Dragon Age: Bladedancers

Philipp Schiefelbein, winner of last year's Bitfilm Machinima Award with his movie Tales of Crusade , just released the first two parts of his new series "Bladedancers".

Made with the Dragon Age:Origins Toolset this new movies again show his amazing skills making Machinima with this toolset. 

"The web series „Bladedancers" is about the life and rise of the kidnapped assassin siblings, Jaldan and Aluria. Over the time they regain their memories of their previous life's and seal the downfall of the ruthless clan."

Dragon Age: Bladedancers Episode 1

Dragon Age: Bladedancers Episode 2

Bitfilm Festival 2011 Winners

These are the machinima winners of the Bitfilm Festival 2011:

MACHINIMA

1st place:
"Tales of Crusade" by Philipp Schiefelbein (Frankfurt, Germany)
2nd place:
"Clockwork" by spyvspyaeon (Lisbon, Portugal)
3rd place:
"Stop, Rewind" by Harrison Heller (New York City, USA)

Congratulations!!

'Order in Chaos' in at MachinExpo and Bitfilm

I'm happy to announce that my recent machinima movie 'Order in Chaos' made it in the finals at this years MachinExpo and Bitfilm.

The Official 2011 Machinima Expo Jury Nominations

The 2011 Machinima Expo will take place November 19th & 20th on the internet and in the virtual world of Second Life.

Bifilm Festival Machinima Award short list

Bitfilm Festival 2011 will take place in Hamburg, Germany and Bagalore, India.
If you like the movie please vote for Order in Chaos at Bifilm (until 17.11).

Festival News and more

For reasons of schedule and availability of rooms, the Atopic Festival has been put back until December 2010. Soon they'll publish the new dates of the festival.The contest is still open for submissions until November, 10th. For more informations contact: machinima@atopicfestival.com

MachinimUWA II: Art of the Artists challenge transcript of the announcements & full winner's list is now online available at this UWA-Blog post . I've had my newest movie "Order in Chaos" submitted but it didn't find any recognition there.

Bitfilm Festival has just announced the winners of the Bitfilm Awards 2010. 1. Prize winner is "The Y-Files" by Alexander Gellner & Flix (Germany). You can still watch all nominated films. As far as I have seen there were no machinima movies nominated. I have no information if any machinima has even been submitted this year.

Thanks to Curator: Lara Sánchez Coterón from Proyecto Amarika, Madrid, Spain a selection of Machinima (music videoclips and experimental animations) will be screened 21st OCTOBER 2010 at this years PLAYFUL & PLAYABLE FALL MEETINGS: A knowledge exchanging platform, about the game as a cultural process. I'm proud to see my movie "Liberty City" being screened alongside work from Paul Marino, Friedrich Kirschner, Zach Scott and others.

For the first time this years EXPO 2010 (Shanghai China) has screened machinima movies. Curator Cristina García-Lasuén owner of the OPEN THIS END SL group and also known as Aino Baar in Second Life, approached Spanish officials for the World Expo with the purpose of bringing machinima to the attention of a greater audience. She was successful as they granted her several hours per week to display machinima simultaneously over five four metre wide HD screens which are attached to a structure called the "Air Tree" built specifically for the Expo at the Madrid Pavilion. I was really flattered to see 3 of my movies (Desassossego, Liberty City, the Graveyard) have been selected to be in the World Expo 2010.

Last but not Machinima Expo 2010 the worlds largest Machinima Festival will start in about 5 weeks from now (20-21th November). 200 films have been submitted and now some preselected 15 films are to be viewed by an impressive 5-person jury to choose the very best films for the Expo awards.

Machinima Makers wanted for Bitfilm 2010

Bitfilm festival just send out a 'Call for Ideas' to Machinima makers to contribute for their 'Money & Me' movie project:

"We are looking for ideas for the frame story of our feature film Money & Me. This full-length film about Money will be created from various short films, united by a single frame narrative, and produced by us with the help of the international Machinima community. This frame story, which takes place in the financial scenes of Singapore and London, will make up about 20% of the whole film."

For more informations please have a look at the PDF you find at this project page. It's great machinima again will play an important role at this year's Bitfilm event. As I've mentioned in a recent post, from the partly commercial concept behind 'Money & Me' this excludes all game based machinima. The machinima production doesn't allow any IP strings attached. As Aaron Koenig from Bitfilm told me they plan to shoot the film in Twinity (a German based virtual world like SL) or maybe using the Crytek game engine. I'm not sure if other machinima platforms are an option as well. Right now they are looking for interesting story ideas. In cooperation with the creators of the selected ideas they will develop a script and shoot the film.

Bitfilm 2010: No Machinima?

Bitfilm one of the few international festivals that had a seperate machinima category seems to have dropped this category this year.

From their recent press release:

"Thanks to the Internet, filmmakers from all over the world can work together on one feature film; the Internet audience‘s votes will determine the film‘s content. The Bitfilm Festival 2010 will be more than a festival - it will be a worldwide „crowd production“. Its result will be a full-length feature film on one topic: Money & Me. Filmmakers are asked to share their personal views on financial affairs."

"Via an online vote, the audience will decide which short films will be chosen for the final film in the following categories: documentary, fiction and animation. The most popular film in every category will receive prize money donated by the Cultural Authority of the Federal State of Hamburg. All selected films will receive a share in the film’s profits."

Since this year "it's all about money", it's clear why they had to drop machinima as a seperate category. You need to own all the content rights and since it's for commercial use it's even more difficult to achieve since that excludes to use most of the creative commons content as well to make your movie. The animation category might be a place one could seak in with tools like Moviestorm, iClone and SecondLife. The content final version of the film needs to be in HD resolution (2K). I have no idea if that could be produced by those tools in the quality they expect. Good to know that for the screening copy they accept all standard video formats.

Although an interesting concept to make, finance and distribute a film, I'm very disappointed we lost Bitfilm for machinima as a festival platform. Bitfilm was very supportive and helped a lot to spread the word about machinima worldwide over the last years.
Their topic "Money & Me." is interesting especially shortly after, or maybe still in between, the financial crisis. I'm interested to see what filmmakers around the world come up with.
Looks like 'Money' did win against machinima filmmakers again. Not only it's very hard to impossible to make any money with our creative work. Now 'Money' forces us out of Bitfilm festival. Can we strike back?

If you want to participate: Submission deadline is July 31, 2010

Festival News

Bitfilm Festival announced the winners and the ranking for the Machinima Award. My entry "Liberty City" ended up on 10, just behind Overman's "Blast Supper" and "Intervention".
By checking out the Bitfilm channel on YouTube a bit closer I recognized that actually "Liberty City" ended up to be the "most viewed non-WoW machinima".

Machinima Expo released their
List of Films Screening at the Machinima Expo.
This is not the final list. They will add more films during the next weeks. None of my submissions showed up so far, but the list contains many known and even some exciting fresh new movies.

Atopic Festival that will take place at the Cité des Sciences in Paris, between October the 27th of October, and November the 4th has finally selected my first film "Desassossego" to be shown in the “Narrative” screening. "Liberty City" was preselected, but was not selected in fine by the commitee. Sisch is in there with "Saving Grace" and with "Kate Lee's The Afflicted" at the 1st Cinemanila Machinima Film.

Cinemanila Machinima Film Festival the 1st Machinima festival in the Philippines has just opened public voting. You can watch and vote for the entries at the festival website.
Vote for your favourite machinima now. I'm quite happy my abstract film "9" made it into the 'short film' section and "the Graveyard" is selected for the 'music video' section.
I couldn't submit "Liberty City" for this festival but agreed they could show it at some festival events. I got some very very nice feedback from them already:
"And now, for some good news! :) We've been introducing machinima to local campuses this week and we've been presenting Liberty City as a machinima that local machinimators can aspire to create. And everytime when your film ends, we can hear some students clapping (you know that kind of clapping when you see something amazing for the first time and you're just awed by it, you just have to clap? Yep, that kind :D )"
That's why I love to make movies.

"Liberty City" will be screend at ARSGAMES at MADRID (Spain)from 19th to 22th november 2009 at La Casa Encendida Art Center

Animatu Festival, the 2009 edition will occur on October, 14-18, at Pax Julia - Municipal Theatre, in Beja, Portugal. The winners will be announced during the final award ceremony on Saturday.

TMUundergound community announed the winners for their First Annual Ollies Awards

Bitfilm festival online voting started

All the nominated film for Bitfilm Festival 09 or online now and open for online voting. The Bitfilm community decides by this online voting on the winners, the deadline is September 24.
Machinim Award category.