These R&C posts are my “link purge” posts, where I deliver bullet-style info for items which I don’t intend to cover as individual articles. Previous Ralph & Chuck: Number 1.

Festivals and Contests

• Don’t Forget to VOTE at the Bitfilm Festival!
• PubFilms Screenplay Competition Now Open. Entrants accepted from any country. $35 per screenplay entry fee; Grand Prize: $25,000 plus your script is produced into a full-length feature film. (Found out via SecondLife)

Recent Machinima Releases

• Morning Run Amok by Fling Films (Frank L. Fox). Featuring sound by Ricky Grove, music by yours truly, and lots of great VO cameos.
• [COMPANY] Rulez! My latest little parody produced with Evan Ryan.
• Hold Me, Thrill Me… The latest music vid by talented up-and-comer, Kyle LeBlanc.
• Akin. Artful collaboration between OneJovialSim and BKiddo, two SimsPremiere directors.
• Moviesandbox Tutorials. Friedrich Kirshner is cranking out a whole series of these on YouTube. Tell me he’s not a natural teacher.
• Afterworld resumes? Daily episodes have begun (U.S. viewers only), presumably intended to continue consistently through all hundred-something of them in total. A great story here, and interesting production style. See also.

Films of Interest

• Stop Motion: The Pit and the Pendulum. Shot in HD, this adaptation of the Poe classic will be showing in HD Fest 2007 in NYC. Looks pretty spectacular. See also their blog.
• Conventional (Indie): Frownland. This one first came to my attention via Paul Harrill’s blog on the subject. The protagonist sounds like a remarkably interesting character. As is any film that can elicit the kinds of responses this article in Filmmaker Magazine describes. I look forward to this being available for all of us to see.
• Experimental: We are the Strange. Filmmaker M. Dot Strange started at YouTube, ended up at Sundance (the first YouTuber to do so)… and came away disillusioned with what he called the “minor league Hollywood” he found there (Hear him talk about it on ABC News). Mike Belmont (M. Dot Strange) is one of my heroes, and his stop motion / CGI hybrid film is extraordinary. His website is loaded with cool extras too. Check it out. (Possibly NSFW).

Resources & Training

• FilmSound.org. An excellent resource, dedicated to the Art of Film Sound Design and Film Sound Theory.
• Illuminations: Why 3 Point Lighting? This 2005 article by Jim Stinson is a great introduction to a real-world technique that, in the proper engine, could be very useful on machinima sets as well.3 point lighting.: http://www.videomaker.com/article/10625/
• Accent Your Character. Paul Meier is a professional trainer in the area of regional dialect (accent) emulation. He has several products on the market for someone to train themselves in a wide variety of dialects from around the world, and most of them are fairly pricey for the casual machinima voice actor. However, the two CDs offered here via Pulp Gamer are a “lite” version of the training for a handful of dialects from the British Isles. They were designed for role-playing gamers, and are priced VERY affordably.

Tools & Software

• MediaFire file-sharing service. Like YouSendIt, but easier / better. Great for sharing large files with your collaborators.
• The Linux Motion Picture Pipeline. Someone asked me recently about a machinima production pipeline on the Linus platform. We’ll probably have to write that up ourselves, but this is a great example for filmmaking in general.
• Ardour Digital Audio Workstation. Speaking of Linux apps, this audio production suite is supposed to be on par with ProTools. I’ve not got a Linux box right now, so I’ve never tried it, but if you do it’s certainly worth a look. (Thanks, Hugh.)
• Scratch - animation for kids. Presumably, just about anyone can pick up this software and learn to do basic animation. A neat concept, reminded me of Buddy’s SummerTech experiences for some reason.