Feb
19
2010

7-Hour MaMachinima Festival 2010 To Start Tomorrow (February 20th) in Second Life

The second annual MaMachinima International Festival will begin screening films tomorrow at 10AM (Pacific Time) at 4 specially designed locations in the virtual world of Second Life. With over 50 machinima films screening, the event will run for 7 hours with a 2-hour after event party. For those who can’t make it to Second Life, the event is being screened live in Amsterdam (at PLANETART Medialab Artspace) and online at the MMIF site. The festival is non-competitive (no awards will be given) and is instead devoted to bringing machinima to a wider audience and to celebrate this new artform. Founded by Chantal Harvey and many, many volunteers, this festival has a wonderful spirit and is a not-to-be-missed event. In addition to screening films, many of the filmmakers will be discussing their work and answering questions.

Here is the basic information on the festival as provided by MMIF.org

MMIF 2010 info, promo video, full programme, live streams, contact and latest updates and changes at http://MMIF.org

MMIF 2010 ARTISTS:
Gala Charron – Ogogoro – Lainy Voom – Draxtor Despres – Bryn Oh – Rohan Fermi – Toxic Menges – Tara Yeats – Phaylen Fairchild – Pooky Amsterdam & Russell (Rosco) Boyd – Poid Mahovlich – CodeWarrior Carling – Evie Fairchild – Graham Miami – Kronos Kirkorian – Osprey Therian – Chaffro Schoonmaker – SaveMe Oh – Dulci Parx – Chatnoir Studios – Paisley Beebe – Rysan Fall – Sol Bartz (phil Rice) – Rocksea Renegade – Cisko Vandeverre – Nitwacket (Pyewacket Bellman) – Chantal Harvey – Lowe Runo – Pia Klaar – Al Peretz – Halden Beaumont – Kolor Fall – Binary Quandry – spyVspy Aeon – Animatechnica – Miles Eleventhauer – Lizsolo Mathilde – Delgado Cinquetti – L1aura Loire – Iono Allen – Pyewacket Kazyanenko – Fort Knight – Luca Lisci – Larkworthy Antfarm – Beans Canning – Gtoon Jun – Tutsy Navarathna – Hadji Ling – Colemarie Soleil – Xineohp Guisse – Lorin Tone – Ian Friar – Suzy Yue – Claus Uriza / Emily Hifeng – Meta Lord, and others.

MMIF 2010 HOSTS:
Blue Linden, Toxic Menges, Pooky Amsterdam, Draxtor Despres, Chantal Harvey, Poid Mahovlich, Paisley Beebe, Evie Fairchild, CodeWarrior Carling, Lauren Weyland, Phaylen Fairchild, Starshine Halasy and others.

MMIF 2010 TIMES:
Saturday 20th of February
19:00 CET (= SL 10 am PST) – DOORS OPEN
20:00 CET (= SL 11 am PST) – Opening ceremony + Machinima film screenings
03:00 CET (= SL 6 pm PST) – THE END + After party online in SL

PHYSICAL LOCATION:
PLANETART Medialab Artspace
Wibautstraat 150
1091 GR Amsterdam (NL)

VIRTUAL LOCATION:
MMIF 1, 2, 3, 4
Second Life®

Teleport links via http://live.MMIF.org

The full schedule is available at MMIF.org.

Katy Fosk’s film “The Vampyre“ will screen at 11:30AM. I voiced the main character and created a new sound edit for the film. Unfortunately, I won’t be on hand to discuss the work as I have to be at work. But I believe Kate will be and I hope to attend later in the afternoon.

See you there!

By ricky | Posted in Blog, Machinima | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
Feb
03
2010

LOGORAMA – Oscar nominated short film

LOGORAMA, created by the amazing French animation company H5, gets my vote for the best short animated film at the Oscar’s this year. It’s very funny and twisted parody of the Hollywood style action movie with a lot of satire on the American consumer culture thrown in. Wonderful style and faaaaantastic acting. Check it out here:



You can also watch 4 of the 5 nominated films at various sites online. They are all very, very good. I saw FRENCH ROAST at Siggraph in August, but the other three (LADY AND THE REAPER, LOGORAMA and GRANNY O’GRIMM’S SLEEPING BEAUTY are all new to me). Here is a central link at Twitchfilm.net

By ricky | Posted in Blog, animation | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
Jan
31
2010

OLD FANGS, a superb animated short from Sundance

 

Background tests for OLD FANGS from the offical website

 

First time in over a decade I’ve followed anything that happened at Sundance. Perhaps the change in the the leadership there and their huge effort to provide free screenings of lots of festival content on YouTube and their site has made a difference. I know there was a thoughtful article in the New York Times today about “exploding the Indie film world” and starting over again (with lots of micro content published and distributed by the creators themselves). I think this bodes well for Machinima both as an art form and as an viable technique for professional animation. Only time will tell.

After watching many excellent short animated films at the Sundance site, this one (OLD FANGS, directed by Adrien Merigeau) has stayed with me and since the Sundance site offers the ability to embed the video, I thought I’d put it out there for the machinima community. It’s not machinima, but the quality of the story and the visual style is certainly something we can do in several different machinima engines. And the serious effort in creating a story with real feeling is impressive. Coupled with an excellent sound mix and very good acting and you have a truly excellent short animated film.

The director, Adrien Merigeau, has been blogging about the film for months now and there is a lot of excellent and interesting posts at the film’s official site. It’s worth the time to read through the entries.

I hope you like OLD FANGS as much as I do.

 

 

By ricky | Posted in Blog | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
Jan
26
2010

Sundance and Machinima

With a new director at the helm (John Cooper), it looks like Sundance is going to re-boot and reach back to it’s indie roots once again. Very glad this is happening as so much of popular culture is filled with merchandizing, promotion and appeals to sentiment/stereotype. I hope Mr. Cooper is able to walk the walk. The festival has certainly done a good job of making many of their films available for streaming and download for those unable to attend.

Lot’s of interesting animation at the festival including a Machinima documentary, Life 2.0, about people in Second Life. The trailer certainly looks good. There was a machinima panel several years ago, but I don’t think anything every happened as far as machinima being a category of animation at the festival. Perhaps with this new reboot, machinima will become a more interesting idea for Mr. Cooper and the festival organizers. Would love to screen the awards panel machinima from last years MachinExpo.

Here’s the Life 2.0 trailer.

“Life 2.0″ documentary teaser from Jason Spingarn-Koff on Vimeo.

By ricky | Posted in Blog | Tagged , , | Comments (1)