The cinema and gaming industries look set to blur this weekend, with the screening of a specially commissioned short film by the Australian director John Hillcoat. Red Dead Redemption is a bloody western, focusing on the adventures of the former outlaw John Marston. But the film is a "machinima" animation and was entirely shot on an in-game engine as a means of promoting the Red Dead Redemption video game.

Hillcoat's film will screen on the Fox network in the US on Saturday evening. The Red Dead Redemption game was released on 18 May on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

Hillcoat made his feature film debut with the prison saga Ghosts ... of the Civil Dead in 1988. He won acclaim for his 2005 western The Proposition and recently adapted Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic fable The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.