Machinima for Dummies

The programme for the European Machinima Festival is now available. You can grab the PDF from this site.

We’re really looking forward to the Festival now. If you’re planning on attending, please do pop by and say hello!

So we’re going to be doing a whole bunch of things at the Machinima Europe festival! Here’s a quick summary of the MfD team’s appearances:

Friday

This is the Schools day, not a public day.

Hugh and Johnnie will be running half-hour presentations of the best of Machinima through the day.

Saturday

12:00 - 13:00 : Tools for Machinima. Hugh chairs a discussion with Friedrich Kirschner of MovieSandbox, Matt Kelland of Moviestorm and John Martin of IClone on Machinima tools.

13:00 - 13:30: Hugh and Johnnie will be signing Machinima for Dummies books in the Student Union. This signing will continue after…

13:30 - 14:30 : Machinima for Dummies Recommends… Hugh and Johnnie present an hour of Machinima films that everyone should watch. Updated from the book!

Sunday

11:15 - 12:00 : Second round of signings.

12:00 - 13:00 : European Machinima. Hugh talks about Strange Company’s production work and Euro Machinima with Alex Chen and Tracy Harwood.

13:30 - 15:30 : BloodSpell Feature Premiere This is the big one - the premiere of Strange Company’s feature-length cut of the epic “punk fantasy adventure”, complete with Q&A with the key crew of the film.

After that, we’ll be in the bar!

Hope to see you there! Comment if you’ll be along.

Oh - if you are coming, do the organisers a favour and register beforehand! It’ll help them to know numbers.

Onward, to Machinima…

As most of you will know, Hugh and I have been working pretty closely with Short Fuze, the makers of Moviestorm, over the course of Machinima For Dummies. As well as bundling a copy of Moviestorm on the book’s cover disk, we devoted two large sections of the book to Moviestorm. We also wrote some of the documentation for one of their early beta releases. We did all this because, quite simply, Moviestorm rocks.

I’m delighted to announce that, as of this morning (Mon 1st October 2007), I will be employed full-time by Short Fuze as Moviestorm’s Technical Author.

You won’t see any huge change in my attitude because of this – I raved about Moviestorm before they hired me and I’ll continue to do so now that they pay my wages – but I want to state for the record that Moviestorm’s presence in Machinima For Dummies was not solicited or paid for in any way. We featured it because we love it, and their job offer to me was made after the book was published.

I’m going to continue to work with Hugh to keep this site updated, and to release new and revised content. I’ll also be continuing to work with Strange Company whenever time and practicality allows. I’ll be mentioning Moviestorm on this blog from time to time, but only if there’s something that I think you’ll find interesting or relevant. I won’t be using this blog as free Moviestorm advertising.

I genuinely love Moviestorm. I think it’s one of the best and most exciting things to happen to machinima for several years. It’s all the better for being developed by Short Fuze – they’re all machinima creators and fans, and are crazy keen to work with the community. They’ve already hired several prominent members of the machinima community, and they’re willing to pay machinimators to make movies using their software. Now, how often do you hear that phrase except prefaced by “Wouldn’t it be great if …”, or “Maybe, someday …”? Hopefully, we’ll see Moviestorm go from strength to strength – check out the latest version, which features some amazing built-in cell-shading.

I hope I’ve been honest and comprehensive in this announcement, but if you’ve got any concerns or questions, feel free to contact me in person (johnnie DOT ingram AT strangecompany DOT org, or just comment on this post).

Well, this is exciting! A tip from the inimitable Moo Money at yesterday’s Machinima Talk event led me to Opensimulator.org, which appears to be a fairly successful attempt to build an open-source, publically-runnable Second Life server.

As we mention in the book, having the ability to run an SL server locally will make a huge difference in terms of its usability for Machinima creation. (For those who haven’t heard, we find Second Life interesting and potentially great for Machinima, but it does have a LOT of problems as a Machinima platform right now.)

Being able to run Second Life as a local service on your own hardware will substantially change the SL Machinima game. It’ll take network latency out of the equation, mean that you won’t have to pay for land on which to shoot, give you total control of your environment, theoretically allow you to run computer-controlled avatars - basically give you all the advantages of both Second Life and a LAN-based game, combined.

OpenSimulator doesn’t seem to be there yet - it’s still in alpha testing, and the site says “Some stuff works, a lot doesn’t” - but there’s clearly a lot of development going on, and there are publically-accessible servers running. Something to keep an eye on.

Apologies for the quiet this week. I’m working on the final cut of BloodSpell and Johnnie’s moving house, so we’re a bit preoccupied.

More stuff next week, I hope.

If you’ve read the first chapter of the book (either by buying a copy like a good boy/girl or by reading it for free online), you’ll have read Hugh’s account of the birth of the word machinima. If you’d like to hear the story as told by the man on the other end of the confusion, the original email exchange has recently surfaced from the frighteningly-organised hard drive of machinima legend Anthony Bailey.

Damien Valentine emails us to let us know that the book’s now available in the UK with no wait! So, grab it now! (We’ll be more than happy to autograph books at Machinima Europe, as well as doing an official bookstore signing there).

Also, a short apology to the Neverending Nights guys. We did of course mean to say that they made (and make) NeN in their garage, not their bedroom. We didn’t mean to imply - you know. Stuff. Things. Just cast it out of your mind. Think about something else.

Hey, look, a penguin.

…

…

OK, this wasn’t actually the first bookstore sighting of the book (Henry Lowood sent me a message that he’d seen a bunch of MfDs in Stamford about six hours earlier), but it’s the first picture we had of it on shop shelves.

So, Jeff L, congratulations, thanks for the photo, and your signed copy will be winging its way out to you very soon.

We’re starting to get reviews for the book now, and they’ve been pretty positive so far (at the time of writing, the book is rated 5 stars on Amazon.com). It’s great to read what people think. For us, this book represents several months of ridiculously hard work and stress, and we’re very proud of it. Some reviews have been just awesome. I did a little happy dance when I read this one (by Sean on Amazon.com):

Thank you very much, Sean. Since you read this blog, I’m assuming that our profound gratitude will reach you via this medium.

Please keep the reviews coming. There’s no need to be as effusive as Sean (although we won’t object if you are!), but please do give us your honest opinion.

If you have made a Machinima film in the last year or so, and haven’t submitted it to Machinima Europe, now’s your last chance!

All you need to do is fill out a form and give them a URL - that’s it! No cash, no hard copy - you can work out trailers and stuff later.

Get your work in there! The deadline’s tomorrow, the 8th.