Free Pixel

We (meaning Ian Bogost, John Sharp of SCAD, and myself) are currently organizing an event scheduled for early 2010:
“The Art History of Games” will be a 3 day symposium on the role of games as art form
February 4-6, 2010 at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta
How do games relate to the established art world? Games [...]

Eyes, their animation, rendering, and natural integration with the rest of the animated body have always been a key element to judge a character’s live-ness in games as well as CGI. Or as Mike Starkenburg, chief operating officer at Image Metrics says:
“Ninety per cent of the work is convincing people that the eyes are [...]

It is a very academic minefield: the discussion whether games tell stories or not. As I am right now sitting in a reprise of the 1999 debate at DAC between Aarseth and Murray it dawned to me that a Machinima producer probably merely shakes her head hearing a discussion like that. This will be only [...]

I am not sure whether this is the first time around somebody did that but here is the trailer that Jordan Mechner did to pitch his Prince of Persia film project to Disney and Bruckheimer. He recently posted about it on his blog. The first thing I found interesting is what the trailer is about [...]

For whatever reason, The Muppet Show DVDs only made it recently into our collection. Ever since we are working our way through 70s puppet bliss. In somewhat of a continuation of the limitations of the game engine this post will ask whether Machinima would ever be up for something like a Muppet Show program.

No doubt, [...]

Lassi Tasajaervi visited Georgia Tech when the print version of his book Demoscene: The Art of Real-Time came out. So I was lucky enough to get a copy but I am not sure how far the word about his book spread. Good news: now it is available as eBook.

The book is a short collection of [...]

I had the chance to visit the MovieStorm folks (twice this summer, actually). Last week I bumped into them during their demo show for the HCI 2009 showcase in Cambridge. I talked them into demoing the not-yet-released next build of MovieStorm… The interface has been reworked overall but maybe the most important coding change I [...]

It seem the top-notch Dartmouth College is warming up to machinima:

I do not yet know what to think of it. In my humble opinion, some names and films should be added to their first outline. But what I found really funny is that is seems they use Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities‘ as a reference for [...]

Henry Lowood pointed me to this collaboration, 6 Days, of Diltz and DeLappe. As you can imagine, it is not your everyday machinima film but more of an experiment in machinima. I have to state upfront that I really like DeLappe’s work. He seems to really work very effectively on the task to bring the [...]

Coming back from New Orleans and my first SIGGRAPH conference… Of course, I missed probably all the amazing sessions (e.g. I did not make it to the “Making a Feature-Length Animated Movie With a Game Engine” one).

But then again: Ricky grove attended a ton of sessions and it seems that that particular one was not [...]