Muvizu is pleased to announce a machinima film compeition co-produced with the MachinExpo 2010 gang . Being the new kids on the block, we’re relieved that the choice of prizes and the whole judging process are also being handled by the Expo organisers. Thanks especially to Ricky on this count.

Anyhow, this is the deal: we’d like entrants to submit a video, of any length but animated in Muvizu, on the general theme of “Holiday Hell” (any holiday is acceptable). What was the worst holiday you’ve ever had? Well, make a film in Muivizu about it!

Clips may be post-processed and effects added using whatever software you fancy, but we are interested in entrants trying to showcase what can be done in Muvizu – the more you push its limits the better. We’d love to see your experiments. Combine live-action with Muvizu, silhouette animation, abstract animation, David Lynch-style films; anything you can imagine!

$2,000+ in Prizes will be offered and, boy, are they swell:

Entries for the competition must be published on the Muvizu site and the film link sent to the Expo by midnight GMT on December 10.

…psssst! Hey, kid, come here a minute:

if you stop by the Muvizu Second Life booth during the Expo on Nov 20th, 21st, there will be a special content pack for the Holiday Hell Muvizu contest. Remember: only those who stop by the Muvizu booth will have access to this custom content. Stay tuned here and at Muvizu.com for the link to the Muvizu booth in Second Life.

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.

Tuesday, September 7th at 12PM Pacific Time

In addition, we have decided to extend the submission period for the Spanish/Latin entries to Tuesday, September 14th at 12PM Pacific Time. We feel that because we added Spain and Portugal several weeks after submissions started, it’s only fair to those Spanish and Latin machinima directors to have a bit more time than everyone else.

The Expo has received well over 130 entries to date and are very pleased with the quality of the submissions. We plan on announcing the films that will screen at the Expo along with those films which we will send on to our Jury sometime in September. We are also planning a surprise announcement about a new category of film screening at the Expo this year. More info to come.

-Ricky