Top Ten Online Filmmaking Techniques article on NewTeeWee worth reading, one of the points (improvisation) goes as follows:
"the cheapest part of film making, writing a script, is the one least employed by amateurs"
- which is probably the other way around for machinima as opposed to "vlog" or video journals, since the script (and the recorded lines) form the basis for shooting scenes and hence you get a better feel for the story up front
Which might be why "rule" number ten is simply Animation - online being a fertile ground for mixing and mashing technologies without having access to a major server park to do the cgi
