Cinematics are movies seen in the game, or released as promotional tools, that tell the game story, introduce new characters, or just generally serve as promotion or advertising. Blizzard has a long history of producing high quality movies through their in-house Cinematics Team, and these have been included with every game they've released since [[Warcraft 2]].
==Cinematics vs. Machinima==
Beginning with World of Warcraft, Blizzard started to produce two types of cinematics. The traditional, fully CG cinematics are animated short movies about the games. These are produced by the Blizzard cinematics team in much the way a movie company like Pixar creates their feature films, and while these movies originate from the same concept art and designs as the rest of the game, almost all of the artwork and environments are created from scratch for the film.
The newer type of "cinematic" that's been used extensively to promote World of Warcraft and now Diablo 3, is created with the game engine itself. This technique is known as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima Machinima], and players can make this type of movie themselves, simply by recording what their character sees as they play. The better fan made movies are edited down from many hours of footage, and usually add soundtracks, dialogue, and sometimes even original special effects and animations. One fine WoW example [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ99Lb8w9-4 can be seen here].
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_vs_blue Red vs. Blue], A fan-made series using the Halo game engine, has become a huge internet success, with episodes even being sold on DVD with the consent of game publisher Microsoft.
===D3 Machinima Confusion===
The fact that players never have the "first person" view while playing Diablo 3 (unlike WoW machinima movies) is probably what's led to some of the confusion, and various members of the Diablo 3 team have repeatedly had to explain[http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/bashiok-on-cinematics-belial/] that those movies are not "true" cinematics. [http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/31/blizzard-interview-leo-boyarsky-and-kevin-martens-on-diablo-3/]
::''Joystiq.com: Monk introduction cinematic was choppy in a few places, it looked a little rough. You know, usually Blizzard's cinematics are so gorgeous and everything looks like it's out of a CGI movie. Was that put together in-game? How did you guys create that?''
::'''[[Leonard Boyarsky]]:''' Yeah, that's an in-game done by our AV team. We have two different ways of doing them. A lot of times when they announce patches for World of Warcraft, you'll notice that they'll do in-game ones as opposed to full-on cinematic ones. That's what that one was. Same with our Wizard one last time. They were developing that as we were developing a lot of his skills. I think they did a really good job with the limited tools that we allowed them to have at the time. [laughs] But I thought it was really cool, myself. But I know what you're saying.
Yeah, there was a few times where you were like, "Oh, it's a little choppy" or some of the characters in the background looked all the same, you know. They're facing the same way, moving the same way.
::'''[[Kevin Martens]]:''' They didn't get the assets very early; they didn't have more time.
::'''Leonard''': We'll take full responsibility for that. [laughs].
==Diablo 3 Cinematics==
