Comments on: Closing out the 2009 Machinima Expo

By: Ricky Grove

Ricky Grove — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:52:54 +0000

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!

By: HatHead Rickenbacker

HatHead Rickenbacker — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:25:13 +0000

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

By: Kate

Kate — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:14:05 +0000

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.