Smooth

If you're hearing strains of Santana then that's about right - have a look at this pic straight from my dev machine (it's not even been committed to the Moviestorm source code repository yet!).

That neck seam has been bugging me for years but I've finally found a way to get it smooth from head part to body part. Annoyingly the answer's been staring me in the face for almost as long, but there's so much to do and so little time.

Hopefully, we'll get this to you as part of the next major Moviestorm release.

Happy Land

You get a lot of stuff for free with the basic version of Moviestorm. There's costumes, props, sets, gestures and moods - as the recent Base Pack Contest shows, it's amazing how many different types of movie can be created.

With all these options available, it's worrying how many Moviestormers' first movies involve, sooner or later, somebody being shot. Come on, guys! We know conflict is at the heart of drama, but there's so much more to life! Why not tell a happy story, full of bright colours and friendly characters and rounded corners ... in short: why not take a trip to Happy Land?

The worst Moviestorm crash we've ever seen

We want Moviestorm to be easy to use. We try not to dazzle you with an enormously complicated interface, with hundreds of buttons and menus. In some cases, this means that you can't get the level of precision you need for a certain task. We're always trying to find ways to let you do that, without transforming the Moviestorm interface into the control panel for a supersonic jet.

One of things that can sometimes prove difficult is precise positioning of objects in the Set Workshop View. Thankfully, we've got some new functionality currently in development which will help.



This gizmo is called the, er ... well, it's actually called The Gizmo right now, because we haven't come up with a more sensible name for it. It allows you to "nudge" an object by very small amounts, until you get it exactly where you want it. As well as allowing linear movement, the Gizmo (somehow I think that name is here to stay) also allows you to apply rotation to an object, in any direction.

We let Ben take the Gizmo for a test drive, and he got a little carried away:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

Height is important. More precisely, differences in height. You can use height to create drama, contrast, emotion, interest, beauty, menace - a clever director can do almost anything with a good, varied set. Up until now, Moviestorm didn't handle height very well. Characters could only really move around on a single level plain, which meant it was very hard to get shots like this:



Woo-hoo! There's no cheating in that shot. It's just plain ol' Moviestorm. That tower really is as tall as it seems to be.



We're using some brand new development code, which Mark has been quietly working on for the past few months, allowing characters to walk on surfaces at different heights. The tower is Amos's work (and, incidentally, his first official art asset for us).

Just in case you don't believe that it really works, here's a clip from the movie Alex is working on at the moment. He's asked me to stress that this is a really, really rough first draft, but it is all rendered directly from Moviestorm in one single scene.



Coming soon. As always: When It's Ready.

This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

Back in the olden days, when Moviestorm was still a young whipper-snapper of a movie-making tool with very few of the cool features it has today, we made a series of short parody movies to show what Moviestorm was capable of. The movies were made by Michelle Pettit-Mee (a leading light of the machinima community, now working as part of Bioware's cinematic design team but back then the Machinimator-in-residence for Moviestorm) and were parodies of well-known scenes from film and television. We had a Pulp Fiction scene, a Phoebe-like Friends song ... and a short sequence that looked suspiciously like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.



We released the Romeo and Juliet costumes as part of a very early Content Pack, and they're still kicking around. We've learned a lot since then, though, and we've also improved what Moviestorm is capable of. Since it's Valentine's Day very soon, we thought it was about time that these two old favourites got an upgrade.



As you'd expect, both of these costumes are tintable.

We'll be making these available to you (along with a handful of other new assets) very soon. Stay tuned for some more sneak previews over the next few days!

Moviestorm 1.1.7 leaked

Among the many interesting people that Dave and I spoke to at the HCI2009 Conference was machinima stalwart Michael Nitsche (seen here milking an invisible cow).

Michael had already seen Moviestorm 1.1.6 (which was the version we were showing off at the conference) so I booted up the development environment on my laptop and gave him a quick tour of version 1.1.7 - well, I did promise, after all. He seemed impressed. Sufficiently impressed, in fact, that he took some sneaky snapshots of my screen and posted them on his blog.

So that just proves it: if you want the scoop on what's coming soon for Moviestorm, bump into me in a corridor somewhere and have your camera at the ready.

The FreePixel blog, incidentally (to which Michael posts, along with Erik Champion and Friedrich Kirschner) is a great read. If you're interested in studying machinima as an artform and as an emergent movement, add it to your reading list.

Parting is such sweet sorrow

I'll admit it: I'm running out of puns.



Here's another work-in-progress shot from the Hairstyles Pack. This is a short haircut for female characters. There's a parting on the other side of the head, which means that my title pun is just about tolerable.

I've still to show you the morph sliders in action on the new hairstyles. I'll post a short video capture of those in a few days time. Meanwhile, don't forget to take a look at the brand new Moviestorm website if you haven't done already.