A Report On the 2006 Machinima Festival

Gamasutra is reporting on the events of the 2006 Machinima Festival, which was held early this month in Queens, New York. The event featured panels, seminars, and Q&A sessions talking about how to make movies with games, talking with the people who do it, and offering tips on how to do it better. Gamasutra also offers up the list of this year's Machinima award winners, as well as interviews with 'This Spartan Life' co-creator Matt Burke and 'Trash Talk' creator Matt Dominianni. From the article: "Chris Burke, the second speaker [on the panel] is the creator of 'This Spartan Life,' the popular talk show that takes place inside an Xbox Live Halo 2 game. Burke screened a PSA on net neutrality using Halo machinima. When the piece was made, net neutrality was the most Googled item of the week; TSL was able to attract a huge audience. Burke also noted that the TSL episode on gun control spawned hotly debated message threads on their forum, and was glad to know that 15 year TSL old fans were debating gun control, and more specifically, was happy to find that TSL exposes world and non-gamer issues to a traditional gamer audience." If you haven't seen them yet, make sure and check out award winners "Male Restroom Etiquette" (Best Writing), "The Fixer" (Best Series), and "The Adventures of Bill & John: Danger Attacks at Dawn" (Multi-award Winner).

Danger Will Robinson!!

[QuantumG]

Linking to videos from the front page, good plan.

Almost made it...

[chilledinsanity]

I started learning to make machinima right after this ended, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out anyway. Check it out at http://civil-protection.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Not impressed

[Das Modell]

Is this the best modern machinima can come up with? They made better stuff for Quake, for God's sake The Seal of Nehahra [wikipedia.org] is still the best machinima movie I've seen (it's not even an independent project, as such -- it's based on the Nehahra modification which itself has many cutscenes, and continues the story). I just don't see a lot of ambition, scale or effort in much of the machinima of today (seems to be mostly just quickly produced comedy).

Best Writing

[Bios_Hakr]

How can MRE get best writing? It's literally a word-for-word copy of a flash thingy that has been on the Internet for years.

Re:

[notthepainter]

It doesn't have to be fair or original. This isn't about writing, it is about winning a writing award. The very fact that it has been around for years means that people like it. That's a decent, if not original, way to win an award.

Makes me think of old times...

[My name is Bucket]

...When I was planning on making a comedy series based on the scientists in Half-Life all those years ago. Episode 1 was going to be about the ingredient "Yellow #5" and why the first four versions were deemed unfit for human consumption. Damn my attention span. Now if you'll excuse me, someone is jingling their keys...