial work for video-game companies, to support a full-time team of six. Their work has appeared on network and cable TV and at New York City's Lincoln Center, and the company's community site now boasts 650 000 registered members and about 750 000 video downloads each week. Rooster Teeth was even commissioned in 2004 to create a short introductory video for a speech that Bill Gates gave to Microsoft employees.

“They are the pioneers,” says Paul Marino, himself an accomplished machinima producer and now the executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences. “They not only made this a pastime, they made it a business.”

In the Rooster Teeth studio on this January afternoon, two guys move their Halo soldiers around on screen as a voice actor in a nearby sound booth reads from a script. Today's project is a short instructional video on how to play Grifball, a multiplayer game that Burns invented to run inside Halo 3. Think rugby, except with gravity hammers and energy swords. Burns, who wrote the script, also directs the take. “Give me some more hoo-hahs at the end of the last line,” he tells the voice actor after one take.

Halo's software and development tools don't allow for an enormous range of expressiveness. The soldiers' faces are entirely covered by face masks, so each player indicates that his character is talking by bobbing its head up and down roughly in time with the dialogue. “It's like puppeteering,” explains Hullum.