Machinima

Machinima is a technique where a recording is made using the game's built-in recording tools, characters and maps to produce a video which has a film like experience rather than a standard frag movie.

The Meet the Team videos produced by Valve are good but non-typical examples of machinima. They are animated using the game engine but have specially written animation sequences and super high quality settings which cannot be accessed in-game (without the use of console commands), along with the original voice actors.

Creating TF2 machinima

Machinima videos are normally created using the standard demo recording techniques and commands. They may also be created using tools in Garry's Mod. A list of commands and instructions can be found in the recording demos article.