A Decent Article On Machinima

Second Life: Video Production And Machinima. From Vizworld.

Not a bad little article, some funny insights into behind the scenes of live machinima TV ala The 1st Question (reminds me of some of the Machinima Expo problems).

Second LIfe Machinima

Busy, busy, busy, busy.

But, these two tidbits (both via NWN) might make Second Life machinima more interesting:

Real time shadows as shown in this video:



And Animeeple, with the capability to import your SL avatar and animate and then export.

Machinima Info Barf #14

Number 14.

I have not done one of these in awhile, and probably will not have time to do another for a few weeks.

Previous Info Barfs listed on the sidebar.

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Machinima News:

Antics v. 5 released. I have reservations.
ZenCub3d new beta.
Xtra Normal releases online animation tool. I made a brief clip.

Contests/Festivals:

The New York festival is coming up. 99.999% sure I will make it. Nominees and Panels listed. Note, the New York marathon is Sunday Nov. 2nd.
The Machinima Expo lost it's real world appendage, but it's virtual head will reappear in Second Life on Nov. 9th.Pineapple Pictures promo.
Imagina Awards 2009.
48 hour machinima contest. I tried to set up a team but no one seems to have the time. That's too bad because that kind of time pressure contest is an experience everyone should survive.
Suzanne Awards winners announced.

Video Game/Virtual World News:

Political Machine (Stardock). Smear your opponent to appeal to your base. Evade all questions while winking at the camera. Offer no solutions. Just like real candidates.
Linux Gamers release.
Mellanium talks industrial archaeology.
Bioshock2 trailer.
Interview with the maker of the Super Columbine Massacre RPG!. Playing Columbine is a documentary on the whole thing made by Danny Ledonne. (Part I, II, III).

Machinima/Video Clips:

Universal declaration of human rights.
Time lapse tilt shift video.
ill clan releases Tiny Nation.
In a few months this blog post might look like this.
YouSuckAtPhotoshop has gone hardcore ARG.
Fear of the Dark animated trailer looks like a nice collection of darker themed shorts by IFC.
The credit crisis as Antarctic exploration.
Virtualization of the Universe.
Cellular automaton in Second Life.
World animation day. Why isn't there a world machinima day.

Digital Online Video/Cinema/Imaging:

New DSLR can do HD.
Stock photo royalties.
ILoveSketch. 3D curve sketching system.
Five Gimp tricks.
Fake tilt shifting in Photoshop.
Real time raytracing.
Photosynth explained.

Misc:

ReadTheWords.com. Reads aloud typed text (plugins for Firefox and IE available).
This Wired report on Ramayan 3392 AD film has some interesting images.
RIP: Remix Manifesto. Open Source Cinema. Rip the system.
Animation explained. From storyboards to render by Dale Myers.

Something Not Quite Right

I believe this (Something Wrong With Me) is a new OneJovialSim video shot in Second Life (in the spirit of Hallowe'en) with music from Cold War Kids. Nicely done!


Something Wrong With Me from Chicanery on Vimeo.

YouTube link.

Voom voom!

New World Notes mentions a new Lainy Voom Second Life Machinima entitled Postcard and helpfully has links to all of the places shown in the clip (it would be nice if you could link directly from the video itself out to a SLURL). Nice imagery, decent soundtrack, it could reasonably be called a great advertisement for SL.

Something Old - Something New

I posted in 2006 about the Antikythera mechanisms being deciphered as an ancient clock mechanism.

A new paper points out that the clock actually contains mechanisms for an olympic calendar and an eclipse calendar and identifies the potential source of the mechanism. This video at Nature is impressive with slices of X-rays being used to generate a computer model showing the clockwork in action. State of the art modern techniques being used to decipher at 2000 year old clock. Not sure which is more impressive.

I asked before if this would show up in Second Life. Steampunk is strongly trending upwards. Will this show up in SL somewhere, somehow? Are there real clockworks in SL?

HypoHeretic - Machinima Music Vid

Great machinima music vid:


HypoHeretic from The Martin Brothers on Vimeo.

Made in iClone with imported content from Google Warehouse and Daz Studio (and some Second Life images as 'matte paintings'), from a collaboration formed when artists met at the Second Life Community Convention (Kirsty Hawkshaw music - filmed by John C. Martin II of MartinBros.).

Read more at MartinBros site.
From iClone dev blog.

Online Machinima Film Festival

UPDATE* I have been informed by those supposedly wiser than myself that I have the times wrong so I fixed them now. It starts at 12:30 PST, 3:30 EST, and some other weird British time.

Forget all these real world festivals, you need to go virtual these days to keep up with the hepcats. The 2nd OMFF festival winners will be announced this Saturday in Second Life. (There simply is not enough people talking about this). If you want to celebrate with other machinima creators and machinima critics and machinima groupies and Zach then you NEED to be in SL at Hatheads fantastic machinima emporium (SLurl) with other cool people (like myself) this Saturday at 8:30pm GMT/12:30pm PST (3:30 EST). If, however, you feel the need to wash your hair at that time, then we understand

See previous post and this forum thread on Mprem (OMFF post).

Forget Second Life

Moltov Alva is so last year (Cinemassively).

Welcome to Peopleburg.

The brilliant minds who brought us "You Suck At Photoshop" have just taken the piss out of virtual worlds, gaming, Second Life, game development, and hippies with their new series Sn4tchbuckl3r's Second Chance (Episode #1 at My Damn Channel).

Plus, as the link above shows, they like setting up some interesting websites.

(see YSAP mentioned previously here).

Time has an article on the creators (wow, that was quick).

Voices!

"Voices" premiered both on The Machiniplex and in Second Life at Hathead's fantastic machinima emporium yesterday.

NOTE to future me: check the damn time fool. Also, check that the in-world time matches that posted on teh interwebs!

Voices is a surreal and very hip video created using almost every piece of 3D filmmaking software that currently exists (Moviestorm, iClone, and ZenCub3d) from Pineapple Pictures. If you have not seen it, then check it out on The Machiniplex (I wish I could link to it directly).








Voices panel
The panel discussion was well attended and there was a lot of questions and some great answers from the co-creators, Kate Fosk and Michael Joyce (and the voice of the narrator - Doug Foss).



















List of those using voice chat. Get it! At the Voices premiere!
Unfortunately I may have missed the answer to my question (what is their previous filmmaking experience? - I was under the impression that Michael at least had a long history in the film/TV industry).






The audience is listening
There were numerous questions asked by the audience over the following hour or so, including the 3D software used, time it took to produce (about 3 months), the genesis of the project, the surreal and stylistic use of color, etc. The difficult thing about using voice chat is the lack of a complete transcript (perhaps someone should record these for posterity's sake? - and the voice and text chat would need to be combined somehow). Someone else will probably have some other comments to note.



















Zach is back! I am black!
It was a great event. I stuck around with the stragglers again. Zach showed up, but no catastrophe ensued.










Robots attack!
Then some unobtrusive new people showed up and pointed out the discrepancy in the time posted in-world for the event and the time posted on the blog (I had also made a mistake so I blame nobody).

The tail end of this party is always interesting. At the last one that I attended, for Clockwork, the creator of The Monad (Sam Goldwater) showed up and sent us a link to that just released film, which turned out to be a fairly interesting piece of filmmaking.

Which just goes to show you, don't be afraid of strangers bearing virtual celluloid.

Machima Info Barf #10

Away for a week, so enjoy some links.
Calling this #10, even though #9 was not titled.

Previous Info Barfs (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9).

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Updated*

Machinima News:

Bloodspell DVD released (thx Hugh).
RvB Boxed Set DVD released.


Contests/Festivals:

I posted about an online photoshop contest. The winners have been announced.
There's 12 videos tagged as 'animated' that are part of the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts Film Festival. There are none tagged as 'machinima'. Hello?!

Video Game/Virtual World News:

Flipside is an interesting premise for a game wherein the player must 'flip' from one side of reality to another (half life 2 net - mod review).
How soon before the Turing Test is passed? An AI has been created in Second Life.

Machinima/Video Clips:

A History of Evil (YouTube).
Lego and Biochemistry (YouTube).
Keiko Takamura sings about Bioshock (YouTube).
This robotic dog is bizarre (YouTube).
Roman Coppola makes an environmental short (nofatclips).
Interesting effect in this Half Life machinima - Message (YouTube).
I like this Portishead video (YouTube).
Low cost multitouch whiteboard (very cool - imagine the possibilities - YouTube).
This video of a TED talk by a neuroscientist discussing what happened when she had a stroke is very inspiring (TED).
Ammo Previz (some clips showing atmospheric previsualization).

Digital Online Video/Cinema/Imaging:

As noted in Indymogul, this composer is offering to make free music for films/videos (forum post).
The secret strategies of viral videos.
Twenty-five brilliant animated shorts.
Photoshop Express is online, but beware the terms of use.
Kloseup is some sort of portal/online movie making platform? Example: (YouTube).

Misc:

Easter Eggs in your software (an amusing list of hidden embedded games and other easter eggs in a variety of programs, DVDs).
Maps and fiction - The 21 Steps. An interesting experiment (game, literature?).
OLPC is offering 8.5 GB of Creative Commons sample content (Wiki).

OMFF

OMFF finalists are up, and as I happen to be one of the judges, I will become intimately familiar with all of the films and people in the nine categories.

So, to recap the process.

1. Nominations accepted from the community at large. Nine categories. Nominations finalized.
2. Short lists derived from #1 accepted from the community at large. Short lists finalized (3 in each category).
3. Judges decide order (1, 2, 3) for each category. All six judges contribute to final order (less finalists than the total # of judges means hopefully no ties).
4. Winners announced.

We're in phase #3 right now. Winners announced in May. There will be an awards ceremony in SL on May 10th.

Best of luck to all the nominees and finalists.

Note: There will be a lot of watching to do. Hours and hours. I hope you all appreciate my sacrifice.

Forget The Regurgitory Nightmare Of Mainstream TV

TV will eat itself until there is nothing left (see previous post - wasn't there some mythological figure who did the same?).

New media produces wonders like this:



A college project that is a machinima graphic novel called "Guilt and Innocence" about survivor's guilt and the Holocaust. Beautifully haunting. Who new HL and Garry's Mod could produce such wonders.

Or how about this. Some good news in Second Life. People with autism and Asperger's syndrome communicating through the use of SL as reported by 4 News. Part of the report deals with a video made by an autistic person.



"In My Language" video by Amanda Bags.



Turn off your TV.

Dr. Muglerstein's Machinima & Fantastic Pictures Experience

Not entirely sure what this is all about, but found this site:

Dr. Muglerstein's Island

That appears to have a contest for submission of machinima from Second Life (among other things) with an in-world as well as a Paris exhibition. Some more info about Mugler on this blog? A fashion designer?

Off topic:

Does anyone else absolutely despise FLASH based sites? You can't get a link to copy, you can't open links in another tab. The damn flash takes over your entire browser hostage. It's all some wankfest artist crap that is all style and no function. Sick of it.

Machinima Talk - Feb 22

I attended my first (but the fourth) machinima talk. The first time it was held in Second Life.
Machinima talk audience.










It appears to have been well received as there was a lot of attendees: some used the audio chat, and some the text chat. I don't have the full list of people attending (nor their RL identities) but you can see from this shot most of the audience.
Myself (Scout), zsgamemaster, and Hathead (left to right).











Discussions ranged from HL machinima, to How Cold is it in Edmonton? to Antics machinima. There was a lot of discussion on production and techniques.
Zach (Lit Fuse Films) straight out of an Aphex Twin video (and in one of his less revealing outfits).


















Moo Money after too much pixel juice (the first step is admitting you have a problem).












Coming soon to a TV near you (in the upcoming second part of the CSI NY episode) as worn by Martholomew (ILLectric Sheep).
















There was also a lot of discussion on paying gigs. Many of the attendees were working full time or in contract gigs on machinima.
Domestic bliss, or just another SL moment?

















I think it went well, and according to some, it was much smoother than previous Skype conference calls. This bodes well for further discussions in SL (Machinima talk, the upcoming OMFF, etc.).

Virtual World Documentary

Two documentaries I found out about recently, both having to do with virtual worlds.

This trailer for "Second Skin", is about some of the interesting events going on in virtual worlds (dating, addiction, gold farming, etc.). The trailer shows a lot of scenes from World of Warcraft.

This series, "Wonderland", from the BBC is about cheating in a virtual world (seems to be about Second Life).

Virtual worlds are beginning to have a very real impact on other media. The topic of virtual worlds is becoming more frequent in broadcast television (let alone cable TV) and not just in journalistic or documentary settings. I've now seen several episodes of sitcoms or copudramas referring to SL or WoW.

I can see where this is going

Machinima Info Barf #7

Been busy and have not done one of these in awhile, so the links accumulated.

Time to purge.

Welcome to the future. Grab some popcorn, this one is long.

Previous Info Barfs (#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6).

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Robots:

There seemed to be a lot of news about robots recently.
Artificial boy built.
According to defensetech.org, the first armed drone in Iraq has killed (the MQ-9 "Reaper").
More ED209 news from Iraq.
Is Iraq to be the playground for the military industrial complex R&D divisions?

eSports:

Shocking news, the WSVG is cancelled. I guess they could not compete with CGS.
CGS to give out $1 million in prizes.

Contests:

Amazon and Microsoft team up to allow up to 1000 indie film developers the ability to get their film pressed on to HD-DVD and available from Amazon.

Machinima news:

Oxhorn talks about advertising.
Anthony Bailey posts about the origins of the word machinima.
Adobe is entering real time 3D animation at least as a research project (and ray-tracing). I always wondered when some of the big players would start to enter this turf.
Shaping Youth talks about machinima.
Casual WoW lists some machinima guides.

Machinima/Video Clips:

Thes two clips mentioned at Frames Per Second magazine from the 2006 Japan Media Arts Festival are fascinating. The first is Oh Hisse is by Hikaru Yamakawa and is either a celebration of rigidity, conformity, and the human machine, or is maybe a rejection of it, I haven't decided yet. Very Japanese. The second is Mix a Miniascape by Tomonori Hayase which has a cityscape constantly disassembling and reassembling as the viewer passes through it. Very cool (and must have taken a lot of work).
Speaking of lockstep, this human powered animation video is impressive.
Rubberdada episode #2 is released (rubberdada.com). This is just BIZARRE and sure to cause controversy. Juvenile, violent, immature, and yet strangely fascinating as it deals with topics like racism (episode #1 mentioned here). Think of South Park. They definitely seem to hate clowns.
More from the CRC Machinima Collection shot in SL. #1, #2.
This video of a system that allows users to create shadow puppets wherein extra animations are added in real time is very cool.
More Shadow Puppets.
Basho is a very impressive thirteen minute Japanese machinima (with English subtitles) made in Second Life with classic ninjas, shoguns, and the fate of a kingdom in hand at SL-machinima.com. Nice to see some hand-to-hand combat (English translated site; Metacafe trailer).
Someone liked the new GTAIV trailer so much, they remade it using GTAIII San Andreas (too bad the game is delayed till next year).
There's an epic machinima made in Halo called Trinity. I have not watched all of it.
Does what happen in Facebook stay in Facebook? Beware your personal bitstream and who's reading it.
Hallow3en is back with another musical machinima using U2's Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me.
OneJovialSim's Bjork based machinima Akin.
Someone's trying to escape their world. Do they succeed? Infiltrator.
Afonso Cuaron and Naomi Klein's trailer for The Shock Doctrine.
Animation Ramblings lists some iClone examples.
List of Siggraph shorts.

Video Games:

Remember when the specs for Microsoft's Xbox360, Sony's PS3, and the Nintendo Wii were released. Remember how everyone said Nintendo didn't know what it was doing and that it obviously couldn't compete in the high tech arena. Guess who's laughing now as the Wii outsells both the Xbox360 and the PS3, even after being released a year after the Xbox360. Never underestimate the company behind the plumber power Mario.
Neuromatrix is an educational video game where you enter a neuroscience facility and track down the nanobots invading the brains of the scientists within. Made by Morphonix. Check out the video introduction.
There was a report from the Eve Online economist and an interview on Slashdot. It would be nice to see reports from Second Life, WoW, and other MMOGs.
Artificial worlds to be artificial intelligence incubators. Now if only they can obey directions like "no, say it with more emotion".
Artificial worlds are the future of commerce.
The marines are using virtual worlds as training simulators.
VastPark is a virtual world content creation system. Site.
Next week, virtual worlds will do my laundry and wash the windows.

Digital Online Video/Cinema/Imaging:

Steam is a digital content delivery platform developed by Valve. Not only are a wide variety of games available, but apparently steammovies.com has been registered by Valve. If you've seen the recent videos Valve has made for Team Fortress 2 you will realize that high quality video can be delivered via Steam, either for free or after paying (via credit card).
Overman lists some free filmmaking tools. Other freeware/shareware lists specifically for Mac and more general tools here. More DIY list from The Workbook Project.
Revver has paid out $1 million to content creators to at least 25 000 people (the winners are the Diet Coke and Mentos people at $50 000). It may not be MySpace, which just seems to keep picking up new shows, but it is definitely a site to consider.
Speaking of which, NewTeeVee discusses what makes an online hit.
Brand Worlds 3D production for Flash and the web.
3D holographic display developed. Now when can I play Tank War Europa on it.
More 3D image creation using plasma balls.
SciVee brings science to the world of internet video.
IndyMogul talks about Reverse Shot, a film quarterly that goes into detail about film and cinema. Check out this extensive article on "the cut".

Big Machinima News!

UPDATE*

There's more info in this Reuters article (six figures!).

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NewWorldNotes has some very big news about HBO buying the rights to "My Second Life", the story of Molotov Alva in SL (previous post here). Not only that, they will apparently submit it to the Academy Awards in the animated shorts category. That's a big machinima breakthrough. Huge!

Will there be a slate of signings now for other series and productions? Or will there be a wait and see attitude? I'm surprised Rupert Murdoch wasn't the one signing on the dotted line.

Second Earth

Back.

Just finished reading an article in MIT's Technology Review on Second Earth, the merging of Second Life and Google Earth (unfortunately requires registration). There's some interesting tidbits in the article, including a reference to a book I've never heard about called Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter (from 1991 - interesting - also covered in Second Life Herald).

It really is too bad the focus is on the merging of virtual worlds (or basically the ability to control or manipulate avatars and interact with the world) with real world data in Google Earth. I find that concept rather dull what with the real world just outside the window and covered in glorious and spectacular HD on shows like Discovery or National Geographic.

No, what will be interesting is the creation of imaginary worlds for the collective experience ('consensual hallucination') of everyone. Not real boring worlds (Earth, Mars), but imaginary ones for the purpose of collaborative storytelling and experiences, virtual religions and the like. Funny that the article mentions the creation of the web as being akin to the creation of these virtual worlds and expects, somehow, that what will be in these virtual worlds will simply mirror the real, and somehow these worlds will reflect places like Amazon (what, a gigantic warehouse of books and electronics with spamavatars trying to recommend this or that purchase?) that grew from the nascent www technology. I suspect in twenty years the most traveled virtual worlds will not be the real (Google Earth), the commercial (WoW, Lineage), or the social networking sites/worlds (Second Life, My3DSpace, FaceBust), but will be imaginary ones created from the ground up by the collective users and by that I do not mean Second Life (which is a cross between a sandbox and the nearest shopping mall) but 'real' virtual worlds that will rival the greatest works of fiction/cinema of the last century. Or religion (what was the last religion 'created' - Scientology?). When we see the emergence of a virtual religion, then we will know the 'consensual hallucination' is real.

Seriously, walking across some rain clouds over Tennessee is just not an interesting use of a virtual world technology.

Wednesday - WTF Is Wednesday For?

Wonderland has an interview with Brent Friedman from Afterworld.TV. Fascinating how no one except Sony wanted to work with them but equally fascinating is how they set out from the get go to build this for today's digital audience (also how they still manage to control the rights).

Some Jovial machinima from Koinup. What's Koinup?

Koinup is the first social network to share virtual lives, screenshots, machinima and virtual stories.

Social networking for machinima and virtual lives? How is this different than say machinima.com or mprem.com?

Sculpting data in Second Life (via NWN). Pushing ever closer to the 3D web.

Quakecon to feature all four versions of Quake in the Quad Damage tourney. Sort of like the decathlon of eSports.

This replica of a Japanese castle painstakingly recreated by an obsessive (fan? modeler? hobbyist? weirdo?) is absolutely fascinating. Maybe he should have done this in SL, it would have been quicker.

I will be a judge for the 2008 OMFF (Online Machinima Film Festival). I am now accepting bribes in large bundles of unmarked bills or gold bullion (the last is a joke for the humor-impaired).