Machinima for Dummies

So we’re nearly, almost, tantalisingly close to the end of production on the book.

We’re reviewing laid-out proofs, we’re finalising agreements for the DVD (and thanks to everyone who helped with that), and we’re starting to think marketing.

At the same time, I’m running up and down the country like a fly with a bottom of an unusual colour. First it was Wednesday and Thursday in Leicester, where I was meeting with people about the Machinima Europe Festival festival, which is happening 12-14th October. It’s looking really cool - the guys at DeMontfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies(IOCT) are really into the whole idea, and they’re giving it a ton of support. The more I saw of it, the more I was convinced that this one’s going to be big.

I also got to talk to dozens of students at the DMU Open Day about Machinima, show a whole bunch of Machinima films, and generally have a great time.

(As a side-note - above all else, the interest, enthusiasm, willingness to throw around ideas and receptiveness of the IOCT guys was great to see. I sat down to dinner with four top people on the Festival sat down to dinner, we all got a bit drunk, and we ended up brainstorming up and deciding to run a new Machinima project - now that’s the kind of people we want involved in Machinima. )

Now I’m back in Edinburgh for a day of frantically bouncing emails backward and forward between editors (including our saintly proofs editor Jodi, who we’re currently assailing with Excel spreadsheets full of last-minute alterations on a daily basis), and in about an hour I jump on a train, hook up to the WiFi, and continue firing emails back and forth into the ether as I’m carried at ballistic velocity (I wish - it’s British Rail we’re talking about here) toward Cambridge, where I’m demoing at the BBC Blast event with the Moviestorm guys.

Machinima is cresting the horizon. More and more serious people are getting interested. We’re now talking about a medium where Machinima creators regularly get approached by representatives of major TV companies, where festivals are being organised for us by seriously influential academics and high-powered business types, and where I’m legging it down the country to teach Machinima at a BBC-sponsored festival.

Toby Moores, one of the main brains behind the Machinima Europe fest (and the high-powered business type I refer to above - he’s also the producer on some of the best-selling PS2 games of all time), reckons that 2007 is the landmark year for Machinima, the point at which we crest the visibility curve. I was dubious when he first proposed that theory, but the more I’m seeing of this year, the more I’m convinced that he might have a point.

We’re assuring Quality. Oh, yes…

A quote from a bug report -

Observed Behaviour:

Black Hair Of Death.

Hot darn, but I’m tired.

We’re in the home straight now. The end is in sight, and both Hugh and I are staggering towards it, gasping for breath with every muscle crying out in pain. The problem is that the end point is deceptively far down the track. I keep thinking we’ve almost finished, then something else turns up, and we’re back to the mind-numbing task of checking every line of a 400+ word book for errors and changes.

Hugh’s making coffee right now, which I desperately need. I remember talking to Paul Marino some time ago. He described the last 10% of his machinima-book-writing-process in much the same way. This is the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time. I’m on my last legs. If we don’t finish all our little tasks today (and it’s looking like we might not), you’ll find me on the floor in a fetal position, gibbering like a maniac.

Somebody call my mum and tell her to write me a note. I can’t do gym today.

“Creativity is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration, and 120% swearing, cursing and hitting inanimate objects.”

“The first 80% of the work takes 80% of the time. The other 20% of the work takes the other 80% of the time.”

We’re in the final stages of editing, redoing pictures, working on the cover and all the other miscellaneous stuff that you never think about when you’re writing a book.

We had a bit of controversy over what we were or weren’t going to say about Second Life a little while back. I just wanted to reassure Second Life users that our small section on SL has been looked over by none other than Eric Call, the maker of Silver Bells and Golden Spurs, also known as Eric Linden.

Just over two months to release…

We’re on the Author Review stage of book writing now, which essentially means “edit our work, and the changes our editor has made, and the queries she’s made about our horrible, horrible grammar/geek jokes/general errors”. Oh, and whilst we’re at it, we also have to trim nearly 100 pages from the page count.

Well, that’s going better than expected (experienced writers will know that there’s always a whole bunch more that you can cut without affecting quality), but we’re starting to flag. Johnnie has been hallucenating User Friendly-style coffee mugs. I’ve nearly fallen asleep in my oh-so-comfy ergonomic chair.

Only 110 pages to go, and then we can rest!

(We’ve also been incorporating changes and suggestions from our lovely, lovely technical reviewers. You all rock. )

I know he’ll be too modest to post about it himself, so I’ll let you all know that Hugh was given the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Machinima at the Online Machinima Film Festival. Congratulations to Hugh on this recognition of the tremendous work he does on behalf on the community, and congratulations to the community for their excellent taste.

You know, normally when people receive Outstanding Contribution awards or Lifetime Achievement awards, it means that the general consensus is that they’re almost dead.

You’ll be relieved to hear that Hugh looks fine this morning.

Just a few things from around the place:

• For the WoW fans in the audience, the latest official World of Warcraft video, trailing the Black Temple, is one of the nicest pieces of Machinima I’ve seen this year.

• There’s a whole bunch more info on MovieStorm’s expected pricing over on the official Moviestorm forums. None of this is set in stone yet, so go give them your opinion!

• At Strange Company, we’re going to be appearing all over the place over the next few weeks, so check there if you want to catch BloodSpell, FairGame or us at any number of places.

Yes, we have a price for Moviestorm, the awesome, dedicated, commercially-licensed Machinima toolset that Short Fuze have been working away at for years now, and about which we have blogged effusively.

It’s going to be… Zero pounds, zero pence.

$0

No Yen.

Zilch.

Nothing.

Nada.

Zero.

Free.

Yes, it’s free to download. Totally, utterly free. Without cost.

FREEEEEEEEEEE!

Can you tell we’re a little excited about this?

You might be asking “how the hell will they survive off that?” Well, the answer, I understand, is add-on packs. MovieStorm’s add-on packs will cost a few pounds/dollars each, and will add tons of new content. And the Short Fuze guys reckon that, by making the initial program free to download, they can get a huge userbase installing subsequent packages.

It’s a brave move. I don’t know if it’ll work, although the Short Fuze management team have more experience than I do, and they reckon it will. But it’s darn fine news for Machinima creators anyway.

Oh, which brings us to point 2. Imagine if “Word for Dummies” came with a free copy of Microsoft Word.

That’s going to be the situation with Machinima for Dummies. It’ll come with a copy of Moviestorm right on the cover - everything you need to get started in Machinima, right there.

Rock and, as various people have said, roll.

OK, that treat we promised you might be coming out next week, now. This week has been a bit of a morass of format conversion, and that’s never fun.