Closing out the 2009 Machinima Expo
The 2009 Machinima Expo is over. The response over the last two weeks has been excellent. I’m so glad so many of you not only took the time to come, but chose to blog about the event a post your photos. Thank God we got something right again this year. Here is a link log os some of the most interesting photos/blogs/conversations about this years Expo:
Ricky’s Flickr Set
Overman’s Blog – Expo 2009 Wrap-up
Machinima Expo Blog Comments
Overman’s Flickr Album
Russell Boyd’s Flickr Album
Pineapple Pictures Comments & Photos
Thebiz’s Comments
Dulci’s Photo Gallery
Darth Angelus’ Comments
Hathead’s Comments
Wolf & Dulci Hour Machinima Expo Discussion w/ John Martin & Gabe
Wolf & Dulci Hour Machinima Expo Pre Discussion w/ Ricky, Damien, and Phil
Please feel free to let us know of any we may have missed and post them in the comments section of this blog post.
While we feel overall that this year’s Expo was a success (especially the screening set up and selection) we want to do a better job next year on the physical arrangement of the events and in organizing them. Part of the reason we held a Post Mortem several days after the Expo (and sincere thanks to those who came to share their ideas and criticisms) was to get an idea of what can do to improve the event in these areas. When you work on something for a long time you often lose objectivity and we wanted to see what others thought. Well, the response to the Post Mortem was fantastic and we have an entire list of things we plan on discussing and trying out next year. Although I can’t share them all (we don’t want to announce something we aren’t going to do yet) some of the highlights for next year’s Expo include:
- Making the 2010 Expo a two-day event
- Staying at the UCSville island, but moving the event into a Skybox
- Creating a unique Second Life HUD for the event
- Using a more linear schedule instead of having events compete
- Providing breaks in the programming; creating special socializing events
- Orienting people to Second Life better throughout the year
- Creating SL Video Tutorials specifically for the Expo
- Finding alternate outside of Second Life to bring the Expo to people.
- Focusing more on Machinima Production next year
- Increasing the staff of the Expo
Phil, Damien and I would like to thank all of those who made the 2009 Expo a success. The Expo is about machinima and the people who make it. After seeing so many ups and downs in the community, it encouraging to see our community come together at the Expo. We had many new visitors, shared promotion with the Asian Shooot Festival and presented almost 8 hours of machinima films. We could not have done any of this without you and your enthusiasm for this great, new art form.
This coming week I’ll be lecturing on machinima at an animation school in San Francisco. One thing I’ll be telling the students is that now is the time to create machinima because the tools are there and the community is strong. Couldn’t say that if it weren’t for you.
Thank You.
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Thanks to Digital Phil for several pictures used in header.
There are 3 Comments to "Closing out the 2009 Machinima Expo"
Decompressing the event into two days sounds like a sound idea guys, especially if you can keep the same time window as this year for each day.
I felt for a Singaporian film maker I spoke to, who realised that much of the event was in the wee hours of Sunday morning in her time zone, at least a Sat / Sun mix would help a little with that, in that Sun isn’t usually a work day.
Rewriting the HUD is possible of course, people do it, but what a pain to do, and none of the versions I’ve seen are any simpler, there must be an easier way to help people?
There are lots of SL orientation videos around, maybe a link page? However I think we’ve tried that before. It is really tough to get people to invest the time getting used to SL before an event, if they are not sure they will use it afterwards, and I think that last minute jump in from complete noobs is probably as much as can be reasonably expected, thank goodness they come at all!
Maybe a series of smaller & simpler events throughout the year would give people who are interested a chance to get orientated.
I’m sure lots of new ideas will occur and I’m so glad you are willing to consider another year, this event is becoming an important focus for many indie machinimators, including myself!
Having events which ‘run themselves’ througout the week seems like a wonderful idea, this year’s screenings were very well organised and I appreciated having the films gathered together and organised into batches.
What a lot of work went into all this event , thanks so much.
Thanks again all involved for all your hard work – it was an inspiring event!
Re: HUD. Was there a HUD this year? I missed it if there was. My concept is i) take all the scripted event navigation points and access them directly from a HUD (instead of requiring avatar/camera navigation); and ii) easy access to a few key web urls. The HUD would be a handful of buttons which initiate a corresponding SL dialog box and action. Making event navigation easy and being proactive with web links is where a HUD can help.
A couple more ideas post-wrap:
- “unconference” session
- invite mdot strange to keynote (he already has an SL avatar and attended an SL screening of WATS in SL) That guy pumps me up.
- stream desktops into SL for technical workshops/demos
- run workshops in a production workflow sequence to watch/demonstrate a work as it develops across sessions, linking them together by outputs.
Looking forward to see what you do next year!
HH
Thanks for the excellent feedback, Kate and Hathead. No, there wasn’t a custom HUD this year. Sorry if I gave that impression. I was referring to the possibility of designing one for next year. Your ideas are exactly what we had in mind, HH. I’ll be talking to you more about it in the new year. And Kate, we do plan to develop video programming for the SL newbies throughout the year and at monthly meetings on land we will be buying in SL.
Thanks again!