Machinima. It's Serious.

On Monday 23rd I'm speaking at the Serious Games conference in Cambridge. I'm doing a panel with Saint John Walker of FDMX entitled Machinima and Cineliteracy: Learning Film-Making Virtually. We're looking at ways in which machinima can be used to teach people how to express themselves audio-visually by introducing them to the grammar of film-making, and the basic concepts of choreography, cutting, and reportage. We're then exploring ways in which being able to use audio-visual media effectively can affect education methods.

It's not just a Moviestorm plug - we'll also be covering machinima made with Antics, Second Life, and others.

If you're there, come and say hello.

24 inch upright

In the long standing tradition of inheriting other employees kit I've got a new monitor (sorry Ivan). Best of all it'll rotate - letting me run Moviestorm at min-res on my 19" and use my 24" upright for code editing.

Now I just want another 24 as "console output" and I'll be done.

Customising stock sets

Moviestorm's stock sets are quite versatile. Even without moving anything around, you can create loads of different sets just by customising the assets that are already in there. This little clip shows what you can do with the bedroom blog stock set - see if you can spot how many individual items are changing with each dissolve!

Your score:

• 60 or more - you're probably a professional set dresser
  
• 40-59 - well spotted
  
• 20-39 - you got the main ones
  
• under 20 - blame it on the resolution
  

Each version of the bedroom took about 20 minutes to create, just by diving into the set workshop and clicking "customise" on everything possible. The poster images were grabbed off the Web.

FX: Jaw hits floor

Soon, very soon, Overman is going to release his new movie. He kindly sent us a preview. Our reaction can be summed up in Chris's awestruck comment.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our users for showing us just how fantastic Moviestorm is.

Phil is pushing Moviestorm way, way beyond the envelope. And we love it.

So, thank you, Phil. And thank you to everyone else who makes movies so that we can enjoy watching them.

Things we didn’t make

If anyone knows what a bitch it is to work with our mod tools, it’s us. And what we sent out to our pioneer users is even horribler than what we’re currently using in-house. So when we see what some people have managed to do with our shoddy tools, we’re seriously impressed. Have a quick look at these bits of work in progress.

Davidwww’s spaceship, trucks, and cityscape with curving roads

Equinoxx’s window sticker

Forgeuk’s “bloke in a jar” with custom t-shirt.

And yes, we will be releasing a proper version of the Modder’s Workshop. We will, we will! Just not this month, OK? In the meantime, well done to all of you who made it through the existing Modder’s Minefield.