Friday, September 07, 2007

Liveblogging The Machiniplex Premiere!

This is fun. The Machiniplex premiere is on right now, showcasing Fling Films new clip, Morning Run Amok (Fling Films). As I write this there are thirteen people in the chatroom, twelve of them grilling the filmmaker, Frank Fox (FLeef), about his new Moviestorm-created clip. Unfortunately, the voice chat was not working, so we resorted to typing.

In the chat we have Ingrid Moon (Coyote Republic), Ricky Grove (gToon), Phil Rice (Overman) Jason Choi, Dr. Nemesis, moo Money, and a few names I don't recognize (sorry if I don't know everyone's real name or their avatar/alias).

Some highlights:

The film is shot in Moviestorm and composited with real world locations like a grocery store and a VA hospital (some funny stuff happened when capturing this) using Vegas 6.

The idea came from a few jokes FLeef had floating around, so he built the film around that idea, all neatly tied together by a jogger. Very funny.

The voice recordings were captured in various places, including Coyote's car. Apparently Phil's Yiddish impersonation just did not work for the film. ;)

Phil scored the film and even bought some kazoo's during music production.

Sound design and production by gToon?

About Machiniplex:

Designed to showcase high quality films and be analogous to a 'machinima museum'. It's nice to see us take notice of this now, because unlike film, machinima, for the most part, can be endlessly copied across platforms, meaning preservation for our grandchildren should be an easy task. The films will be chosen by Jason, Ingrid, and Ricky. There was some discussion of a nomination process but nothing was decided.

There will also be special content and workshops presented. This part could be really interesting.

There won't be a comments or forum section (there are other sites for that).

High quality downloads will be available for all.

Awesome work, and looks like a great site for machinima content.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for coming, and thanks for your coverage and the good questions you raised.

You are right, sound engineering was done by gtoon (Ricky Grove).

bllius said...

NP.

Ricky Lee Grove said...

Thanks for stopping by and for your comments here at your excellent blog. Your descriptions are very amusing. I think we ended up having a simultaneous voice chat as the written chat was going on. I think there were about 8 of us yelling at Frank to "answer the questions faster..come on!". It was still going on at 3hrs +.

We hope to keep a low profile at first for Machiniplex as we build up the site and add more content. We've got a possible mock/serious TV show idea called "Film Free For All" where use Moviestorm machinima to discuss current films on the site. I'm working on setting up a three way blog with Jason, Ingrid and myself. Also very specific and techncial workshop (some live, I hope) about aspects of film production for machinimators.

And finally we received two private submissions of extremely good (and possibly controversial) machinima that we are setting up premieres for as I write this.

Exciting stuff. Thanks for your kind words and appreciate your support.

Ricky Grove

PS yes, I did the sound mix and a lot of the effects, but Frank helped out, too. I'd say we both did the work together.

bllius said...

Lol, that's why Frank's typing looked 'nervous'.

I look forward to see what future directions the Machiniplex takes. Really curious about the workshops too.

Unknown said...

I've text chatted and I've conference called, but that was the first time I EVER tried to text-conference-chat-call! I'm surprised I didn't accidentally type out what was filling my ears at that moment. hehe It was quite a converconversationsation!

Thank you, bllius, for taking part and documenting the experience. I had fun meeting so many machinimaniacs in real-time.

Here's to a long life and healthy growth for Machiniplex!

bllius said...

I'm getting the impression that I missed half the fun.