Rather than list all of the screeners at one time, we are going to announce them in small groups over the next several weeks. Today, we are listing 10 machinima films we think should be screened at the Expo. As we confirm more screeners, we’ll announce them here. Remember, if your film isn’t listed here it might be on the next round.

Also, we have created a separate page on our new Machinima Expo called “List of Films Screening at the Machinima 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. Of course, any filmmaker who gave us a private link to a film not yet released to the public, we will keep that link private.

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 are the first 10 films we’ve decided to screen:

-”anonymous (Part 1) by Jorge Campos

-”Daddy is Home” by James Thorpe

-”Friend” by Layne

-”Hello” by Azmira Jamlus

-”Le Terroriste” by Olibith

-”Moordenar [0] What Came Before” by Anima Technica

-”Ptolemy’s Blues” by Harvey LaReau

-”7 Keys” by Casper

-”The Shadow Over Innsmouth” by Joseph Kwong

-”Welcome to the Desert of the Real” by Paolo Pedercini

Congratulations to the filmmakers and thank you for submitting your film.

Phil, Damien and I are proud to announce that the 2009 Machinima Expo will take place on Sunday, November 22 from 9AM (Pacific Time) to 2PM (Pacific Time) on the University Campus Suffolk’s island in the virtual World of Second Life. We’ve done our best to set a time that most people in northern hemisphere times zones could accommodate. Here’s a time converter if you want to see what the Expo event times will be in your time zone:

Time Zone Converter

MachiniExpo 2009 is being produced with the assistance of the University Campus Suffolk http://www.ucs.ac.uk. University Campus Suffolk (UCS) is a unique collaboration between the University of East Anglia and the University of Essex. UCS was created in August 2007 in order to establish a university campus in Suffolk, UK. The UCS island in Second Life is a teaching and learning resource available to staff and students in the School of Arts & Humanities.

When we put out the word we were looking for a space to hold the 2nd Expo event, Eddie Dugan, Senior Teaching Practitioner in the School of Arts and Humanities (and who teaches a course in machinima at UCS) contacted us and offered the school’s facilities in Second Life along with assistance in producing the festival.

We will be screening a selection of UCS student machinima films as part of our screening series and there will be several UCS students on hand as helpers and assistants at the festival. You’ll recognize them by the special t-shirts they’ll be wearing (or perhaps an unusual hat?).

After an extensive tour of the UCS island in Second Life, we are excited at how well the structures will fit with our Expo program. There is a large, three story building with open interiors for information areas, panels/presentations, screening sessions and even a top floor lounge for folks who want to talk and drink fun virtual cocktails. Here are a few pictures:

There’s also a wonderful structure just off of the island. You can see the stone walkway that leads to this cabin in the above photo. Some very smart person set the stones just under the level of the water so that the walk to the cabin is very pleasant aesthetically.

This cabin is very much like a 50’s style bachelor pad all decorated in bright colors and square furniture. Lovely views of the ocean expanse all around and an especially beautiful view of the UCS campus building on the island. Phil and I spent a lot of time here mulling over logistics and debating programming. Here’s a shot of our mull session (I’m away from the camera; Phil is closest with his legs inside of the couch)

And here is the bachelor cabin from a view a little further away. Man, I just love flying in Second Life. We awer planning a very special event to take place here. One that we will be announcing soon. There will be a very slight re-design of the space to accommodate the programming.

Many thanks to Eddie, his students and co-workers for offering to help and then for working with us to make the Expo happen. We’ll be announcing the programming and the first round of film screenings on this blog very soon.

Our sincere thanks to our 5 judges for their time and effort. We hope to send you many excellent Machinima films to consider.

The two returning judges are:

-JOEY O’BRYAN-

JOEY O’BRYAN was born in Mississippi, raised in Texas, resides in Los Angeles and keeps finding himself summoned to Hong Kong. One such occasion was to co-writeFulltime Killer, an award-winning action thriller directed by Johnnie To.After years of options, assignments and hustling to get another movie off the runway, he got a short story published instead. “The Unlikely Redemption of Jared Pierce” appeared in the Stoker-nominated anthology Dark Delicacies II: Fear.

He is currently dying from encouragement as various film projects inch toward production.

-ARMAND CONSTANTINE-

ARMAND CONSTANTINE is a freelance game writer whose recent projects include Pandemic Studios’ The Saboteur, BioWare Austin’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, and Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2, for which he shared a nomination for the Game Developers Choice Award for Best Writing.  His fantasy and horror fiction has appeared in various outlets, including most recently Midnight Walk, an anthology of original horror fiction edited by Bram Stoker Award winner, Lisa Morton.  For more information about these and other projects, please visit www.armandconstantine.com

And our three new judges are:

-TARI AKPODIETE-

Journalist TARI AKPODIETE is a multi-award-winning filmmaker. “Impact”, her live action documentary television series on social issues has aired around the world. Her first animated movie, “VoxPopuli Terra Pax”, was selected as the innagural Newbury Film Series ‘Twitter Flick of the Week’. She was honoured when Hugh “Nomad”Hancock named her as one of the “Women Who Have Changed Machinima” on Ada Lovelace Day. Tari has spoken at numerous conferences and events throughout Canada and the United States, and her articles have appeared in print and online. She has also been actively involved in the mobile computing community. Nicknamed the “Pocket PC Princess”, she married her long-term interests in entertainment and technology to pioneer video playback on handhelds. Tari currently resides in Toronto where she divides her time between community evangelism and social media activism.

Check out her blogs: digipendence.com and solojourno.com

-MICHELLE PETIT-MEE-

MICHELLE PETTIT-MEE has been working as a Cinematic Designer for video game studio BioWare for the past two years, working on titles such as Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2. Previously to that, Michelle was machinimator-in-residence for Short Fuze UK, using Moviestorm. She began creating machinima five years ago and her Sims 2 film ‘The Snow Witch’ was a jury prize winner at last year’s Expo.

FRIEDRICH KIRSCHNER is a filmmaker, visual artist and software developer. He re-purposes computer games and realtime animation technology to create animated narratives and interactive performances.

His work has been shown at various international animation festivals and exhibitions, including the Laboral Gameworld exhibit in Gijon, the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Ottawa international Animation festival and the Seoul Media Art Biennale. He is currently an independent researcher and board member of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

We initially came up with a list of several people to nominate as keynote speaker, but after consideration there are only two people we would like to deliver this important speech at the Expo: Phil Rice and Mike Jones.

Phil Rice, in addition to being one of the organizers, is an important figure in Machinima. He is a superb filmmaker, so he understands the practical aspects of machinima filmmaking; he is a leader in the commmunity, providing a bi-weekly podcast on Machinima plus a very active Machinima blog. He hosts a monthly Machinima “chat” which brings in people from all across the Machinima community spectrum. And he actively works behind the scenes to promote, support and collaborate with many individual filmmakers and Machinima film companies.

When I asked Phil if he would consider being the keynote speaker, without hesitation he said “Yes” and immediately began ruminating over what his subject would be. In fact, I think he’s still sitting in front of his computer thinking about it.

Mike Jones, on the other hand, comes at Machinima from an entirely different direction. I first came across his brilliant new media blog, Digital Basin, when it was added to the Machinima RS feed and have been a devoted reader. Mike is a cutting edge critic of “new media” which Machinima is very much a part of. He is also the head of the Technology department at the International Film School in Sydney, Australia, and has published many articles on film, new media and aesthetics. His home page, luciferjones.com, is a nice intro to him and his work.

Over the last year as I’ve read dozens of his well-written and imaginative posts on everything from sound to video encoding practices, he has always included Machinima as part of his thinking. In fact, when I contacted him about being a keynote speaker at the Expo (something he is very enthusiastic about) he included a marvellous riff on Machinima. No question he is itching to present his ideas in a public forum like the Expo.

As usual, the primary factor in who will be our first keynote speaker at the Machinima Expo is money. We have a decent (but limited) budget and travel/housing is expensive. The Arcadia Festival (our sort of mother organization) might be able to help us out here, but it’s still being negotiated. We should know it the next few weeks. I’ll be making a public announcement here at the Machinima Expo site.

My thanks to both Mike and Phil for their patience and willingness to be a part of our still developing Festival. I only wish we could have you both. Hmnn…now there’s a thought.