Machinima for Dummies

Over at Rikomatic, the eponymous Rik posts about something interesting…

“UMG has claimed some or all audio content in your video Elfay Pinkdot’s Jazz Party in Second Life. This claim was made as part of the YouTube Content Identification program. Your video is still live because UMG has authorized the use of this content on YouTube. As long as UMG has a claim on your video, they will receive public statistics about your video, such as number of views. Viewers may also see advertising on your video’s page.”

Hmm. I’m not sure what to think. It’s interesing that major music labels have a) noticed and b) decided not to attack a Machinima piece using their music. Thoughts, anyone?

Just a quick reminder - the Online Machinima Festival is happening in Second Life this weekend. There’ll be live music, award presentations, and the chance to hang out and chat with other Machinima creators - should be a great evening.

Machinima stalwart CJ Ambrosia contacted us to let us know that season 3 of his long-standing series, PEDS, is now underway.

PEDS is a comedy drama which also has the distinction of being the longest-running Grant Theft Auto machinima series ever. It’s also the series that spawned GTA Studios, the de-facto machinima tool for GTA. You can watch the Season 3 Premiere on YouTube. Keep an eye on the Pawfect Films site for new episodes.

Hancock fans might like to note that Hugh is interviewed in the June 08 issue of 3DWorld Magazine, along with several other machinima superstars such as Phil Rice, Paul Marino and Leo Lucien-Bay.

The article is a very good one, and has a much higher accuracy-to-nonsense ratio than most articles on machinima that make their way into the mainstream press. It’s also interesting to read an explanation of machinima from the point of view of hardcore 3D artists. Let’s hope this article encourages more talented 3D artists to dip their toes into the Machinima lagoon.

Yikes. My metaphor-stretching toolkit has just exploded.

The article also features a quote from me. Irritatingly, it’s a single sentence in which I manage to split an infinitive in a manner so magnificent that Gene Roddenberry would weep with pride. That’s committed permanently to print now, and will therefore annoy me till the day I die. I’m described as a “machinima veteran”, a term which is highly complementary but embarrassingly inaccurate. The article also describes Machinima For Dummies as “indispensable”, which made me blush a little.

My personal syntactical blunders aside, the article is highly recommended. UK readers will find 3DWorld for sale in most large newsagents. International readers might have to search a little, but I believe the magazine is exported to Foreign Climes with reasonable regularity.

A few pieces of news for the Azerothians in our midst:

• Uber-Machinimator Baron Soosden has been hired by the venerable Machinima site Machinima.com. He’ll be acting as Community Manager there, and also producing new Machinima for them - at least one new series, apparently. Full post here.

• There’s another feature-length Machinima piece on the horizon: MMMovie has released their first 10 minutes. It’s a pretty good piece, with great writing and voice acting, in a very “Scary Movie” style - I laughed quite a bit. Having said that, I’ll be interested to see if they can keep it up for a full 90 minutes, or if it starts to drag.

• Finally, there’s a new Blizzard Machinima piece on the horizon: they’ve released the trailer for the new Fury of the Sunwell patch. As always, it’s quite impressive Machinima work, although I didn’t feel it was as polished as earlier efforts like their Black Temple backstory piece. Some lovely shots, though.

It’s interesting to note how even high-budget game creators like Blizzard have trouble competing with their own fans - certainly, you could argue that Baron Soosden’s work has been of higher visual standard than some of Blizzard’s!

Philip Rosedale, the founder of Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) , will step down as CEO. Rosedale is quick to confirm that his work with Linden Lab will continue, so this is more of a “step sideways” than a “step down”.

A lot of changes and disruption recently among the familiar Linden faces. What repercussions this will all have for Second Life remains to be seen.

Via Massively and LinuxInsider.

That was not the best time for our longterm trackback problem to blossom into a full-fledged Denial of Service. Still, we seem to have fixed it now, I hope.

Apologies for the breakdown in service.

This is the worst news I’ve ever reported in a blog post.

Peter Rasmussen, director of “Rendevous”, “Killer Robot” and “Stolen Life”, has died.

I held Peter in great regard both as a friend, a colleague and an extraordinarily talented filmmaker. Everyone involved in Machinima is lessened by this loss.

And it’s another Second Life post. Damn you people, stop creating clever stuff!

One of the huge downsides of Second Life for a while has been the lack of lipsynching - there’s a fake you can do by playing a video on the face, but that’s about it.

However, MM Alder has recently released a new tool which offers limited 3D “lip flap” - no phoneme recognition (voice recognition-based lipsynch) or even Half Life-style volume-controlled lipsynch, but at least it does give simple 3D mouth movement when a character is talking.

There’s a very detailed and interesting post over on the Second Life wiki talking about the approach behind this lipsynch tool, some tweaks that Machinima creators can use to create better lipsynch, and the limitations of the current techniques. Sadly, once again this tool is limited by access to source code - the SL Voice code is apparently not open right now, and so it’s not possible to make the lipsynch more accurate.

We’ll add it to the list of things that will suddenly get better as and when bits of SL become Open-Source…

Even so, this is a great tool, and should be a lot of use for SL Machinima creators.

Thanks to Frank Fox for the tip.

I’m not doing a very good job of taking some quiet time, am I? Still, this one definitely deserves a post. It’s sad news, but it seems to be true: Stage 6 is shutting down.

Stage 6 is one of the premier choices for top-quality (divx) video hosting. It’s popular throughout the machinima world, but World Of Warcraft machinimators in particular are absolutely in love with it. The loss of this site is going to be a major blow. The site will close its virtual doors in just a few days time, on February 28th 2008. All hosted videos (and everything else besides) will be lost.

The official announcement on the Stage 6 site gives the reason for the shutdown as basically financial:

“So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we are not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it’s really as simple as that.”

There’s not a lot of time to make alternative arrangements, so if you currently host on Stage 6, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and investigate some alternatives. Thankfully, there are several available.

Yet again, we thank moo Money for this one. She gives good suggestions for alternative hosting in her original post on WoW Insider.