Participants: Phil Rice (US), Ben Grussi (US), Damien Valentine (UK), Elf (US), Frank Fox (US), Lucinda McNary (UK), Michael K. Clements (UK), Peter Rasmussen (AUS), Ricky Grove (US), Zachariah Scott (US), Michelle Pettit-Me (CAN), doogle300 (?), Will Vitale (?), NarcoticGetz (?), Thundara (US).

Elf’s article on encoding and distribution practices was the anchor for this month’s conference, though the unmoderated feel allowed conversation to venture wherever people felt led. There were a few more people not listed above who were also joining us via the 800 number, making the total participants number at 16 at the peak - the highest turnout yet! Here are links from the chat log:

• Elf’s Article on Encoding and Distribution
• Lainy Voom’s “The Dumb Man”
• After Effects Tutorials
• Motion Tracking
• Crysis - the game and its tools
• Faceposer Tutorial
• Interesting Firefox Ad
• Merchandising as a money-making model re: machinima
• The Sims 2 as a machinima platform
• Machiniplex
• At this point, the conversation went all over the place for another 90 minutes or so, I confess I lost track of the topics because I got caught up in a private conversation with Ben.
• There were also a number of side conversations in the text chat on a variety of topics, the most spirited of which was one on story / screenwriting techniques, led in large part by Lucinda. Really good stuff.

Here’s a text file of the full Skype chat log: conf04_chatlog.txt