2009 Machinima Expo Date and Location Announced

Phil, Damien and I are proud to announce that the 2009 Machinima Expo will take place on Sunday, November 22 from 9AM (Pacific Time) to 2PM (Pacific Time) on the University Campus Suffolk’s island in the virtual World of Second Life. We’ve done our best to set a time that most people in northern hemisphere times zones could accommodate. Here’s a time converter if you want to see what the Expo event times will be in your time zone:

Time Zone Converter

MachiniExpo 2009 is being produced with the assistance of the University Campus Suffolk http://www.ucs.ac.uk. University Campus Suffolk (UCS) is a unique collaboration between the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex. UCS was created in August 2007 in order to establish a university campus in Suffolk, UK. The UCS island in Second Life is a teaching and learning resource available to staff and students in the School of Arts & Humanities.

When we put out the word we were looking for a space to hold the 2nd Expo event, Eddie Dugan, Senior Teaching Practitioner in the School of Arts and Humanities (and who teaches a course in machinima at UCS) contacted us and offered the school’s facilities in Second Life along with assistance in producing the festival.

We will be screening a selection of UCS student machinima films as part of our screening series and there will be several UCS students on hand as helpers and assistants at the festival. You’ll recognize them by the special t-shirts they’ll be wearing (or perhaps an unusual hat?).

After an extensive tour of the UCS island in Second Life, we are excited at how well the structures will fit with our Expo program. There is a large, three story building with open interiors for information areas, panels/presentations, screening sessions and even a top floor lounge for folks who want to talk and drink fun virtual cocktails. Here are a few pictures:

There’s also a wonderful structure just off of the island. You can see the stone walkway that leads to this cabin in the above photo. Some very smart person set the stones just under the level of the water so that the walk to the cabin is very pleasant aesthetically.

This cabin is very much like a 50’s style bachelor pad all decorated in bright colors and square furniture. Lovely views of the ocean expanse all around and an especially beautiful view of the UCS campus building on the island. Phil and I spent a lot of time here mulling over logistics and debating programming. Here’s a shot of our mull session (I’m away from the camera; Phil is closest with his legs inside of the couch)

And here is the bachelor cabin from a view a little further away. Man, I just love flying in Second Life. We awer planning a very special event to take place here. One that we will be announcing soon. There will be a very slight re-design of the space to accommodate the programming.

Many thanks to Eddie, his students and co-workers for offering to help and then for working with us to make the Expo happen. We’ll be announcing the programming and the first round of film screenings on this blog very soon.