I post this in the event that there are some of you out there who have not yet seen it. Many of you probably have, but it’s worth the chance of redundancy if I’m able to introduce this quality of work to just one new person.

This weekend, Ian Chisholm released Clear Skies 2, a forty-six minute followup to his immensely successful epic sci-fi movie Clear Skies. It is some mighty fine filmmaking (once again), great story, intelligent dialogue, lots of action and humor, heightened suspense… I couldn’t recommend it any more strongly.

Download links are below, but I am happy to report that Clear Skies 2 is available to watch on Vimeo, right now! (If you want the higher res original, the download is for you.)

Like the movie? Help spread the word and Digg it!

• Clear Skies 2 is downloadable from this link. The “Download Now” button is a torrent file, if you’re able to download that way. If not, there’s also a direct download link of the 357MB WMV file in the tiny print just under that button.
• You can watch the original Clear Skies streaming on Machiniplex.

As if that wasn’t enough high-tech infused machinima for one week… Dave Tyner just announced that the second installment of his series Doublekill - titled “Jess” - will premiere this Friday at 9 p.m. EST at the following site: http://www.treadster.com/jess The first installment in this series showcased some amazing Unreal Tournament customized animations and voice acting / sound engineering by our friend Ricky Grove. Needless to say, I’m excited.

Anyone feel like doing a Skype chat starting around 8:30 p.m. EST Friday for some live interaction while we watch the release? Dave plans to stream it using the DivX player on his site, thought it might be fun to chat while we watch. Interested? Let me know, we’ll organize something. (Sorry, Euro-folks, I know the timing is awful for you)

1. NewTeeVee: Sony Adds Machinima Studio To Playstation 3’s Home - Wagner James Au asked both myself and Hugh Hancock for our first impressions.
2. NVidia Badaboom converter uses GPU instead of CPU to transcode videos - I’m not sure how significant an advance this is, but thought it warranted a mention. Will be interested in some real world feedback re: just how useable the “rest of the PC” is when the GPU is tied up with encoding.
3. Karmakula Chapter 3 (live action kung fu series from the creators of The Little Ninja)
4. Tutorial: Props from Blender to Moviestorm
5. Acting Workshop, Natural Facial Performance in both CrazyTalk and iClone 3.2
6. Through the Looking Glass: Movie scenes remade in CryEngine 2 - Amazing!
7. /film - more CryEngine 2 movie scene renderings - This one includes more Blade Runner and one from The Fifth Element.
8. Apparently, I got an award. Glad someone told me over on Twitter!

Click here for archive of OverByte posts.

Quite a few of you have expressed interest in a closer look (listen) to some of the original music I’ve employed in the past few films. So now you can listen to the orchestral soundtracks for both Parking and Blast Supper, as well as my stab at the Radiohead-esque in Intervention (both the original backward and forward versions of the song). All these pieces are now atop the Sampler Playlist in the music section of the main site. I hope you enjoy the other stuff in that sampler, I’ve tried to keep that list populated with what I think are my strongest compositions.

Regarding the Intervention soundtrack, a few folks have asked me how that music was approached, given that the film was designed to play backwards. Without getting into a lot of boring detail, suffice it to say that the song was recorded in it’s forward form, but it was deliberately designed to be heard backwards and still work as a forwards song (much like the film itself). There are some circular aspects to some of the chord changes that really helped in this regard. Originally, I’d thought of only releasing the first (backwards) version of the film, and just wait and hope someone would get curious about the “backmasked” lyrics and would extract the audio and reverse it… but to be honest, I just didn’t have the patience.

Plus, it just seemed a bit much to ask of the audience at this stage. Maybe one day when there’s 100k of you regularly tuning in, I’ll try something that ambitious again and not balk.

Finally, a few folks have asked about MP3 availability on some of the soundtrack stuff. Wheels are in motion for something in this area, I appreciate your patience while the pieces are put into place.

A woman hunts for her car.

Features an original musical score.

This ultra-short film was created for the Moviestorm “Keep It Snappy” 30-second film competition.

After sifting through and mixing four and a half hours of audio, I’ve finally got the grand finale of the overcast ready for release. I’ll be releasing the show in four parts, one each Tuesday in the month of May.

The first of these four parts is available here:

http://theovercast.com/overcast-051/

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to leave it for the most part uncensored. Things got a bit wild, just adults being adults. I’ve also made each part’s mix somewhat eclectic in feel, in that each will have a mix of different original sources, conversations, interviews, musical and comedy bits, etc. There’s a logic to how it flows together, but mostly I did that no one section runs on for too long. (As an example, the big group Skype call ran nearly two hours by itself… so I give you about 30 minutes of that conversation in each finale part).

Hope you enjoy our sendoff, and thanks again for all your support over these three years of podcasting.