Free Pixel

fMX is an international conference/ festival on “animation, effects, games and digital media” currently under way at the Haus der Wirtschaft in Stuttgart, GER. A look at this description makes it clear that someone interested in machinima should have a look … and so I did.

There are some talks on Machinima on the festival (e.g. one by Claus Dieter-Schulz which I will have to miss) but so far the most interesting – if somewhat unfinished – idea I heard here was that of a machinima driven daily soap. Unlike some of the discussions regarding such a project in the usual machinima circles, this time, the presentation was done by a writer of the Grundy/Ufa TV production group, which is ultimately owned by the Bertelsmann concern – a behemoth of European media production. So this was a glimpse into the plans of the money making industry and their use of game engines in a TV production pipeline. I am sure there are a number of these projects under way at the moment but I have not seen many presentations about them apart from a not really conclusive idea sketch at GDC I mentioned earlier. That’s why I will mainly talk about this session.

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These days the game engines seem to become more a nuisance then an empowerment to machinima artists. Once upon a time there were discussions whether any postproduction should be allowed in machinima and the ILL clan forced even their title sequence to Hardly Workin’ into Quake. Today there is rarely any machinima film on the arty side of things that has not seen some form of (ever more elaborate) post-production. When even Phil’s contest states that ‘use of video games in any way is probably out of the question’ and Hugh moves on to Moviestorm after his long years in games then the demise of games in machinima becomes only too obvious. Sure, the developers brought it upon themselves with unclear legalities but I still regret that development deeply.

So here it is: a geeky call back to inferior control schemes, blocky graphics, and the limitation to a handful of cameras: let’s hear it for Adrian Stephens, The Assembly Line, and Stunt Island. Of all things, could the mother of all machinima engines be a flight simulator at heart?

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Just imagine your machinima here..

Urban Screens Melbourne 08 is the third, ground-breaking international conference and multimedia exhibition in a series of worldwide Urban Screens events. It will mark the official launch of the International Urban Screens Association and will take place 3.-8. October at Federation Square, Melbourne.

Conference: Mobile Publics 3-5 October 2008
Outdoor Multimedia Program: 3-8 October 2008
The event will promote a lateral trans-disciplinary approach to exploring the global transformation of public culture in the context of large new multi media precincts such as Federation Square and various networked forms of urban screens. It will build on the successful events held in Amsterdam in 2005 and Manchester in 2007 and will be the first Urban Screens held in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Atlanta branch of the Savannah College of Art and Design is holding its Game Developer’s Exchange and among a range of the usual suspects (Zimmerman, Fullerton, Crawford, Costikyan - half of the Georgia Tech  Digital Media faculty) Matt Dominianni of ILL Clan fame will be there. Matt and I are on a round table about Machinima scheduled today and he will give a talk tomorrow (Friday).

Ali Mazalek and myself will talk about our work on puppets for machinima directly after Matt - so we managed to get quite some presence for machinima. The registration is not too expensive ($ 25 for students, I think) and one does not find this collection of game scholars in the Deep South all the time - so come and have a look if you are in the area.

I assume this has been all over the boards but I only now stumbled over the new Make Something Unreal contest. Given that the last one did produce some outstanding results, I am very much looking forward to see what the new one brings. It might be a good measure to see whether machinima is still moving on.

There are quite a lot of very interesting machinima films out there at the moment (The Monad, Clockwork and the one’s below) but I have not seen anything really exciting in Unreal 3. Which is weird because the editor looks amazing.

“The relationship between filmaker and viewer of what you want and what I want to give you. One could hope someday I’ll be in the position to make that video game motion picture that fully pays tribute to what the fans wish for while making the reasonable comprises of established filmaking.”

Monty Oum “presents” his new movie with a two page abstract on how it’s all about the audience and why Dead or Alive didn’t have enough characters to make for an even fight - “It’s that level of thought that I try to put into my work.”

watch it on GameTrailers

Paul Robertson releases his new movie “Kings of Power 4 Billion %” for free and for “a generation to come”.
Get the torrent from here: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4096264 (yes, bittorrent sites can host legal stuff too!)

or more information from Paul’s website.

And finally, the tale-of-tales people released “the Graveyard” - a game/demo/machinima music video about nostalgia, age and death as discussed (and please do have a look at the comments) at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

I have been praising as well as criticizing afterworld but by now I have given in and turned into a trusty follower of the series. The show has been out there in various ways (MySpace, Bud.TV, SciFi) but I followed it on their own website where the episodes gradually unlock on a map that shows the hero’s path as he literally crosses North America. In this format, we have entered the final days of the series and it is time to simply sing its praise.

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We don’t normally post conference calls here but I thought some of you may be interested in the GLS call for 31 March as it doesn’t seem a typical academic ’submit paper and present like a wooden dummy’ type conference.

There are Interactive Workshops, Symposium, Individual Presentation (each session is assigned a Respondent who will comment on the presentations and brainstorm issues they collectively raise), Conversation ·(A 90-minute moderated conversation between two or more participants on a key issue..speakers are asked to elaborate on topics that emerge from the interaction rather than only those defined in advance.

Etcetara, but what caught my eye (for those of you live near Wisconsin) was Fireside Chats, Chat ’n’ Frag:

A 90-minute session that allows interested game researchers, designers, aficionados, and fans a chance to engage other conference participants in their selected game (off-the-shelf titles or grassroots designed), providing activities or walk-through’s related to key questions and ideas chosen by the session host. The structure and content of these sessions is at the discretion of the host, although sessions that include thoughtful game analysis and hands-on play are encouraged etc

Dichtung Digital recently published one of my more recent ramblings on Machinima. The title is ‘Claiming Its Space: Machinima’ and the abstract reads:

Although machinima has grown exponenatially, it remains a largely undefined digital artistic practice in-between existing traditions. Machinima makers freely sample/ combine/ and break elements of traditional media. They “play” their references. This essay does not attempt to fix machinima to any single definition but will identify the intermedia relations to better position machinima into the digital media landscape. The argument will target three main influences: film, television, and theatrical performance. To exemplify these points the essay will discuss examplatory and relevant machinima pieces. It puts emphasis on the real-time aspects in production and play back to highlight the key specifics of this relatively new format.

It might be of some interest especially if you want to look at the relationship between Machinima and other media as the essay has ‘intertextual’ written all over it. You can read the essay here.

GDC 2008 had some official sessions on machinima and some rather well hidden gems. In fact, very well hidden at times. The conference is simply too big to attend or even find every interesting talk so here are my impressions.

Oh, and I bumped into Paul Marino almost every step of the way - which was great, too.

I went to three main talks regarding machinima: ‘Mashups, Mods & Machinima: Who Owns the Rights to Your Blood, Sweat & Tears?’ by Sean Kane - an IP lawyer working mainly for the game industry; ‘The Future of Animation is Games’ by folks from Blockade Entertainment; and ‘Challenges of Creating Linear Content in a Game Engine’ by Jerry O’Flaherty and Oliver Ozoux from Digital Domain.
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