Oh, dear. The decision on the WowGlider case is in, and it doesn’t look good.
We’ll have legal commentary on this as soon as we can talk to someone who knows about this law stuff. But it might well be that US Machinimators just became even more limited, at least in theory.
Here at Machinimafordummies Towers, we recently received an email from a guy looking to put together a racing scene. Now, I’ve seen a few pieces of racing Machinima in my time, but it’s always been a minority interest, with nothing like the pull of the flight-sim scene, say.
But a bit of Googling around did come up with a very impressive-looking, highly-modded engine that he could use.
It’s called rFactor, and apparently it’s independent (which means it’d be easier to negotiate some kind of license for commercial work), it’s highly moddable (the official site has dozens of varied addons), fairly pretty (not at the level of the latest racing games, but good enough to play onscreen), and has full camera and replay tools.
Here’s a quick demo of its potential:
Interesting tool!
I don’t know about you, but if I were Head Honcho at Bioware, the thing keeping me up at night would be “Gosh darn it, we simply haven’t hired enough top class machinimators yet”.
Well, they’ve just added Leo ‘Dr Nemesis’ Lucien to their roster.
Leo is the man behind Binary Picture Show, and the creator of seminal machinima pieces such as Beast (which, regular readers may recall, I quite liked).
Congratulations Leo – it’s about time your talents and abilities started netting you some actual green stuff1. Just don’t let this stop you making great machinima!
1 Adjust colour for Canadian money as appropriate. It could be bright pink for all I know.
We kinda won. Certainly, there’s a good chance the legislation will be de-fanged.
See http://stealth.strangecompany.org for more info.
The producer of This American Life on getting good at creating by starting bad.
Man. This is one of the best pieces on the creative life, how to make good films, how to work through the bits where you know you’re not making good films, that I’ve ever heard. Please, everyone in the Machinima world, listen to this one.
P.S. - so, Overman, you’re all kinds of right with your current approach.
BoingBoing links to this guide to making online videos reusing copyrighted content. It’s long and rather hard going, but provides invaluable tips for anyone making Machinima using any materials copyrighted by someone else.
(Sadly it’s US-centric, of course.)
For example, did you know that making “frag videos” memorialising a performance in a game is actually clearly Fair Use?
Very interesting.
We interrupt your normal Machinima for some really, really bad news.
You remember that proposal to remove internet access for filesharers after three infringements? The one that was blatantly excessive and bloody worrying?
Well, someone at the EU looks to be planning to stealth it through on MONDAY!
Professor Lillian Edwards of the University of Southhampton has an article on the subject. It’s tough going, but you need to read this - she’s one of the UK’s foremost experts on Internet law, and she lays out just what’s so very, very bad about this whole thing.
In short: This is a stealth attempt to impose a law that would remove all internet access from anyone convicted - by their ISP - of three violations of copyright. It doesn’t matter if those were accidental or deliberate. It doesn’t matter if someone else was using your wifi connection.
It doesn’t matter that denying people friendships, contact with family, and potentially their means of making a living for trading a couple of songs is vastly excessive.
If you’re in the UK, use WriteToThem to contact your MEP and ask them to vote against this proposal.
(Anyone know how non-UK people can find their MEPs?)
Also, please spread the word of this anywhere you can.
Seriously, this looks to be bad. If you don’t want to risk your internet access being cut off for good because your ISP rightly or wrongly thinks you’ve been filesharing, or because you’ve not set your router up correctly and someone’s been using it, or just because you think permanently disconnecting someone from the predominant communication medum of the age is a bit harsh for sharing a couple of songs,
PLEASE contact your MEP this weekend.
Before it’s too late.
If you make machinima using World of Warcraft, or even if you’ve ever thought about doing so, this post is for you. Your life just got a whole lot easier.
Over at WowInsider, moo Money posts about a new WoW machinima tool from Mads ‘Malu05’ Lund. This is the most feature-rich WoW machinima tool in existence, to the best of my knowledge, and it’s going to blow your mind. It’s not yet clear whether this tool requires you to run a private World of Warcraft server or whether it operates client-side only on the official WoW servers.
moo describes it as
The tool that will change WoW machinima forever
and I think she might be right. The tool allows multiple cameras (through clever use of saved viewpoint positions), speeding up of the WoW day/night cycle, bullet time (yes, really), automatic smooth camera panning, automatic tracking of player avatars and even resizing of avatars. You can trigger almost any animation, in realtime, by simply picking your animation of choice from a drop-down list. You can even detach the camera from the player model and wander all over the map if you like – we would have committed almost any act to get hold of that functionality when we were making BloodSpell.
At the time of writing, the tool is still in a closed beta state, but Malu05, the insane genius who knocked this baby together, is openly inviting participation from other coders. He’s released a lengthy demonstration video, showing the tool in action. If he can deliver on his promises in the video, then it’s going to be hard to see Malu05’s tool as anything less than the Holy Grail for WoW machinimators.
Thanks to moo Money for giving us an early tip-off here.
Books in the For Dummies … series traditionally end with a section called The Part Of Tens, which consists of lists of ten related items, points or tips. Some of them are amusing, some of them are useful, and the best of the bunch are both at once.
For Machinima For Dummies, our “Tens” included Ten Machinima Sites To Bookmark, Ten Machinima Films You Must Watch and Ten Ways To Ruin Your Machinima Movie.
Here’s another list of ten: in this case, ten online machinima resources that might have passed you by. A list like this seems more suited to the web than printed text anyway, and I’ll try to keep it reasonably up-to-date. These are in no particular order, by the way. As always, if you have any suggestions of your own, make a comment at the end of the post.
Lucinda McNary (lucindamc123 from the Moviestorm and The Movies communities) has started this group for machinima creators and fans. Veoh shows serious signs of becoming the new cool kid on the block, so head over there now and join for free.
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a tool from the good ol’ days of the early internet, but it’s still used today. You can think of it as an instant messaging application crossed with a chatroom. There are quite a few very useful machinima-related channels in existence. The most active is the #machinima channel on irc.quakenet.org. Although the channel tends to be populated mainly by World of Warcraft machinimators, it’s enormously friendly, and you’re likely to find someone happy to chat about almost any aspect of machinima here. You might also want to try #machinima on irc.freenode.net, which – while less active than its quakenet cousin – often plays host to the most complex technical discussions. Moviestorm also has an unofficial irc channel, #moviestorm on freenode.
Unfamiliar with IRC? It’s not nearly as complicated as you might think. This is a good beginner’s tutorial .
We’ve “already mentioned” the Machinima Google Calendar, but it’s worth including in this list nonetheless. The calendar includes upcoming events of interest to machinimators, and you don’t have to be a Google Calendar user to subscribe.
Overman’s audio conferences have rapidly become the place to meet your fellow machinimators, to network and chat, and to have a fun and interesting discussion about any topic that arises. For the past few months, the talk has taken place within Second Life. You don’t need a paid Second Life account to join in – just sign up for free and get in touch with Overman (Sol Bartz in-world) once you’re up and running.
A brand new entry on the playing field, tekbreeze is a project from digital_phil, the host of the ill-fated Machinima Live! podcast. Phil says that tekbreeze
was created with the simple notion of building an online community to support blogs, forums, portfolios and interactive publications focused on gaming, Machinima and technology in general.
And yes, it’s free to join.
As well as hosting forums for Z-Studios, the Machinifeed and the Overcast, the Z-studios forums serve as a point of discussion for
All Things Anymation: Machinima, Animation, Motion Graphics, Filmmaking
Often some of the best machinima- and anymation-related discussion on the ‘net takes places here. If you’re not a regular visitor yet, you’re missing out.
Sometimes, getting your friend Dan to do all the voices for your epic machinima series just won’t cut it. You need to find some real actors. If you can’t drag your entire cast round to your custom-built sound studio, this might be the next best thing. This popular forum is full of people who are only too happy to provide vocal talent for whatever project you might have in mind. They’re pretty good, too.
Adam and Derby, previously known for The Movies On Air podcast, have started a new podcast, this time aiming to cover all aspects of machinima rather than just The Movies. It’s called Elite Radio and the guys have a few episodes in the can already.
LinkedIn is a hugely popular networking site for what are rather euphemistically termed “professionals”. The Machinimators group is intended as a network for professional machinima creators throughout the world. If you’re a professional or semi-professional machinima creator (or you’d like to be!) contact me on LinkedIn and request an invitation to the group.
Ever wondered what your fellow machinimators like to listen to? The machinima group on last.fm will tell you. If you haven’t discovered last.fm yet, you’re missing out on the revolution. The website will track the music you listen to, either through it’s own software or through one of the many plugins for popular music players on all platforms. You can then ask last.fm for music similar to the stuff you normally listen to. If you join the Machinima group, you can also ask the site to stream you a random selection from everything we’ve been playing over the last few days, which can lead to some pretty eclectic offerings.
As many people may know, I’m not a huge fan of Second Life’s graphical capabilities, despite its advantages for Machinima creators. However, slowly, slowly its faults are getting fixed, and today another one has (sort of) fallen - shadows.
Normally, nothing in Second Life casts shadows, making it look, well, kinda flat. But apparently, there’s a new ultra-experimental renderer for Second Life which enables dynamic shadows.
It might b0rk your PC, of course. But it might also help you get shadows into your SL films, which are stunningly important for mood. Hurrah!
