EVENT: JORDY VEENSTRA’S LIVE MACHINIMA PRODUCTION IN GRAND THEFT AUTO V (APRIL 28–29 2026, ONLINE)
On Tuesday 28 April and Wednesday 29 April, between 19.00 and 23.00 CEST, Jordy Veenstra will livestream Live Machinima Production in Grand Theft Auto V, a free two-part event on both YouTube and Twitch dedicated to the making of machinima in Los Santos.
Veenstra, co-author with Matteo Bittanti of Los Santos Plays Itself (2025), will use the livestreams to explain and illustrate some of the production processes discussed in the book. The sessions are conceived as a practical and critical demonstration: how does one approach Grand Theft Auto V as a cinematic environment? How can its weather, traffic, pedestrians, architecture, camera systems, engine routines, and glitches be transformed into moving-image material? What does it mean to make cinema inside a game built around missions, acceleration, spectacle, and control?
The livestream is open to anyone interested in creating machinima in GTA V, from students and artists to filmmakers, editors, players, modders, scholars and researchers. No registration is required.
Schedule:
Tuesday 28 April, 19.00–23.00 CEST (10.00 a.m.–2.00 p.m. PDT): Live Machinima Production in Grand Theft Auto V, Part 1
Wednesday 29 April, 19.00–23.00 CEST (10.00 a.m.–2.00 p.m. PDT): Live Machinima Production in Grand Theft Auto V, Part 2
YouTube:
Live Machinima Production in Grand Theft Auto V, Part 1
Live Machinima Production in Grand Theft Auto V, Part 2
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/apixelatedpointofview
Jordy Veenstra is a video editor, experimental filmmaker, machinima artist, and front-end developer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His work connects videogames, experimental narratives, and technology through machinima, with particular attention to what he defines as the “practice of distortion”. This framework consists of rules and values centred on the distortion of otherwise clean videogame-generated images and audio, with the aim of moving away from the perception of the film as “a product from a videogame” and closer to “a product of cinema”. Cinematic resolutions and aspect ratios, 24 frames per second, colour grading, motion blur, and grain become tools for altering the perceptual status of game footage. Veenstra’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2020 and 2022 editions of the Milan Machinima Festival, while Regression Trilogy was featured on VRAL in 2020.
In 2021, Regression was featured in a special event, accompanied by a live orchestra as part of Rome Jazz Festival:
The event also arrives at a moment when GTA V remains one of the defining cultural platforms of the twenty-first century. Released in 2013, Rockstar Games’ open-world title has sold-in more than 225 million units worldwide according to Take-Two’s latest financial reporting. GTA V reached $1 billion in retail sales faster than any entertainment release in history. These figures are not merely commercial trivia: they explain why Los Santos has become such a significant site for contemporary machinima. Its scale, longevity, modding culture, streaming afterlife, and technical persistence have turned a blockbuster videogame into a vast production environment for experimental cinema, game video, and critical media practice.
For two evenings, Veenstra will treat Los Santos as a working film set: unstable, overdetermined, artificial, and full of cinematic possibilities.