Free Pixel

Celebrating Jim Henson’s birthday yesterday, Google Doodles created an interactive puppet doodle (which eventually should be available again here so head over there and play). This spawned a number of live puppeteering machinima pieces. It is a bit like a 24 hour movie project gone rogue and a great example why puppets are so valuable for machinima and real-time animation.

So far, all the examples I have seen were live screen captures – but one can imagine some amazing work with a little bit of compositing and editing.

It is pretty clear that machinima is not interactive. It is not a game, one cannot achieve a high score or solve the problem, but receives a prefabricated performance in one way or the other. This rings true for audiences streaming their daily dose of gameplay videos on YouTube and a large part of followers of machinima. The closer one gets to the production side, the more the whole enterprise turns into an highly interactive theatrical and cinematic event. One that touches on a whole lot of live performance issues – for example on digital puppetry (and some weeks ago Sanjeev Nayak, one of my students just finished his work on a nice new version of digital puppetry using cell phones). But in-between are the murky waters of cutscenes and QTEs …. and things get muddy.

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From the times when machinima flourished and folks saw it as a new possible form of commercial filmmaking, there was one myth of machinima, a kind of holy grail: to catch up with Pixar and do a kind of Toy Story x in real-time. After all, who would not like to swap with John Lasseter? The man turned himself into an CGI animation myth, like Disney did for traditional animation.

Now we have Cars 2 and the myth has cracks.

After watching Cars 2 I had to see Wall-E and Toy Story 3 again – just to remind me of what Pixar stands for. You cannot blame my lack of interest in all things automobile alone. The timing was off, the characters were lost, and worst of all the story was fragmented and garbled up to sheer nonsense. The result was a mediocre tale polished up by render virtuosity. What went wrong and is there a lesson to learn for machinima?

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Just found out that there is a new book on Art, Code, and Machine of the Demoscene out. In German only – so the real title is “Kunst, Code und Machine” – and I got to admit that I have not read it yet, only skimmed the available intro. But this one sets the scene nicely by diving into Farbrausch’s debris head on and already battles with the “real-time definition.”

I used to point to Lassi Tasajärvi’s “Demoscene, The Art of Real-time” as my default book on the demoscene. So it is good to see something else on the market.

It has been a long time. Epic, really. But, here it is: The Machinima Reader put together by Henry Lowood and myself and published by MIT Press.

The reader is structured into six main sections: Reflections, Technology, Performance, Machine Cinema, Pedagogy, and Context. Here is the amazon link; and after the jump the table of contents, if any further arguments are needed:

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The Month of Machinima has kicked off in Second Life – more precisely here. Thanks to the Linden Endowment for the Arts

I have so much catching up to do that I did not really have any idea what to expect. Well, after the jump you should find the 14 selected movies (thanks to Chantal Harvey)

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A machinima related follow up on Barcelona winning the Champions League.

Sport visualizations have been around for some time and this one of the 3 goals Barca scored yesterday is not necessarily revolutionary.

Digging a bit deeper showed that the underlying software VRTV is coming from England and based on a mysterious Graphics Environment for Scripted Applications (GESA) engine. Originally the company (Sportflashback) used Flash but moved on to a real 3D engine to achieve better results.The business model looks very much like that of familiar machinima companies: divide in engine and content and earn your money in the long run with the content. The tricky question is: where is the content coming from?

Creating the necessary 3D animations is the bulk of this model, I would think. The answer might be Russia. St. Petersburgh to be precise, if this older (German) article still applies.

Another interesting detail is the interface, which is not based on game paradigms at all but instead is all buttons and menus. Well, it might be a game interface: namely that of a Fussball Manager. Could it really be a question of the content that defines the cinematic operations and functionality of a specific machinima engine?

Over the last term, Ali Mazalek’s, Claudia Rebola’s and my own class here at Georgia Tech worked toward a final shared piece involving digital puppetry. After some test runs, the resulting “Pictures at an Exhibition”  performance will be one short segment in the Experimental Puppetry show at the Center for Puppetry Arts. May 18-22 2011.

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So the abbreviations SL’s MOM might be somewhat misleading but the Linden Endowment of the Arts (LEA, of course) has declared May the kick off month for their Month of Machinima (MOM) showcase in Second Life. There is a mini trailer here (which should evolve into a more comprehensive YouTube channel for the program).

As this seems to be the first official LEA event, it will be interesting to follow the development. The idea, however is promising:

The objective of the event is to promote Second Life machinima, encourage the creation of new work, and showcase existing work to the community and beyond. It serves as an opportunity to introduce Residents to the machinima art form and to support the machinima community to continue to create these films for everyone to enjoy. MoM is a recurring event, continuing each month with juried screenings of community-created machinima.

I remain somewhat distanced from the excitement surrounding SL but Chantal Harvey is committee member of LEA and that is a good sign and the SL blogosphere has some write ups of the initial meeting that happened at the LEA theater.

There is more information on conditions and formats here. For May there is no specific theme – next month it will be “Mixed Reality.” As another concession to the first round, the length is limited to 3 minutes for May but increased to 6 minutes the following month.