Animatu is calling for entries for their 2008 festival. Deadline is May 30, 2008.
Highlights:
They have a Machinima category for submissions
Enter up to two of your films; No entry fee
Winners selected by International Jury; category winners eligible to run for Grand Prize and Best Portuguese Film and in any category run for the RTP2-Onda Curta Prize (broadcast rights acquisition) and for the Tourism of Alentejo Award
Online Machinima Film Festival entries are closed; view the nominations by clicking here. Stay tuned for info about the award ceremony later this Spring in Second Life.
Hungry for more festival opportunities? Check out Withoutabox.com, a really great tool / resource for independent filmmakers.
The fourth machinima audio conference is scheduled to take place this Saturday, January 26, 2008 at 7:00 P.M. EST (That’s 4:00 P.M. Pacific, midnight GMT). To verify the date/time in your time zone compared to the time in New York (EST), please visit the World Time Server.
We plan to discuss Elf’s article on encoding and distribution, and whatever else comes up. All machinima creators of all experience levels are welcome. It’s looking like we’ll have the biggest turnout yet, should be a lot of fun.
More info is available at: http://z-studios.com/conference/, but here’s the basics of how it works. When the time comes for the conference, message me on Skype and I’ll add you to the text chat and - if there’s a free slot - to the voice chat as well. If more people show up than we have slots for, we have an 800 number you can call on a land line to participate in voice (just ask me about it if interested, the number won’t be published anywhere publicly), and we’ll also rotate people into and out of the Skype voice chat if need be. Just look me up when you get on Skype, and I’ll get you connected.
By the time of the next conference, it’s possible we’ll have a web conferencing solution in place which will not only improve the ease of connecting, but will greatly expand the number of simultaneous participants which can be sustained. Stay tuned! And Peter and I look forward to conversing with you Saturday!
Back in November, I had the privilege to spend about an hour talking with Matt Kelland and Dave Lloyd about Moviestorm. The excitement these guys have about the craft and their movie-making tool is positively contagious. Enjoy!
When I did a voiceover role for Leo for this film (I’m the guy on the phone at the beginning who sounds more than a little bit “J. Jonah Jameson“), I had no idea what he was using to make it… I had no idea it was being made with iClone. The guys at iClone wisely tapped Leo to do a short film which showed off their new City Elements add-on pack, and iClone in general.
Most impressive to me was Leo’s command of such a variety of dialects, both British and American. A couple of the voices had a noticeable similarity in timbre, but for the most part there was excellent distinction in that regard as well. It’s not easy to be on screen with one’s self… but then Leo already has extensive experience doing that, and doing it well.
Does this ever happen to you: a film comes along, and it’s so ridiculously gorgeous and rich, and you feel like it’s infinitely more artistic than you even know how to imagine being… and it makes you think to yourself, should I even keep making films?
And then, somehow, the despair and insecurity turn to drive and inspiration, and you hold up the object which moments ago had shamed you and now lights up the room of your imagination, and you say, “I will be a better filmmaker simply by virtue of having watched something this good. I will learn from it, I will broaden my own palette, I will make a point to paint with some new colors when I next visit the canvas.”
And then, for the next few days, what I’d term the “aftershocks”… you watch it again and again get discouraged that you just don’t have it in you to be that good, watch it again later and you get hit with a new idea to try in your next work, up and down, up and down, until it finally settles.
I’m expecting aftershocks for the next several days.
The Sims 2 has a reputation for being one of the easier machinima platforms out there - a reputation that is mostly true… there are indeed a lot of great things about the engine. However, you might have noticed the preponderance of music videos and other non-dialogue-based films which are made with The Sims 2. This versus say Halo, which seems to be the talkie magnet. And if you look at a cross section of some of today’s finer machinima filmmakers, you’ll find that many avoid lipsync altogether - not because they wouldn’t like to use it, but because why do it if it’s not going to look great?
There is a very good reason for this: to do lipsync well in machinima is not easy, and it has never been easy to do well… (okay, not until Moviestorm, but I digress). The costs of production (in terms of time) skyrocket in most machinima engines when one hopes to get precision lipsync that actually elevates the film instead of bringing down the overall quality. And this challenge has a long history.
