http://blog.machinima-expo.com/

The 2011 Machinima Expo will take place on November 19th and 20th, 2011. You can attend via Second Life or through our web portal at:

www.machinima-expo.com

If you need to contact us here at the Expo for any reason, please use the “Contact Us” at the blog link listed above.

-The Expo Team

If you haven’t tried Muvuzi, head over to their excellent website and check it out. Very easy to use software based on the Unreal Engine, plus friendly forums and lots of tutorials.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/ucsville/152/152/1101

We haven’t been able to work out a chat system for those of you who may not want to come to Second Life (sorry about that), but if you want to volunteer and can’t make the meeting, simply contact us using the contact form here at our Expo blog.

Anyone new to Second Life can download the free software here. The slurl (second life url) is a link to a location in Second Life where the meeting will be held. Just tell us you are new to Second Life and there will be plenty of people to help you out.

If you need to figure out the time zone for the meeting, here is a good time zone converter.

Hope to see you at the meeting!

We are looking for people to help with promotion, programming, logistics and ushers/help for the actual Expo event. Come on by if you are interested. We’d love to have you.

Will post the Second Life slurl here in a few days. Still working on the location.

And for those of you who don’t care to come to Second Life, we are going to try to set up a chat channel where you can interact with everyone.

Thanks! Hope to see you on Sunday!

I also appreciated her challenge to the community to be more demanding with our filmmaking. She urges us to help each other by honest criticism and help in order to make our films better. Amen, brother.

One point she makes that I can clearly echo in my work on the screening team this year for the Expo, is how truly international machinima is becoming. We had dozens and dozens of films submitted from all over the world. And given the statistics for attendance at the Expo, it appears that we had people come from all parts of the globe to watch films and learn about the “state of the art” as Tracy puts it.

My thanks to Tracy Harwood for taking the time to watch films, ask questions, go over the submissions and for making connections for us that help and stimulate the machinima community. And, by the way, she also designed this year’s Machinima Expo program!

You can listen to the audio here and/or read the entire speech in a Scribd document below. Remember you can enlarge or reduce the text if you need to, just look at the controls at the bottom of the screen. You can download the document (pdf, 141kb)

Tracy Harwood Keynote @ Machinima Expo 2010 by rgrove

Keynote at 2010 Machinima Expo

The 2010 Machinima Expo was a break-through year for the festival. Consider that in our first year (2008) we maxed out at over 100 people, whereas this year we had well over 1000 people attend the festival via our web portal alone. Our film submissions were the highest they’ve ever been and the profile of the Expo is such that people from all over the world are starting to take notice of our Machinima festival. So what do we do next?

We start planning to make next year better. And we need your help in order to do that.

The Expo has always been about bringing the community together and sharing the best films we can find. But it takes a lot of careful planning and work to make that happen. That’s why we’ve started a tradition of the “Expo Post-Mortems” where we have an open forum for discussing the previous years Expo, figuring out what worked and what didn’t, and laying down the foundation for the next year’s festival.

And so we are excited to announce that the Post-Mortem for the 2010 Machinima Expo will take place this coming Sunday, Dec 5th at 10am (Pacific Time) @ the UCSville Expo Hub in Second Life. The slurl for the event is:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/ucsville/161/161/1101

Some of the ideas we plan on discussing are:

For those of you who can’t make the event or simply don’t enjoy Second Life you can fill out our feedback form and add your comments. Here is the link for the Expo feedback form:

MachinExpo 2011 Feedback Form

If you have more elaborate comments and suggestions about the Expo, you can send them directly to our Expo email by using the “Contact Us” for at the top of this page. Also, if you are interested in volunteering to work on the Machinima Expo 2011, come to the meeting and let us know what you’d like to do. We had many future staff members come to last year’s Post Mortem. It’s really a great way to meet and share mutual interests and goals.

We hope to see you this Sunday!

1. Offer the films in better streaming quality than years past
2. Make it easier for people to attend

The first goal needs no explanation: we all want to see machinima – our own and that of our colleagues – broadcast in the best possible quality. Internet video streaming and the proliferation of high speed Internet connections made this one a no brainer. We actually came at this one in two different ways, which I’ll explain in a list below.

But the second goal – making it easier – warrants some explanation. Early on when I was describing to the team what our vision was for this year, I put it something like this. The first two years, the Machinima Expo was about providing an experience for avatars; this year, let’s make it about providing an experience for people at computers. Rather than solely use a virtual world to try to simulate a real world event, let’s adopt a pragmatism that embraces the versatility of the World Wide Web at large, and use “whatever works best” to craft a quality experience for this machinima community.

I remember when I got invited to go see Rocky Horror Picture Show back in high school. As these guys and gals were describing the experience, that everyone was dressed in the costume of one of the movie’s characters, all these rituals that were part of the cult following (throwing bread at the screen at a certain point, e.g.) and general sing-along stuff… as a neophyte, I felt intimidated enough by all that hullaballoo to bow out with a “No thanks.” It just sounded like more trouble that it was worth.

In a way, I was starting to feel that by making everyone come into Second Life and dress up in avatar costume, learn a certain system of etiquette, etc. etc., was a bit like expecting everyone to do the Rocky Horror song and dance – something extraordinarily fun for regulars, but maybe not as appealing as we’d like to believe for others. Maybe some people just wanted to listen, watch, and participate on their own terms, in a manner that felt a bit more like their usual/familiar Internet experiences.

Don’t get me wrong, those who participate in the Expo within Second Life have a greatly enhanced experience versus those who watch from a website – but it just didn’t feel right to force that choice upon all attendees, and risk turning the Expo into some kind of private club or something. So that’s why we made the big push this year to truly make it easier to attend.

We made a number of big changes to try to meet those goals and make the Expo better, including:

• Expanding the Expo from one day to two days
• Enlistment of a larger team of volunteers
• Addition of Kate Fosk to the Expo Organizers, and more clearly dividing the roles of those Organizers
• Leveraging Expertise – Partnership with TMU Theater and TMOA Radio for video/audio streaming, early enlistment of Lainy Voom to oversee primary build, etc.
• Requiring all submissions to be uploaded to Vimeo – which greatly simplified the submission process, streamlined our film acquisition for selected works, and also paved the way for high quality OnDemand viewing galleries
• Building a web portal site, and making that the focal point in our promotion of the event
• Engaging in a distributed model within Second Life, making use of multiple locations to avoid the server overload that caused trouble in the first two years

While we are already sharing ideas in how to do things even better next year, overall we feel like the 2010 Machinima Expo was a big success. And the attendance numbers seem to substantiate that.

• 2008 Attendance (Second Life): 186 people
• 2009 Attendance (Second Life): data misplaced, but approximately 250 people
• 2010 Attendance:
  • Web Portal: 1140 unique visitors
  • Second Life Hub: 103 unique visitors on Saturday, 159 on Sunday
  • TMU Theater video stream: about 600 unique visitors each day, with nearly 5,000 viewing hours between them

In short, we had over 1100 people come to the Expo Portal over that weekend, from 59 different countries, and about 600 people each day tuned in to the video stream for some period of time.

However you dice it, that’s an increase we’re all really happy about. Add to that the fact that film submissions nearly doubled this year, and it really does feel like the Expo has hit a new level.

Here’s to making the 2011 event even better!

Every film* selected to the 2010 Machinima Expo will be shown! Even clips from the Highlight Reel will be shown, spread out over several nights.

We’re calling them “Popcorn Nights,” because each screening is around the duration of a feature-length movie. Screenings happen twice daily – once at a Europe-friendly time, and once at a North America prime time slot. Popcorn and your choice of tasty beverage is encouraged. Huge thanks to D.L. Watson at TMU Theater for coming up with this schedule and doing all the sequencing to make it happen with no time conflicts with the TMOA Radio shows.

The screenings are open to the public, and you can attend them in one of a few different ways:

1. At www.machinima-expo.com
2. At TMU Theater
3. In Second Life right at the Expo Hub or at the UWA Theater (see the Locations page for SLURL info)

So come on down, bring your friends, and chat the nights away while enjoying some great machinima films.

Here’s the full screening schedule. Need help with the timezones? Check out the Schedule page for a time zone translator.

Expo Popcorn Night #1 – Monday November 29th: ‘Screener Reel Part 1’
Run Time: 2h 41m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 4:00PM PST / 7:00PM EST
Film Lineup:

• Across the Universe – Craig Lyons by Rysan Fall
• Alone by Darth Angelus
• Beautiful Love by Tan Yan Hao
• TheBiz’s House of Horror by Harvey LaReau
• The Book of Eli Trailer by Rene Dege
• The Calling by Joseph Kwong
• Ctrl-Alt-Del by Lainy Voom
• The Dark Side of the Mirror by Loris Rizzo
• The Day After by Renaldoxx
• Decay by Toxic Menges
• DISTURBING EXPERIENCE by David Thomas
• Divas: Season 2, Ep. 3 by Phaylen Fairchild
• The Druid’s Dream by Titus Leskov
• Elite Rescue Society by Nick bondar
• Embers by IceAxe
• la Fuite l’empire Aryen by Yalrok
• First by Phil Rice

Intermission: Garry’s Mod & Second Life Presentation Videos

Expo Popcorn Night #2 – Tuesday November 30th: ‘Screener Reel Part 2’
Run Time: 2h 33m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST
Film Lineup:

• First Wave Saga: Parts 1 & 2 by Mark Pleasant
• Forest of Scissors by Vivian Kendall
• Ghosts by Maxime Lebled
• Hybris by SammyHouse
• Incubus by Kate Lee & Sherwin Liu
• INVASION of the INVADING INVADERS by Mefune Akira
• Is Sometimes Colder Than Ice by BobE Schism
• The Joy of Music by Chantal Harvey
• The Little Match Girl’s Revenge by Paul Carr

Intermission: Moviestorm Presentation Video

Expo Popcorn Night #3 – Wednesday December 1st: ‘Screener Reel Part 3’
Run Time: 2h 39m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST
Film Lineup:

• Little Red Riding Hood by Toxic Menges
• Live for Speed – Collateral Collision by Martin Bigg
• Love and Death in Dustville by Loris Rizzo
• Lovely Family TV by Medoc
• Machinima Versus Anymation, Ep. 1 by Warlord & Dulci
• Moments by Pia Klaar
• Monsters of the Atomic Age by theBiz
• Mr. Bones: Dangers of Navigation – Wartime by Ole Etzel
• A Nightmare in Hell by Vivien Beaumont
• The Nobbit – Part 1 by Anima Technica
• Park Tennis by Kate Fosk
• Post Mortimer by Lucy Georges

Intermission: Muvizu Presentation Video

Expo Popcorn Night #4 – Thursday December 2nd: ‘Screener Reel Part 4’
Run Time: 3h 17m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 7:30PM PST / 10:30PM EST
Film Lineup:

• RED by Reggie M. Fox
• Rien a battre by Deji Deka
• Ring of False God by Jorge Campos
• Ruth by IceAxe
• Sentimental Gentleman by Vivian Kendall
• She Moved Through the Fair by Scott Hather
• The Sniper by Warlord
• Solar Freyr by Peter Martin
• Stop, Rewind by Harrison Heller
• The Story by Legs Machinima
• This Base Pack Life by John Norton
• Time Traveller – Episode 1 by Skawennati Fragnito
• Tree of Life (Part 2) by Paul Carr
• The Undoing by Aaron Jeans
• Unfriendly Fire – A Team Fortress 2 Tale by Xanatos
• Valentines After the Monster Apocalypse by Jorge Campos
• Voyages of the Sojourner by Anima Technica
• What a Night! by TGO GMBH

Intermission: Voovees & The Movies Presentation Videos

Expo Popcorn Night #5 – Friday December 3rd: ‘Latin/Spanish Reel’
Run Time: 2h 12m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST
Film Lineup:

• Claus Uriza (Pop Art Lab) by Alfonso Kohn
• Ceci N’est Pas Une Exposition by Jose Pedro
• Explorers by Alfonso Kohn
• Jonathan Jekill by Carlos Leal R. & Leonel Guerrero C.
• The Paganini Diavolo Show by Jose Pedro
• Pagina Asesina (Assassin Page) by Amaya Mendizabal
• El Puente by Pablo Mora Garcia
• RMS Titanic in Second Life by Alfonso Kohn
• Situation Where You Can’t Sleep by Franciso Gomez Rodriguez
• Witness of an Assassin by Carlos Sanchez-Fortun Pelegrin
• Zabulon “The Lord of Hell” by Cristian C. Llanos

Intermission: Sound Design Presentation Video

Expo Popcorn Night #6 – Saturday December 4th: ‘48Hour Film Festival Reel’
Run Time: 52m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 6:00PM PST / 9:00PM EST
Film Lineup:

• The Lake by Jun Falkenstein and Ben Covi
• The Shadows by Hussayn Dabbous
• Nihilist by Elizabeth Olds

Expo Popcorn Night #7 – Monday December 6th: ‘Jury Reel’
Run Time: 3h 5m
Screening Time # 1 – 9:00AM PST / 12:00PM EST
Screening Time # 2 – 4:00PM PST / 7:00PM EST
Film Lineup:

• Unheimliche by Pierre Gaudillere, et al
• TERRA by Rod Pulsar
• The Big Event by Jorge Campos
• That girl stole my Nick at the Voom Hotel by Voom
• W B Yeats – An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by R. Boyd
• A Woman’s Trial by Chantal Harvey
• Major League Azeroth by AFK Pl@yers
• Order of Madness by Eugene Tan
• Moonlighter by Igor Tkachenko
• Dagon by Lainy Voom
• gEISHA by Krrish Spyker
• Clockwise:Part 1 by Nefarious Guy
• It’s a Wonderful Second Life – Breathe 2 by SamLowry Hawks
• Out in the Cold by Legs Machinima
• Success Begets Success by Pamela Crabtree
• The Ills of Silence by Walvince

Intermission: Reallusion Showcase Presentation Videos

* Sadly, there is one exception – The Trashmaster by Mathieu Weschler will not be part of this screening event, due to some copyright issues regarding its music. However, you can still see this extraordinary film right here: http://vimeo.com/14756047

The basic idea behind the video presentations was to present a short (yeah, right..) introduction to the topic or machinima program being presented. We wanted a simple presentation on how a particular program works or what the basics are for a topic like “Sound Design” or “Writing Scripts for Machinima”. What emerged was better than I expected: a range of approaches that range from the pro-style video created by Indy Liu for Voovees Director to the personal video essay created by machinima writer Kate Lee of Chatnoir Studios.

Our thanks to all of the presenters for the time and effort put into making these vids and for being present at the Expo to answer questions live.

The main archive for the videos is here: 2010 Machinima Expo Presentation Reel

The individual presentations were:

-Voovees Director by Indy Liu

-The Movies by Killian

-Introduction to Muvizu by Barry Sheridan

-GMOD (Gary’s Mod for Half Life 2 by Harrison Heller

-Second Life by Pooky Amsterdam

-Sound Design for Machinima by Ricky Grove

-Writing Scripts for Machinima by Kate Lee