Moby Music Video Contest

Moby is having a competition where mobygratis users can win $5,000 to make a video for his new song 'wait for me'. Looks like an interesting challenge and opportunity for machinima moviemakers.
Bryn Oh has already submitted his SecondLife machinima:
MOBY - WAIT FOR ME by Bryn Oh

KEY DATES

• Open for entries: Feb 22
• Entries close: Apr 5
• 6 Finalists announced: Apr 12
• Winner announced: Apr 19

PRIZES

• Serviced worldwide as the Wait For Me music video
• US$5,000 cash for winner
• US$1,000 each for the 2 best finalists

details are at: http://genero.tv/moby/


Official Music Video:
Wait For Me by Jessica Dimmock

MMIF 2010 Playlist and Pictures

I had a great time at the MMIF2010 Machinima festival. Festival organizer Chantal Harvey and her team put together an amazing machinima festival. It must have been a lot of work expecially with all the technical stuff involved in setting up such a huge event in both SL and RL. I've unfortunaley not had the chance to attend the whole 9 hours of screening, but I was surprised that when I joined in for the last 3 hours, the place was still crowded and even until the last hour where my movie was shown there was a huge and interested audience watching the movies. It was just announced they will run the festival again next year: MMIF 2011: Saturday february 19th!
I'll try to do my best to improve the quality of my movie work to meet the requirements to attend next year as well. For those of you who couldn't attend the festival and/or want to watch some of the movies shown again, they are available via the following playlist:
Chantal Harvey’s MMIF 2010 playlist

A collection of pictures from the festival can be found at Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/mmif/

Machinima Screening at Gallery Maskinen

Just got informed that Gallery Maskinen will show 3 of my movies at their Machinima screening on 2 March 2010. The screening will take place in HUMlab at the Umeå University in the northern part of Sweden.
Maskinen is an artist-run, non-profit gallery. Their ambition is to run a nontraditional gallery that doesn’t necessarily work inside ”The White Cube” and give place to lesser-exposed trends in the different forms of contemporary art. Established, as well as un-established artists are represented in Maskinen. More info: http://gallerimaskinen.se

MMIF 2010: Avatars starring at global film festival

The build is done, the media is set, 4 sims are prepared for the
MaMachinima International Festival 2010
Saturday Feb. 20 ^th , 2010
MMIF sims (SL™) + PLANETART, Wibautstraat 150 Amsterdam (NL).

Festival organizer Chantal Harvey and her team have done an excellent job creating an amazing venue for the festival, preseting an interesting and inspiring collection of machinima artwork.

From the offical press release:

‘MMIF 2010′ is the second edition of an annual film festival in 3D cyberspace with a screening in physical space (‘RL’). A seven hour movie marathon with a two hour afterparty. MMIF 2010 can also be followed on the web via live stream broadcasts.
The MMIF is a celebration of ‘Machinima’: a new cinematic art form, created with virtual worlds and video games. On 3D Internet platforms like Second Life®, any kind of movie sets can be build for very low costs. The MMIF aims to bring machinima to a wider audience, online – and offline. Machinima artists from all over the world are present in real time at the virtual MMIF Theatre. They present over 50 short films and have talks with other machinimatographers and an international audience

The festivals will show creative work of over 40 artists. For a total of 7 hours the movies are screened in both Second Life and Amsterdam. I'm proud to be part of that event. My recent movie 'the Graveyard' will be screened in the track from 5 pm - 6 pm PST (2 -3 am CET, Sunday) hosted by Phaylen Fairchild. Hope to meet you there.

For more details about the festival and detailed schedule can be found at the festival Website: MMIF 2010
Live media streams and SL Teleport links via http://live.MMIF.org

Machinima@Miami Animation Festival

Phil Rice has put together an excellent line up of machinima films for the A.D.A.M. & E.V.E. Winter Break Mini Fest (an animation / digital arts festival). The one hour machinima program will be screening at the Miami Science Museum on December 27-28, 2009. I'm proud my last short film 'the Graveyard' made it into that screening.
Machinima Films screened at A.D.A.M. & E.V.E. Festival Miami

Dragon Age Toolset News

The community using the Dragon Age Toolset is steadily growing. Besides some Machinima tests I've not seen any Dragon Age Machinima so far, but that will change soon. Some members have already announced to work on a Machinima film.
The Dragon Age Forum has been better structured and now the Toolset has 6 sub-forums. One called 'Cutscenes' which is for disussions around Machinima and the tools to be used to create cinematics (like the cutscene and FaceFX editor). 'search' is now working as well in the forum.

A new version of the Toolset has been released (Version 1.01). This version fixes the missing FaceFX entry and now using the toolset should no longer interfere with playing the game.
And even better - it now has ALL the game assets form the single player campaign included (levels, cutscenes, etc.) . Ready to explore, learn from and ready use in your own mods or machinima. Single player and core resource source files are available as seperate downloads as well.

The number of video tutorials for the toolkit is growing.
DragonAge22's toolset video tutorials (now 12) where the last two are cutscene/machinima tutorials. DragonAge22's video's on YT

SilentCid has reworked and improved his video tutorials:
Cid's Video Tutorials ver. 2 parts 1,2, and 3
Cid's Video Tutorials Version 2 Part 4

Qkrch shows how to begin with the DA toolset, focused for the experienced NWN builder.
Videos are in youtube, HD enabled, spanish voice with English subtitles: Qkrch's Toolset tutorials Spanish/English sub

Blender 2.5 released

The first official testing release of Blender 2.5 has been released. Work on Blender 2.5 will proceed alongside the Durian open movie project, along with continued collaborative work from the worldwide developer community leading up to a fully stabilised and production ready Blender 2.6 release in mid 2010. This version of Blender has the Blender Game Engine (BGE) build in so it's a tool for Machinima as well. There might be some changes to the BGE implementation until 2.6 but that gives you enough time to learn the new interace and features of Blender. If you want to have control of everything in your production and as well have a tool with no EULA strings attached, have a look at Blender. Interested? Michael Fox has made some great videos about Blender 2.5 at his Blog 'Blender Labrat'