• by Shankar Gupta , November 28, 2006

World of Warcraft's 7 million registered users provide a responsive audience for creators of machinima - short films created using the graphics from video games - and Dementia-Myndflame Studios is one of the up-and-coming machinima producers that has just begun entering the world of ad-supported video.

An operation composed of two brothers - D.W. Hackleman does the video, and Clint does the audio - Dementia-Myndflame's first video, "Zinwrath," has garnered 1.5 million streams, and their second effort, "Super Snacks: Illegal Danish," topped 3 million streams.

For their second effort, the pair began accepting paid sponsorship from hardware companies including Athlon, Creative Labs, D-Link, and Hypernia. Clint said they would be choosy about their partnerships.

"We've got a couple of companies that have contacted us, but we're kind of picky on who we have sponsor," Clint said. "If we're going to show people a company at the beginning of our movie, we want to make sure that it's targeting our audience."

The brothers Hackleman have no formal training in videos: Clint worked as a software engineer for Microsoft, and D.W. dropped out of college and did odd jobs before working on Dementia-Myndflame projects.

"Neither one of us has any professional background in the creation of movies and music, but we've put more time into it than most college students, so we're pretty adamant about it," Clint says. "You can take machinima and turn it into a blockbuster that millions of people love and enjoy."