We begin with a heartfelt tribute to the late Frank Fox — filmmaker, musician, and beloved member of the machinima community. From his classic MovieStorm film Morning Run Amok to his live music performances as “Frank Leonatra,” we reflect on his creativity, generosity, and the lasting impact he had on virtual filmmaking and the people who loved him.

Then we dive deep into one of the most visually unique and emotionally powerful machinima ever made:

🎥 “Among Fables and Men” (2007) by Tobias “Dopefish” Lundmark.

Created in World of Warcraft using an experimental motion-comic style, this five-minute film is a masterclass in:

• Visual storytelling without dialogue
• Music-driven narrative
• Surreal atmosphere and symbolic design
• Why bold artistic style can outlive “realistic” graphics

We explore its production history, its Japanese folklore and graphic-novel influences, its innovative camera and compositing techniques, and why it still feels fresh nearly 20 years later.

If you love:
✨ Machinima history

🎮 Game-based filmmaking

🎼 Cinematic sound design
🎨 Experimental visual style
📽️ Virtual production as true art

…this episode is for you.

In the history of machinima, Among Fables and Men stands out as a quiet but profound turning point, not because it pushed technical realism, but because it expanded the very idea of what machinima could be. At a time when most creators were striving to replicate the look and grammar of live-action cinema – dialogue, shot-reverse-shot editing, lip-sync, and narrative realism – Tobias “Dopefish” Lundmark chose a radically different path. He treated the game engine not as a virtual film set, but as raw visual material, closer to animation cels, comic panels, and theatrical tableaux than to conventional cinematography.

The film’s motion-comic style, its use of cut-out figures moving through layered 3D space, its panel-like framing, and its subtle depth illusions created a hybrid language that sat somewhere between graphic novels, animation, and experimental cinema. By refusing to anchor the story in spoken dialogue or narration, Lundmark allowed music, rhythm, and sound design to become the primary storytelling forces. Meaning emerges through atmosphere and emotional progression rather than through explicit plot mechanics, placing the work in the tradition of visual music and art film rather than scripted drama.

This stylization also gave the film a timeless quality. While many machinima from the mid-2000s now appear dated as game engines evolved, Among Fables and Men still feels fresh because it is not trying to simulate reality. Its abstraction frees it from technological obsolescence and instead roots it in artistic intention. The world of Warcraft becomes a symbolic landscape rather than a literal one, a dreamspace shaped by folklore, surrealism, and the logic of music rather than by gameplay.

Lundmark’s innovation lies in this shift of perspective. He did not ask how to make a game look more like a movie; he asked what kinds of cinema could only exist inside a game engine. By combining modded camera tools, compositing, and graphic design principles, he constructed a personal visual grammar that was neither traditional animation nor traditional machinima. The intense, constraint-driven production process, created in a matter of days, without final voice performances, pushed the film toward suggestion, mood, and symbolic imagery, turning limitation into aesthetic identity.

In doing so, Tobias Lundmark helped demonstrate that machinima could be more than recorded performance or digital theater. It could be poetic, abstract, musically structured, and formally experimental. Among Fables and Men showed that virtual worlds could host not only stories, but also atmosphere, metaphor, and visual philosophy, opening the door for machinima to be understood not just as a technique, but as a legitimate and distinctive cinematic art form.

Audio only version of this episode

YouTube version of this episode

Show Notes & Links

Among Fables and Men by Tobias ‘Dopefish’ Lundmark, released originally in 2007 and was then uploaded to his YT channel 15 years ago, on 8 October 2010 –

Link to the Archive version of the film is here.

Newgrounds flash graphic novel series ‘Thamesis’ link here.

Knytt Stories, free platformer game released in 2007, link here.

and a run through of the game, which includes some of the fantastic music –

The Snow Witch, made with The Sims, and released just the year before Among Fables and Men won Best Film at the European Machinima Film Festival in 2007 and was reviewed on one of our first podcast episodes, link here.

Malu05 or Mads Lund, was the developer of the WoW machinima tool, link to his channel here.

Peter Greenaway’s controversial comments –

And finally, what’s the difference between Noh and Kabuki Theatre? Check this out!