CALL FOR ENTRIES: 20th Festival of Animated Film Stuttgart

The Festival of Animated Film Stuttgart (ITFS) will take place for the 20th time! ITFS is regarded as one of the biggest and most important festivals for animated film around the world. Around 80,000 viewers and approximately 2,500 accredited people attended the festival last year. This year they are open for Machinima Movies as well!!
Places are in the category Cartoons for Teens (Competition for short films, series, animes, machinimas and cut scenes from computer games). This category focuses on youths aged between 12 and 18 and shows the best animated series, animes and cut scenes from computer games.
Competitions is still open for submission until January 15, 2013 (EXTENDED DEADLINE!)
ITFS-Submissions

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

Valve's Source Filmmaker Now in Open Beta

Source Filmmaker is now available for everyone. Found a link to download it in my Source Games list on Steam today. Now downloading.
Just found this was announced officially yesterday. "July 10, 2012 – Valve, creator of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, Portal, and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the open beta release of Source Filmmaker (SFM), for free, to everyone."
Download, infos,tutorials etc. on sourcefilmmaker.com

Kinect Real-time 3D Model Reconstruction

I just came across a interesting article in the German computer magazine c't. Just a while ago Microsoft Research Lab showed how to get a 3D scan from an object or scenery with the Kinect. Now the Austrian company PROFACTOR released their software ReconstructMe which allows us to play around with that technology as well. With this software now Real-time 3D Model Reconstruction is in our hands. Having a decent graphics card it even allows 3D capturing in real-time. And it is free for non-commercial use. Export formats include .obj and .3ds. I made a short test and scan of one of my favourite objects and then imported the scan into Blender. It's still some work to use this in a machinima movie project. The model data has a high polygon count, which has to be reduced and so far there in no texturing data grabbed.

ReconstructMe capturing the object:




Captured object imported into Blender:

Blender and Kinect again

In my previous post I introduced my first experiments with Blender and Kinect using Blender Game Engine. I've revisited the project and added some parts I have researched a while ago. So this time I have added a softbody mesh which is controlled by the Kinect as well (hand movements) and added live video/webcam.
I think Blender is the only (free) tool out that allows us having a softbody mesh to be rendered in real-time with live video/webcam feed and now with Kinect support.
This opens a whole new world for Machinima puppetry. Now it just need's some code for networking. It would be nice to be able to control multiple characters/objects by different users (Kinects) and to stream the webcam/video over the net.

Blender and Kinect

Having played around with the Kinect already for some time and using it as an input device to control some of my favourite tools (Processing, vvvv, and Supercollider), I was excited to see NI Mate released .
NI Mate is a small but powerful software that takes real-time motion capture data from a Kinect or other supported device and turns it into two industry standard protocols: OSC (Open Sound Control) and MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface). And they have showed already how to use it to control characters in Blender.
I joined their Beta program, but unfortunately it didn't work with the drivers I have installed (SensorKinect, OpenNI or NITE). Uninstalling and updating it with their versions of the drivers was not an option since I fear of some of my other applications might no longer work. So I looked at their Blender examples and after a weekend of Python coding and testing I finally got my own Kinect Blender setup to work. It uses OSCeleton as middleware to convert the Kinect sceleton to OSC data which are then sent to Blender. Although NI Mate is more advanced, OSCeleton is simple and Open Source. I've read that NI Mate maybe will become a commercial product after the Beta.
Now lets welcome the "Kinect Blender Bunny". This example was rendered in realtime using the Blender Game Engine.



It's still a long way to use this for a machinima movie project, but I'm excited to have this technology ready to be used. Controlling a 3D character in realtime with markerless motion capture is amazing.

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!!

Machinima Expo 2011 News

The Expo Screening Reels have begun already. The films selected for the festival will run continuously 24/7 at the main Expo site:

www.machinima-expo.com

The main Expo events will start on Friday 18th with a screening in Second Life of the movies made in Second Life and a Master Class on 'How to create Second Life Machinima'.

Second Life UCSVille - The Expo Hub

On Saturday 19th all the jury nominated films will be screened which is followed by the Expo Awards Ceremony where the winners will be announced. Sunday 2oth is packed with a lot of interesting sessions on Machinima. From Monday 21th on screening reels continue to run through the week at the Expohub until Sunday, November 27th at midnight.

2011 Machinima Expo Schedule

Complete list of films Screening at the Expo

2011 Machinima Expo Trailer from Ricky Grove

My own promo trailer made for Machinima Expo:

2011 Machinima Expo Promo Video from CD Schulz on Vimeo.

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.

New Movie: Order in Chaos

Just finished a new Abstract Machinima Movie, which I made for the MachinimUWA II: Art of the Artists challenge in Second Life.
Machinima makers in SL were asked to create a Machinima of between 2 and 5 minutes in length that featured some of the winning artworks from the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge. They had more than 35 artworks spread across 4 floors, from which to choose.

This movie is featuring December 2009 Winner of the UWA 3D Art & Design Challenge: CHAOS IN ORDER by Igor Ballyhoo
Filmed and edited by Rohan Fermi
Music by Kirsty Hawkshaw
Creative Commons by-nc-sa v1.0
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

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

New Movie: the Graveyard. (NIN version)

I still love the original version, but from some comments I got and from my own impression I recognized some flaws. By making the choice to use the song from the original game this imposts a much faster pace to the editing than was good for the film. And since the song is in a not widespread language (Flemish) I had to put subtitles on. At the end it's a bit an information overload. You have to watch, listen and read at the same time. This could kill the mood that could be set by the film. Although I recognized that very soon after releasing the movie it needed one of those miracles to help. By random listening to tracks on my iPod, I came across that Nine Inch Nails song. I didn't remember to have ever heard it before, but did know instantly that this is the right music for that film. It had the right pace, set the right mood and has no text on it's own that puts some kind of interpretation to the film. Since my work on abstract film, I love the idea to let the viewer be part of the story and leave enough room for his/her own interpretation. I hope you like this new version and look forward your reviews, comments, critics.
Enough words. Let the movie speak for itself.