He moves the game's virtual first-person camera with his Xbox controller, and instead of yelling "action," he has the characters in the game "act" with the flick of a joystick.

Burns is among innovative filmmakers who are turning to video game consoles and computer games instead of movie cameras to make their short films. It's a rising movement of animation called "machinima."

"Machinima," a hybrid of "machine" and "cinema," involves animating stories using the graphics programs or "engines" that power video games. So instead of running and gunning their way to the top of the arcade pyramid, these players control their game characters in much the same way directors order around their actors.

It's a medium that is gaining respect, so much so that the Sundance Film Festival and the alternative Slamdance Film Festival in Park City each scheduled panel discussions about "machinima." Slamdance held one Sunday, and Sundance will host a discussion Wednesday at 3 p.m. at the Yarrow theater in Park City.

"It's pre-designed animation at your fingertips, and that creates a new school of filmmakers," said Carolyn Cohagan, manager of the BIG C Game Competition, a Slamdance-sponsored contest for video game design that is held during the festival. "People are already working on feature-length machinima."

Burns had always wanted to be a filmmaker but was instead working for a video gaming Web site generating video clips of the Xbox game, "Halo," for the Internet. While doing that, he realized he could tell stories with the game's space soldiers, who normally run around the landscape shooting at each other.

As a result, he and some friends created the Internet sensation, "Red vs. Blue," an animated series of three- to six-minute comedy shorts about the hilarious musings of bored space soldiers who guard their planetary command posts.

"I made a trailer one weekend by myself just using the game engine and doing the voices myself, and I showed it to some guys and they said, 'Yeah, let's do this,' " said Burns, 32, who lives and makes the shorts in Austin, Texas. "On a lark, I put the trailer online and it took off from there. People liked it, and we were cranking out an episode once a week."

A script is written on Sunday. It's streamlined on Monday, and Tuesday Burns and three to four of his friends record the audio like a radio play in a closet in Burns' house.

Then they fire up the Xbox and start "filming" by using the controller to make the "actors" move to the recording.

"It's more like live action filmmaking than animation," said Burns, who is speaking on the Sundance panel Wednesday. "We do multiple takes. We're actually doing performances. They [the characters] have to go, hit their marks and run off."

To make the films, Burns and other machinima filmmakers use technology available to anyone. His Xbox is connected to his home PC via a store-bought video capture card installed in his computer. He and his friends then "act" out the story on the Xbox as it is recorded to the computer's hard drive. Those clips are then edited together using off-the-shelf video software, and the final film is distributed to the Internet on their site at http://www.redvs blue.com. There are nearly a million downloads from their site each week.

Burns and his friends have made some 50 shorts and have even been hired by Microsoft to make Xbox commercials for game store kiosks. They also have a new series called "The Strangerhood," using the program that powers the popular PC game, "The Sims 2."

While "Red vs. Blue" may be the first example of machinima to develop a following, Burns and company were not the first to make movies through gaming.

The earliest short was made more than eight years ago by a group of avid players of the computer shoot 'em up, "Quake." Two more films in 2000, "Apartment Huntin' " and "Hardly Working," were the first to be entered in a film festival. In 2003, the first music video made from machinima, from the Zero 7 song "In the Waiting Line," aired on MTV.

Soon after, scores of movies were being made with the computer graphics engines that powered popular games like "Quake 2," "Unreal Tournament" and "Half Life." Game developer Jake Hughes even made a feature-length film called "Anachronox" using a computer game of the same name.

Today, the Machinima Film Festival is held yearly in New York City, also home to the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, and dozens of Web sites have cropped up supporting the technique.

These characters, from the hit Internet animation series "Red vs. Blue," were made by using the Xbox video game, "Halo."