Machinima for Dummies

If you haven’t seen the new Ulduar trailer for World of Warcraft, you really should, whether you have any interest in WoW or not. (If you don’t, you need to know that for various reasons, the Orcs and the Humans are recently at war after an unstable peace broke down, and the wizards aren’t involved. But that’s it.)

It’s made by, amongst others, Terran Gregory, one half of the team that won a Mackie for their WoW movie The Return, and it really pushes out the boundaries of what you can do with both World of Warcraft and Machinima as a whole. The scriptwriting and storytelling, in particular, stand out - there’s genuine jeopardy, some excellent action sequences, convincing character conflict, and some fantastic use of standard WoW scenes to great cinematic effect. It’s also very interesting how subtle lipsynching really helps to sell the piece.

If you’re interested in writing stories using Machinima, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

A quick question for the assembled masses - has anyone ever corresponded with Blizzard via their machinima@blizzard address, and if so, what was their response? In particular, has anyone received permission to embark on commercial activity with WoW, or to enter or show Machinima made with WoW at a film festival?

We’re about to do a roundup of Machinima licensing in 2009, and I’d be really interested to know how responsive they were.

It’s Ada Lovelace day - the day for blogging about influential and generally cool women in tech.

Now, various people have in the past claimed that Machinima is a male-dominated artform, so I thought it was worth talking about some of the women who have shaped the artform to what it is today…

India Drummond - as the maintainer of Sims99, she has supported and grown one of the largest sources of Machinima on the Internet, equivalent in size to Machinima.com and WarcraftMovies.

Katherine Anna Kang - founder of Fountainhead Entertainment, founder board member of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences, director of the hit Machinima film “Anna” (still one of my favourite Machinima films ever), producer of the MTV-played Machinima music video “In The Waiting Line”, and project director of Machinimation, one of the first and few dedicated Machinima toolsets.

Michelle Petit-Mee - Director of some of the most critically acclaimed Machinima films of all time (including Snow Witch and my personal favourite, A Mermaid’s Tale, which she made with Kheri Batal), teacher and commentator, and now full-time Machinima creator with Bioware.

Jun Falkenstein Director responsible for the stunningly popular, award-winning and successful “Snacky’s Journal”, “Ballad of the N00b”, and many more top World of Warcraft films.

Sasha “Moo Money” Rudie - Prolific Machinima commentator, responsible for the Moviewatch daily feature on World of Warcraft Insider and one hell of a lot of Second Life Machinima news, now full-time Machinima journalist with Machinima.com.

Kerria Seabrooke - Creative Director of Machinima pros the Ill Clan, working on the CSI Machinima and Tiny Nation amongst much, much more.

JayDee Mega-successful Sims 2 director, best known for her multi-million view film “Helena”

Jackie Turnure - Producer of Stolen Life, winner of the Best Picture at the 2007 Machinima Europe festival, and one of the few Machinima feature films ever created.

Selserene - prolific and influential WoW Machinima creator, responsible for the “In For A Penny” series.

Decorgal - prolific creator of Sims mods, models and recolors, including the ground-breaking lipsynch mods for Sims 2, and the creator of the popular Sims machinima series “Adventures In Dating”.

Trace Sanderson - Innovative and successful Second Life machinima director, best known for her hit surrealist film “The Dumb Man”

Ingrid Moon - Former senior staffer with Machinima.com, founder of Machiniplex.com, showcase site for top Machinima films, organiser of the Machinima Expo, and international Machinima evangelist.

Tracy Harwood - Machinima advocate and organiser of the first Machinima Europe festival.

Kate Fosk - leading current commentator on Machinima, Machinima Europe 2007 nominee for Experimental Machinima, and evangelist for the “Anymation” movement.

Tari Akpodiete - the former Community Manager at Moviestorm, and a prominent voice in the machinima community.

Sally Brewer - One of the first women involved in Machinima production - producer of Strange Company’s Eschaton series, one of the founding writing team on Machinima.com, and Strange Company staffer from 1997 to 2002.

You all rock.

Anyone we’ve missed? (It’s unintentional, we promise). Comment below!

A brief announcement, in the interests of journalistic disclosure: I’m now employed as Product Manager for Short Fuze Ltd in the UK (I was previously employed by the same company as Technical Author). Short Fuze are the guys who make Moviestorm, which we’ve mentioned more than once on this blog and in the book.

My job now is to be a ‘champion of the product’, which is a rather pretentious and buzzword-laden way of saying that I have to ensure that Moviestorm remains great, and co-ordinate the input of the whole team to decide what exciting features we’re going to work on next.

As I wrote when Short Fuze first hired me, this blog is not and nor will it ever be a thinly-veiled publicity tool for Short Fuze. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be talking about Moviestorm, though. We will. And IClone. And Antics3D, and ZenCub3d, and Second Life and World of Warcraft and anything else that seems relevant.

I’ve come across a few manifestos in the last couple of days - lists of attitudes, approaches, thoughts. All of them have relevance for the Machinima producer, so I thought I’d post them here.

The Cult of Done - Cory Doctorow describes this as “like finding a name for my disease”

Bruce Mau Manifesto - 40 tremendously helpful and inspiring ideas about creativity - of the lot, this one’s my favourite

Bruce Sterling on Web 2.0 - Long, but fascinating, and a kind of manifesto for post-Crash design and creativity.

What do you think? Any others you like?

It’s a sad day for fans of WoW parodies of rap music. It appears that Nhym, creator of numerous WoW hip-hop parodies including MfD favourite Hard Like Heroic, has had to quit playing WoW for reasons unknown, and has posted his last video as an encore.

No big story here, just a pity to see a fun Machinima creator go.

If you’re using a non-game platform like iClone or Moviestorm, you may well have started to feel that compared to the universe of mods available for UT, The Sims, or Half-Life 2, your content choices are a little limited.

Well, this isn’t going to solve your problems, but it might help. A new site called ”Machinimods” is aiming to collate The Movies, Moviestorm and iClone mods. Whilst it comes out of the Movies community, it’s already built up a modest collection of Moviestorm mods, and I’m hoping we’ll see a lot more in the near future.

Yes! The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US advocacy and defence group for digital rights, is on the case of the recent YouTube takedowns.

If you’ve had your Machinima video taken off YouTube in part of the Big Sweep, they’d like to help you - they’re experts in this stuff, and are looking to get these decisions reversed. Do call them!

ZenCub3d’s Billy Chang has just posted an announcement in which he states that

We will be putting the ZenCub3d project on-hold indefinitely.

After the recent loss of Antics3D from the Machinima scene, your reaction to this is likely to have been the same as mine – panic.

There’s no need for screaming and wailing just yet though. Billy’s post makes it clear that this is not the end for ZenCub3d. Quite the opposite in fact – they’re going into ‘stealth mode’ to work on the successor to the application.

I think this is actually great news for the future of ZenCub3d (and, judging by the comments so far on Billy’s post, most people seem to agree with me). The ZenCub3d forums will still be active, and there’s no indication that current copies of ZenCub3d will suddenly stop working or anything horrible like that.

If you don’t have a copy of ZenCub3d yet, it’ll be available to download in its current form for another two weeks. After that, you’ll have wait patiently for the grand unveiling of the sequel (ZenCub3d2? Seems a little unwieldy!)

I was very excited when I heard from Bilius’s [Machinima Info Barf] that the first Little Big Planet Machinima film had been released, and surfed on over there PDQ.

To be met with “This music video has been removed because of a copyright claim from Warner Bros”.

That’s REALLY bad. A pioneer film going missing in the early stages of an engine could kill an entire genre of Machinima.

This is really not acceptable.

I’m waiting for an external post at the moment, after which I’ll be posting some details on what you can do about all this.