Machinima Expo Jury is Set

We are very proud to announce that the 2009 Machinima Expo jury is set. We have two returning judges and three new ones. They will be judging the finalists for the 5 jury awards, the Grand Prize Jury award and the Asian Machinima award.

Our sincere thanks to our 5 judges for their time and effort. We hope to send you many excellent Machinima films to consider.

The two returning judges are:

-JOEY O’BRYAN-

JOEY O’BRYAN was born in Mississippi, raised in Texas, resides in Los Angeles and keeps finding himself summoned to Hong Kong. One such occasion was to co-writeFulltime Killer, an award-winning action thriller directed by Johnnie To.After years of options, assignments and hustling to get another movie off the runway, he got a short story published instead. “The Unlikely Redemption of Jared Pierce” appeared in the Stoker-nominated anthology Dark Delicacies II: Fear.

He is currently dying from encouragement as various film projects inch toward production.

-ARMAND CONSTANTINE-

ARMAND CONSTANTINE is a freelance game writer whose recent projects include Pandemic Studios’ The Saboteur, BioWare Austin’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2, for which he shared a nomination for the Game Developers Choice Award for Best Writing.  His fantasy and horror fiction has appeared in various outlets, including most recently Midnight Walk, an anthology of original horror fiction edited by Bram Stoker Award winner, Lisa Morton.  For more information about these and other projects, please visit www.armandconstantine.com

And our three new judges are:

-TARI AKPODIETE-

Journalist TARI AKPODIETE is a multi-award-winning filmmaker. “Impact”, her live action documentary television series on social issues has aired around the world. Her first animated movie, “VoxPopuli Terra Pax”, was selected as the innagural Newbury Film Series ‘Twitter Flick of the Week’. She was honoured when Hugh “Nomad”Hancock named her as one of the “Women Who Have Changed Machinima” on Ada Lovelace Day. Tari has spoken at numerous conferences and events throughout Canada and the United States, and her articles have appeared in print and online. She has also been actively involved in the mobile computing community. Nicknamed the “Pocket PC Princess”, she married her long-term interests in entertainment and technology to pioneer video playback on handhelds. Tari currently resides in Toronto where she divides her time between community evangelism and social media activism.

Check out her blogs: digipendence.com and solojourno.com

-MICHELLE PETIT-MEE-

MICHELLE PETTIT-MEE has been working as a Cinematic Designer for video game studio BioWare for the past two years, working on titles such as Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2. Previously to that, Michelle was machinimator-in-residence for Short Fuze UK, using Moviestorm. She began creating machinima five years ago and her Sims 2 film ‘The Snow Witch’ was a jury prize winner at last year’s Expo.

FRIEDRICH KIRSCHNER is a filmmaker, visual artist and software developer. He re-purposes computer games and realtime animation technology to create animated narratives and interactive performances.

His work has been shown at various international animation festivals and exhibitions, including the Laboral Gameworld exhibit in Gijon, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Ottawa international Animation festival and the Seoul Media Art Biennale. He is currently an independent researcher and board member of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.