One of the great “hard sci-fi” writers of our time, Charlie Stross, is making an appearance in Second Life this weekend, courtesy of Delos Books. In addition to being one of the more interesting author/philosophers of today, Stross is also on the leading edge of incorporating Creative Commons into his publishing strategy. He’s a big inspiration to many of us in this “indie” circuit, who are exploring the possibilities of this model.
Does the name sound familiar in a more localized sense? Maybe you remember Hugh Hancock talking about him at various times. In fact, Charlie made a cameo voiceover appearance in BloodSpell, and had very pleasant things to say about the film and the potential of its medium. He’s a very interesting guy; if you can make it out there to hear him speak, you won’t be sorry.
Details available here. Thanks Boing Boing.
If anyone knows a cheat code to help me get past this, I’d appreciate it…
Friedrich announced this week at Free Pixel that the Machinima Film Festival 2008 is set to take place the first weekend in November in New York City. More details to follow. Yay!
And here’s what’s going on tomorrow. Doesn’t sound like bad luck to me!
- Machinima Party in Bitropolis - Bitfilm launches the grand opening of its virtual world prescence. Called Bitropolis, it takes place in the virtual world of Twinity; they’ll be showcasing Bitfilm nominee films, plus there will be a live DJ, virtual souvenirs, and a good chance to mingle with the international membership of the Bitfilm Club. More info is at: http://www.bitfilm.com/festival/bitropolis.php
- DiVAS Finale - Postponed from the original May 31 date, this Second Life sitcom’s first season comes to a close tomorrow. Two in-world screenings, followed by worldwide release. Check their blog for details.
- New Overcast - Ricky and I take on the first in a two-part series on acting in machinima. Check theovercast.com tomorrow, or watch MachiniFeed for the release announcement.
- The 52-week content marathon continues - This week, a guerilla-style short featuring a video game which, if you haven’t played it yet, as a machinima maker or enthusiast you really need to do so. Watch this blog for the embed, or keep an eye on the ZS YouTube channel.
- Event: NVision 08 / San Jose, CA; August 25-27, 2008 / Quite an interesting lineup this year, including a concentrated machinima emphasis.
- Event: 2008 DragonCon Film Festival / Atlanta, GA; August 29 to September 1, 2008 / Currently looking for suggestions, panelist participants, and machinima video submissions.
- Event: Revelation Perth International Film Festival / Perth, WA, Australia; July 3 to 13, 2008 / Leon Marvell is organizing an experimental machinima exhibition this year in memory of Peter Rasmussen.
- SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 / Singapore; December 10 to 13, 2008 / They are explicitly calling for machinima submissions; I’m not sure they’ve always done that, have they?
- Paper: What Counts as a View? - a study of various video-sharing sites to understand this unit of measurement we all use from time to time.
- Exposition: Experiments in Machinima - A nice treatment of some experimental machinima work, presented by Harrison Heller (Nefarious Guy of Amorphous Blob Productions)
- Notice: Brightcove Video Sharing Service is discontinuing its Pay Media model
- Upgrade: Sims99 Expands User Profiles to include Blogs, more
Click here for archive of OverByte posts.
“This was turning out to be such a beautiful day…”
Content Advisory: Rated R for Language and Adult Themes
This short film is the first chapter of a collection called UMBRA, a set of thematically connected short films exploring that darkest part of shadow.
Versions:
High Quality Downloads at 1280×720, 800×450, and for iPod are available at:
http://z-studios.com/films/apology/
I welcome your comments at whatever location you view the film, or right here. Thank you!
Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet on the ol’ blog here, I’ll get back on the horse pretty soon. I’ve been in hardcore production mode, and if everything goes well then tomorrow you’ll be seeing some of the result. Uncompressed render is running right now, and in the morning I plan to run off a DivX version for testing. If everything checks out okay with that, then tonight I’ll be prepping distribution renders.
It’s such a short film, under 4 minutes, but I’m more excited to show you this one than anything in recent memory. I’ll be Twittering away while I render and upload tomorrow, if you want to obsess right along with me. And as a reward to those just nutty and bored enough to do so, you’ll see the first viewing URL there before I put it anywhere else.
A funny thing happened while recording some foley last night. I won’t get into it now because I don’t want to give even a hint of a spoiler. But I’ll tell you about it next week either here or on a YouTube video blog… a practice I thought I’d hate but am starting to enjoy.
