Holy crap. http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/ Well, that makes the discussion about which engine to use all the more interesting…
The first big Guerilla Showrunner project is now up and available, and I’m thinking a lot of Machinima people will find it interesting. In short, I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a series project fun, and the answer that came back was - fans. Active fans who comment on the show, tell you they like it, and tell their friends about it. Too often we end up with thousands of casual viewers whom we only know as numbers on a YouTube page, and not as many interested, involved viewers as we’d like.
So it’s the Day of Announcements here at Machinima for Dummies Towers. Guerilla Showrunner! I’ve been working on a new project - yes, in addition to the mammoth task that is Death Knight Love Story. For a while now I’ve been feeling I want to do a bit more talking about all the various tips and tricks I’ve learned over more than a decade of making shows. And I’m not just talking about Machinima shows here, but also live-action stuff like Kamikaze Cookery.
A quick announcement, in the spirit of full disclosure: as of January 2011, I am no longer employed by Moviestorm Ltd. I know we’ve been pretty quiet on this blog recently. Sorry about that. Both Hugh and I have been pretty busy, and the blog has been drowned in spam, but we’ve got some exciting changes planned. I’ll let Hugh tell you more about that in the next post.
In what must be one of the most potentially exciting developments for independent machinima creators in a long time, we’ve just heard that Winch Gate Properties Ltd., the creators of the online MMORPG Ryzom, will be releasing the entire game as an open-source project. It sounds like the developers are keen to work with the community, and will be accepting the best 3rd-party developments into the main Ryzom codebase. Projects already underway include ports of the game to both Mac OSX and Linux.
As promised last year, Moviestorm have now announced lifetime subscriptions, for f £149.99 / €199.99 / $249.99 . Good stuff. Now, we’re just waiting for that end-of-life policy…
Damn those guys at Moviestorm. They’re the only software company doing really interesting things with Machinima right now (the Second Life pro-Machinima EULA change nonwithstanding - I’ll be writing about that later - and iClone people, if you have interesting news, please send it to us!), and so we at MfD have to keep writing our big “yes, we’ve both done work for them, Johnnie’s their product manager, but Hugh’s writing this as an independent outsider” disclaimer.
It’s Ada Lovelace Day again and so, in a combination of genuinely heartfelt celebration and bare-faced self-promotion, here’s a link to our article from this time last year, Women Who Have Changed Machinima. If anything, women have become even more prominent in Machinima and Anymation over the past twelve months. It’s particularly obvious in the more abstract creative communities such as Moviestorm or IClone, but even the communities for supposedly male-oriented games have many prominent female bloggers, movie-makers and celebrity players.
Coming from the “Rise to Power” competition again (what is it with the official Blizzard Machinima competitions that bring out such amazing work? The same thing happened with the Machinima Film Festival), Slashdance’s latest effort didn’t win anything, but probably should have. I loved “Welcome to the Deadmines”, but this is its equal in its pure simplicity and emotion. Nearly all shot in-game, too. Love it.
It’s not very often these days that I get excited by a new graphical advance, but this one got me. Proper clothing! Proper hair! At last! (When it eventually turns up)