MachinExpo Set for Next Sunday, Nov 22nd in Second Life

The 2009 MachinExpo is set for next Sunday, November 22nd from 9AM to 2PM in the virtual world of Second Life. UCS (University Campus Suffolk) has kindly provided their island for the event. Our thanks to UCS and to Eddie Dugan for helping the Expo find a home this year.  The MachinExpo is sponsored this year by Reallusion, makers of the machinima tools iClone 4 and Crazy Talk 6.  And we thank John Martin for helping to make this possible.

The MachinExpo will consist of screening rooms where we will screen films submitted to our annual competition, plus presentations and panels on related machinima subjects. There will also be a “What is Machinima?” booth where you can watch machinima films made to explain the process of making machinima. Lainy Voom will be presenting an installation of her works in a specially designed space. And Fallopian, the recently formed machinima group, will have their own installation area.

We have made one scheduling change to the Expo programming (I’ll post the final schedule of programs tomorrow). We will be replacing the already announced Machinima Premiere scheduled at 11AM, we will be instead presenting a Special Edition of the Overcast with myself and Phil. We’ll be talking to selected jury film directors and sharing current machinima info just like the old days. Now if I can just get Phil to promise not to start drinking early, it should be a fun show. Iian Friar (IceAxe), director of the jury-nominated film, Clockwork, is one of our confirmed guests and will be participating in a Q&A. Here you can see Phil and Iain practicing their Clint Eastwood silent macho stares with each other (at least I think that’s what they are doing). This should be another gripping Overcast.

What's up with Phil and Iain?

Phil, Damien and I spent most of the morning in a tech rehearsal with panel participants and speakers getting technical issues ironed out and going over the programming schedule. As you can see, someone didn’t like their schedule so they blew up about it. We were all embarrassed, but what can you do?

Someone just blew up at the rehearsal

But that wasn’t the end of it. Phil had been working on the site late into the night and the blow up just tied him into knots.

Phil tied himself into knots of worry

We eventually talked him down with Tracy Harwood’s help (you can see her trying to get behind Phil and get a hypo into him).  It didn’t help matters much when Damien appeared and suggested that we try to see how many avatars we could stuff inside his Dr. Who phone booth.

How many avatars can you stuff into a Dr. Who phone booth?

We finally gave up when we got to about 10.  But it was certainly exciting and intimate.  I hope no young children are present at the Expo as scenes like these could be potentially damaging.

And after the crowd left (thank God), Phil and I worked ourselves to the bone getting the sets built and painted. Here you can see me working at the Lainy Voom installation testing the …ah…period chairs.

Testing Lainy's period chairs

Phil and I were amazed at how much we got accomplished today. Eddie Dugan and UCS gave us carte blanche to create the Expo set. Still have some work to do this week, but we are well on the way to having a great opening next Sunday. We did make some slight changes physically to acomodate technical issues, but nothing that participants can’t easily adjust to.

Very excited about the screening rooms. We got a chance to test them out and the films look great. We’ll have over 6 hours of Jury reels, screening reels, Asian jury reels, UCS student reels and maybe some stag films thrown in for good measure.

I’ll be blogging pretty much every day as well approach the Expo opening, so stay tuned for up to date info here.  Information about the festival is on the columns to the right of this post.