Call for Machinima by Atopic Festival

Last year, the first edition of Atopic Festival, international art festival dedicted to virtual realities, allowed a wide audience to discover Machinima : movie realized by filming inside a virtual world or inside a video game. This year the festival will take place 5th to 20th november.

*The contest*
A selection committee will choose best movies according to one of the following categories : narrative, creative and alternative. Three films will be rewarded : “the audience award » and “first and second prizes of the jury”. The call for entries is intended to Machinima films and creation by allowing winners to see their film screened during the festival and in the prestigious setting of the Geode .

*Conditions and contacts*
The contest is open to all. Machinimas already produced will be accepted. Quality must be of the highest possible, that it can be projected in the big screen.

To participate, contact : machinima@atopicfestival.com
Deadline: 27th of September, 2010, at noon.

Machinima Expo 2010 Trailer

While playing around with the new Muvizu features, I thought why not make something useful, so created this short trailer for Machinima Expo 2010.

New features for Muvizu

Just recently Muvizu has been improved by adding some very interesting new features. Besides their are now more sets available the new highlights are:

1. Camera animations
2. Importing 3D models

Import is done through Unreal Engines .ase format. There are importers available for most 3D tools including Maya, 3dsMax, Sketchup and Blender. Unfortunately I did not get the exporter for Blender 2.53 to work, but Blender 2.49 worked fine. See below my imported Suzanne in Muvizu.

Inspiring talks about education

Found this interesting talks about education on TED I want to recommend:

Charles Leadbeater: Education innovation in the slums

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves

They don't mention machinima, but from the context in these talks I think machinima could play important role in new forms of education.

Custom props for Voovees Director

A while ago good old Machinima tool ZenCub3d has been relaunched as Voovees Director. Over the last days I'd run some first test on creating custom assets/props for voovees.
Here are the first results:




The blackboard in the back is a modified voovees prop done by simple texture modding. The simple textured cylinder is created from withing 3dsmax. The monkey, as you may have spotted already, is done in Blender (suzanne) and it shows that complex shapes,UV's and textures work perfect in voovees director as well.

How to make money with Machinima.

Sorry for the catchy title and sure this is no post on how to get rich with making machinima movies. I just want to write about an idea I had a while ago and which came back into my mind through the start of the Flattr service. Flattr is a social micropayment platform that lets you show love for the things you like. One of the main restriction we have with Machinima is that we are not allowed to use it commercially since most of the time we use games or content that doesn't allow that. We are happy that at least we can publish our movies, but earning any income from them is tough. Most of the time we don't care about that because we make movies because we love it and earn our money elsewhere. But wouldn't it be nice to be able to pay some bills with money income based on your creative work we like that much and maybe some day make a living just by by creating machinima movies?
So how does it work? The basic idea goes back to an interesting talk on Linux and Open Source development at a conference years ago. It draws a close connection to Open Source and 'Gift economy'.
"A gift economy (or gift culture) is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards". Of course I don't want to see the society as a whole to change, nor do I want to replace money (maybe it might need some changes how money is used in our society). The main point about a gift that is important is that what we receive (the gift) is in no direct connection to what we create (the movies). And we are already part of kinda gift econony, since all our movies, blog posts etc. are already gifts to the society. So we only need to extablish a way that others are able to send us gifts (money prefered) as well to support us. It's different from asking for money (support) for a next movie project or in exchange to any benefit like access to bonus, HQ version , etc. It has to be a pure gift and as the said above 'without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards'. Only that way any commercial relation to the movies is removed. That way we can create our movies using any game/tool we like and still have the opportunity to pay our bills.
The main problem is still how to rise the awarness about this new way to support our work. A platform like Flattr might help, but maybe we find other ways to establish different, more creative way for others to make them aware that we are accepting gifts as well. This will not solve any problem with machinima, we are still bound to IP based problems when we want to send the to some festivals or even show on or sell it to TV. And of course there are some things I don't like about the Flattr platform, but I see it as a start and I hope more services like this will arise that will help us making some money with machinima.

Edit: I actually managed to get part of Flattr beta. If you like you can now Flattr me below. Thank you for your support. Let me know if you need an invite to test this platform as well.

Machiniplex Forum on “Experimental Machinima”

This weekend another interessting and inspiring Machiniplex Forum will take place in Second Life.
From the Machiniplex Blog:

"Next Sunday, May 31st @9AM (Pacific Time), Machiniplex will host its May forum on “Experimental Machinima”. Our special guest will be Tom Jantol, an award-winning Machinima filmmaker. Tom has been making poetic and experimental machinima for many years and putting the finishing touches on his most recent film “Dear Fairy”. We hope to show “Dear Fairy” as a work in progress at the forum on Sunday. ...
Claus-Dieter Schulz (Liberty City, 9), along with Lainy Voom (Push, The Dumb Man), will also be on hand to discuss their own experimental work. Both directors have focused on the experimental in their work, but in very different ways than Tom Jantol. So it will be a lively conversation."

I look forward to meet you there.