Machinima

Today starts the Machinima Festival Europe 2007 in Leicester, UK. I was honoured to be part of review panel. You can get an overview of all nominees at the nominees festival page. If you are a registered in Second Life have a look at: SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Innenstadt/186/208/25 SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Pixel%20Expo%20II/2/45/51 and HatHead Incubators, a highly creative virtual experiences company, specializing in immersive environments and digital communities SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/HatHead%20II/250/161/313

In August I had been at the Games Convention Germany 2007 in Leipzig. It is one of the biggest consumer game fairs in Europe, so all known game companies are there and presenting there new titles. Besides this commercial event, there is also a complete hall about Game Art and here was also a Machinima booth with machinima movies exhibited, workshops and talks. I was invited to give a talk about Games and Art. If you are interested what my talk was about, have a look at my powerpoint presentation. ...

The movie is based on CBS news from Oct. 2, 2006 about the ordered tight security curfew to break the curve of violence and the difficult and dangerous situation in the streets of Baghdad. The movie is made in the games Battlefield 2 and The Sims 2 and is made in 3 days for the Machinima Competition organized by Holland Animation Film Festival, Mediamatic and Virma.

The second Machinima workshop was successfully held at the Mediamatic institute between 26th - 29th of October. Again the workshop was held by Friedrich Kirschner (Germany | machinima maker, editor Machinimag), Daniël van Gils (NL - interaction designer, machinima teacher), me and of course Mediamatic. During the workshop Friedrich presented the tool moviesandbox, he is currently working on. We have already had the chance to experiment and make films with it. Moviesandbox is a free graphical movie scripting environment for the game Unreal Tournament 2004. You can simply script your own character animations, place cameras in a scene and lots more… ...

From 14-17 march ‘06 was the Machinima workshop at Mediamatic. Together with Mark Meadows (US | artist, 3D animator, game developer), Friedrich Kirschner (Germany | machinimamaker, editor Machinimag), Daniël van Gils (NL - interaction designer, machinima educator) and of course Mediamatic we provided the workshop. The main tools we used for the workshop were Machinimation 1 & 2 and Sims2, but also any other game was possible to use. What I really like about machinimas (making films in games) is, that it is a development out of the fan culture, where gamers stopped playing a game and started creating their own content. The shift from consuming to creating makes it interesting. To get an idea of machinimas have a look at films at the official machinima site, check out the online readers or have a look at wikipedia. ...