The Special Jury Honor of this year's Siggraph computer animation festival is a short animated film called 458nm and i was happy to attend the "Making Of" session yesterday.
Realised in just under 5 months by a group of three students from german film-school Filmakademie, the film depicts two cyborg snakes making love.

Seeing the way people worked on achieving their goal in such a short amount of time was astounding and, at least to me personally, puts a lot of the things i was slowly getting used to working in machinima back in perspective.
Realizing just how few compromises people are willing to make in their productions and how much creative effort they put in to create something new makes machinima "as an artform" (how many of us are calling it) simply pale and fade away.

Now i know that i am comparing apples with oranges and that machinima isn't meant to be high class animation. But the impact of a movie that was created from the vision of these young people, instead of just being cut together from different predefined assets, has a totally, and i mean totally, different quality.
There is a thin line out there and machinima as a whole is still way below it.