Participants: Phil Rice (US), Michelle Pettit-Me (CAN), Sam Goldwater (UK), Claus-Dieter Schulz (DE), Michael Clements (UK), Wytchwhisper Sadofsky (US?), Damien Valentine (UK), Michael Joyce (UK), Katy Fosk (UK), Todd Stallkamp (US), Frank Fox (US), Zachariah Scott (CAN), Phaylen Fairchild (US?), Sasha Rudie (US), Robert Stoneman (UK), Barricus (US), Brian Mayberry (US).

It looks like we picked an excellent time of day this month; the participation was spread across the globe. Participants came from every major North American time zone (US and Canada), a fantastic turnout from the United Kingdom, Claus-Dieter joined us from Germany (right?), and Barricus was out in Hawaii! Frank and Michelle were gracious enough to provide a wonderful setting, highlighted by a big screen TV which Frank kept populated with URLs related to the discussion (a fabulous touch, and a reminder why this venue can work so well). Discussion felt lively and relaxed, and apart from one impromptu lapdance by an androgynous Joker, things stayed wonderfully on topic. Thanks, everyone, for making this a really nice time!

The topics:

• Machinima Film Festival 2008
• Cambridge Film Festival 2008
• The Vimeo Issue
  • Vimeo’s Announcement
  • Commentary at: Shattered Keyboard, Machinima For Dummies, Eric Rice’s Blog, Kotaku
• Recent Ill Clan Article on 4:3 Encoding
• The Crysis game engine (being used by Dead On Que)
• CryEngine Character Pipeline
• Machinima at Games Convention Germany and Dragon*Con Film Festival 2008
• WithoutABox.com - Great site for keeping track of film festivals, entering them efficiently
• Phaylen’s Second Life comedy series: DiVAS
• OneJovialSim’s Lewis Carroll themed sim, Jabberwocky
• Zebra Presenter: Presenting in Second Life Made Easy

We closed with a humorous discussion on the various ways we’ve all heard “machinima” pronounced, and tried to come to a consensus as to which was correct. I don’t think we achieved that consensus, but it was fun.