Thoughts and Pictures of the Machinima Expo 2008

I’ve finally managed to get my Expo pictures together and upload them to Flickr. Here is the set:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15491090@N07/sets/72157608996818794/

Also, quick correction to the official program that we handed out and posted here. Aaron Jean’s information on his Canadian Jury finalists page was incorrect. His link is

http://www.aaronjeans.com

Thoughts on the Expo

I can’t tell you how pleased I am with how well the Expo turned out for us. My sincere thanks to everyone who came, both panelists and attendees. And even with some minor glitches (video hiccup, my lost microphone) veterans of Second Life events told us that this was one of the best events they’d ever attended in SL. We managed to stay on schedule and get everything done we had planned. And I was just blown away by all of the postive feedback we received on the event.

Brian Mayberry from Dead on Que sent me this email a few days ago:

Huge Success!

Even though I was in and out during the day, and completely passed out like a wuss after the live music, I had a blast at the Expo! (Phil, I think I got as little sleep last weekend as you did! Yikes!)

I honestly didn’t know quite what to expect, I was sort of under the impression it would be second rate when compared to what it was originally. But as it turned out, those silly impressions of mine were completely unfounded! Bang up work guys, and everyone else involved too! Though I’m sorry to say that I don’t know who all may have been. Please send along my praise, cheers, and hugs where applicable!

Best part about the whole thing, it got Mike and I really excited about the future. Some fairly heated discussions were taking place during both the panel and the Overcast on our side, in classic knee-jerk reaction to the topics and questions, that I’ll have to go back and re-listen to much of the other responses! Haha! That’s the sign of a great event, IMHO. We must have gone over the ideology of your amateur vs. professional points, Ricky, for another hour at minimum!

Thanks again for the great event!

Cheers,

-Brian Mayberry

I don’t think I could have received a more flattering and inspiring response. Certainly, after the disaster of the Montreal Expo cancellation, we never expected this kind of excitement and enthusiasm. Thank you, Brian.

Special thanks to the women who participated in the Women in Machinima panel. I’ll be contacting you individually with thanks and a suggestion for future meetings. Ian Chisholm was a remarkable guest director for what I think was our best Premiere yet for “Clear Skies”. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come and give us a wonderful running commentary in the text chat while the film was playing (I’ll try to get that together and post it here). And thanks to all of the jury winners who attended and to those who had films screening at the Expo. It was so much fun to sit next to Aaron Jeans when his film “Boomerang” came on the screen. He had been trying to track it down all day, so when he finally timed it right late in the evening, Aaron was like an excited parent watching their child perform in a pagaent. Thank you for that enthusiasm, Aaron. You make it worth all of the effort. Really.

And finally, a big thanks to my co-producers Phil Rice, Ingrid Moon (who did a wonderful job heading the Women in Machinima panel) and to Damien Valentine for all of your help and for keeping your heads up when it looked it we were going to fold.

What’s Next?

We will continue to run the screening reels at Jamville Island in Second Life all week. I’d highly recommend that you get together with a friend and sit down and watch the reels. You can also spend time at Tom Jantol’s exhibit of his Anymation films. walk through Marque Cornblatt’s installation and sit in the Peter Rasmussen memorial exhibit and watch some of his remarkable machinima filmmaking.

This week we will be working on frank and honest critiques of films submitted to the Expo. We put out an invitation to anyone who submitted a film that if they wanted constructive criticism of their works to let us know. We have had about 15 filmmakers take us up on the offer and are in the proces of responding to them with our ideas/thoughts.

And we will also be having an open discussion in the ZS forums and at this site on how to improve our festival for next year. Even though we were very successful, we still have a lot of room for improvement. Better time scheduling, video servers upgrades, specific schedules for the exhibits, along with several other items are on our discussion agenda. So, stay tuned for announcements on the post mortem and please join us in the discussion.