Muvizu, the free 3D animation software developed by Glasgow-based Digimania, will be supporting the 2010 Machinima Expo with a generous donation of prizes for our jury winners. And, although we haven’t announced our programming schedule yet (look for it in early November), Muvizu will be hosting a booth in Second Life and showing an “Intro to Muvizu” video as part of a series of Sunday, November 21st machinima software presentations.

The major prizes that Muvizu will be making possible are:

Jury Grand Prize:
-M-Audio Microtrack II Digital Audio
Recorder
-Rode NT1A Condenser Microphone

Jury winner 1:
-Blu Ray Bundle which includes a Pioneer Blu Ray Writer/Selected Blu Ray Animation DVD’s and a Blue Microphones Snowball Mic

Jury winner 2: -Hollywood Camerwork 5-DVD course in film blocking and staging.

Jury winner 3: -Blue Microphones Snowball Mic and Asus ASUS ENGTS450 GPU

Latin/Spanish Prize winner:
-Blue Microphones Snowball Mic + Adobe Soundbooth CS5 Audio Editing program.

In addition, all winners will receive 10,000 Linden dollars for use in Second Life.

Our sincere thanks to the Muvizu crew in moody Glasgow, Scotland. Especially the wily Vince Ryan, for helping set all of this up.

Note: we will be announcing a Muvizu film competition co-produced by Muvizu and the Expo in the coming days. There will be some fabulous (and I mean it) prizes announced for the 5 winners.

So head over to muvizu.com and download their free program. The community there is tight; the folks that run the site are funny and helpful and the program is easy and fun to use. Development is moving quickly, too. Lots of increasingly interesting films being created using this software.

And stay tuned for more on the Muvizu-Expo film competition!

It is our great pleasure to announce that Reallusion, the company behind iClone, CrazyTalk and other 3D animation tools, has agreed to co-sponsor the Machinima Expo in November, 2010. Last year Reallusion gave significant support to the Expo in the form of a software presentation, advertising and, most importantly, providing the prizes for our 5 jury films. Their support was a significant factor in making last years Expo a success.

This year Reallusion has gone even further in their support for the Machinima Expo by providing financial assistance, an introductory video for their flagship 3D animation software (iClone 4) and, once again, providing prizes for our jury winning films. Not to mention the fact that many films we are screening at the Expo this year are made using iClone and CrazyTalk.

Our warmest thanks to John Martin II and CEO Charles Chen for providing much-needed support for this our biggest Expo event yet. We are so proud to include Reallusion amongst the Expo’s most important supporters and friends.

From the Company Overview at Reallusion.com:

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Reallusion is a leader in the development of 3D cinematic animation tools for consumers, students and professionals. Recognized as an industry pioneer, the company provides consumers with easy-to-use avatar animation, facial morphing and voice lip-sync solutions for real-time 3D filmmaking and previsualization for professional post-production. Reallusion’s core technologies are widely used by consumers, gamers and filmmakers to ready their PCs with a total real-time movie studio that plugs-in to the gamer mentality with videogame-like play-to-create technology. Professional content developers equip their studios with Reallusion technology to streamline production efforts to match the lightspeed demands of animation. In addition to PC software, Reallusion is a trusted digital imaging and mobile 3D development partner to brother, Panasonic, Skype and Nokia with embedded applications in leading consumer devices worldwide. For more information, visit www.reallusion.com.

Any Latin or Spanish Machiniima filmmaker who still wants to submit a film to the Expo has until September 14th (1 week). We extended this deadline because we changed the terms of the category a few weeks after the submission period began by adding Spanish entries (Spain, Portugal). We feel it’s only fair to make up the time they lost by our delayed announcement.

If you are interested in submitting your film, use the submission form linked to the right of this blog. Be sure you have permission to use any music that is in your film.

Once all entries are closed on Sept 14th everyone will be notified about how their film fared. We will then begin to announce the films that will screen at the Expo and the films we are sending on to our Jury. We are adding a new category this year for screening films. This will be a “Submission Highlights” reel which will feature short scenes from films that were submitted to the Expo this year, but don’t quite have the quality to screen fully. We feel that these films (and their filmmakers) need to be acknowledged and supported. The Highlight reel films/filmmakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Turbulence – 2008 from jpro on Vimeo.

Then in 2009 we chose Asia to focus on and had many excellent entries choosing Krrish Spyker’s “Scripted” for our jury prize.

This year we are focusing on Latin America, Spain and Portugal for our International Jury Prize. Originally we decided to narrow the entries to only Latin American countries, but we feel it is too narrow a choice and are opening the Expo to any submissions from Spain or Portugal (Spanish and Portuguese). Note: entries do not have to be subtitled in English (although we encourage you to do so).

Please spread the word to any Spanish, Latin or Portuguese Machinima filmmakers you may know. Submission guidelines and forms are to the right of this post.

Phil and Ricky mull over Expo 2010 in Ohio

An excellent meeting yesterday (Sunday, April 18th) to get the ball rolling for Expo 2010. We had a great group of volunteers show up with lots of very good ideas. In fact the meeting was so constructive we were able to make several major decisions regarding how we will present this years Expo. I’d like to thank all of those who attended for taking the time to help us transition the Expo from a two-man team to a larger group effort which was one of the main objectives we had this year: give more responsibility to volunteer staff.

Another decision we made was that the Expo this year will be a two-day event (Saturday and Sunday) at a date in November. The advantages of a two day festival are obvious: increased attendance, better time zone management, more films to view and more events to program. This decision came out of a desire to improve the quality of the event for attendees. We want it to be simpler and easier to see films, participate in events and make friends.

We have also decided that this years Expo will be programmed sequentially (no simultaneous events will be scheduled) and will be a cross-platform, decentralized event. This means that in order to combat lag in Second Life we will design a custom HUD which will allow users to easily transport to different Sims, listen to local or main audio for the programming and watch films all inside of the HUD. And while we feel Second Life is the best location for the Expo, we plan on creating an internet portal for programming and content, so you don’t have to use Second Life to enjoy the Expo.

And finally we feel that we absolutely must increase the viewing quality of the films we are presenting at the Expo. In order to do this we will be streaming the video from outside of Second Life which will enable us to provide very high quality video. We hope to partner with TMOA Radio to help provide this new method of presenting our Expo content.

A motley crew of volunteers will make Expo 2010 shine

Entries for MachinExpo 2010 will be earlier than in previous years and we will deadline the submissions sooner in order to provide quality presentation at the Expo and to allow for more promotion of the films screening and the jury films as well.

All in all, this should be an amazing year for the Expo. Stay tuned for more announcements and info in the coming weeks.

PS for those who might be interested in listening to the audio from Sunday’s meeting you can do so here:

Audio from Expo 2010 planning meeting on 4/18/2010

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.

We still have the Jury films and the Asian films left to announce (which we will in the next several days), so if your film is not listed here, there is still a chance it may be on the Jury or Asian list of films. Our sincere thanks to all those who submitted.

Also, we have created a separate page on our new Machinima Expo called “Films Screening at the Expo” (clumsy, but accurate) where you can see the list with a screen cap from each film which is linked to the location where the film can be viewed. They are listed in alphabetical order by title

Phil, Damien, Ingrid and I would like to thank the Machinima community for responding so strongly to our festival. We really appreciate the support.

Here is the final group of films we will be screening:

-”Ad Hominem Attack” by Jorge Campos

-”Cloud Angel” by IceAxe

-”DoubleKill: Jess” by Dave Tyner

-”Elegantly Forbidden” by Cecil Hirvi

-”Escape – chapter_11 from DREAM ON/OFF movie” by cisko vandeverre

-”Indiana Jones and the Gray Ghost” by Wayne Poe

-”re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton” by John Norton

-”Rise” by Brian Mayberry

-”Rising Stasis” by James D. Holbrook

-”the Graveyard” Claus-Dieter Schulz

-”What is Second Life? (For Linden Lab Website)” by Kerria Seabrooke