Machinima is on the verge of stepping beyond its chaotic mix of artistic, ludic and technical conceptions into established traditions and vocabularies of contemporary media. As machinima invents itself, the flexibility of its form poses an interesting challenge to academics as well as artists and critics. We want to offer an inaugural reader for the further development and critical discussion of Machinima, one that charts its growth from several angles and also provides a foundation for critical studies in the future.
Tuesday 21 December 2010
Machinima Reader final proofs
Monday 20 December 2010
Links'n'stuff
- Moviestorm
- Machinima
- Low-budget / amateur / indie film-making
- Film techniques
- Animation techniques
- Film-makers resources & training
- Previsualisation
- Pre-production
- Movie news
Saturday 18 December 2010
New tutorials
- The gesturiser
- Moods & facial animation
- Working with multiple cameras
- Working with multiple scenes
- The script window
- The timeline: basics
- Working with stock sets and characters
- More on lighting using hidden on-set lights
- The lighting rig in the Rock music set
- Making a music video
- Choreographing a fight scene
- Making props move
Friday 17 December 2010
Men in Tights
Moviestorm: under siege
Wednesday 15 December 2010
Stormileaks: Operation Groundswell
Date: 13 December 2010CB: Moviestorm Command Headquarters, Cambridge, EnglandFL: Moviestorm Propaganda Unit One, Orlando, FloridaCB: [indecipherable]FL: Operation Groundswell? Isn't that the super-secret project you've been working on since late 2008?CB: Correct. We're putting it back into active status with immediate effect.FL: If I recall the briefing correctly, this would give you the power to raise or lower the ground simply by pressing a single button.CB: [indecipherable]FL: Isn't that too much power to be putting into the hands of ordinary people? They could create giant hills or rolling sand dunes? How would actors be able to move around without falling down or experiencing interdimensional clashes like last time? Terrain modification is dangerous stuff.CB: We've thought of that. We'll simultaneously be deploying WST. [Note: this is believed to be Walking on Slopes Technology, an experimental process that enables actors to free themselves from the constraints of flat surfaces.] We've got the prototype code from [redacted] and we just need to [indecipherable].FL: When do we expect first test results?CB: Operations will commence as soon as the primary dev team have left the office for Christmas holidays. It's safer that way. With luck, we'll have achieved basic stability by the time they return.FL: And when do we anticipate full external deployment of Groundswell?CB: That depends on the preliminary test results. Assuming it's non-hazardous, early in 2011. If things don't go as planned, we'll just mothball it again until it's safe for another attempt, and ensure nobody finds out about it.FL: [indecipherable]CB: Let's hope not.[Transmission ends]
Monday 13 December 2010
Christmas support
Thursday 9 December 2010
New patch out today
- Moviestorm is now better at detecting when a patch has failed to download, and will retry the download correctly after a restart.
- There's a clearer 'Moviestorm is locked!' warning message (when there might be another copy of Moviestorm running).
- And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, Moviestorm will recognise when a subscription's details have been updated, and allow the user to use the updated subscription immediately.
- The Safe* & The Mob (Criminals)
- Dead Walking (Halloween 2009)
- Doin' The Deed (Miami Beachfront)
- Galaxy Voyage (Sci-Fi)
- The Big Day (Wardrobe 02)
School days
Wednesday 8 December 2010
Give your friends a movie studio
Tuesday 7 December 2010
Let's not fight about this...
Monday 6 December 2010
Julian's psychedelic sniperscope
- Autotoon. Like Cel Shading, only as a post-process. It's not quite as crisp'n'dry as the real thing, but if you only want one or two clips rendered 'toon-stylee, this will help.
- Binoculars. Wow! It's like looking through binoculars. Sort of.
- Binoculars (night). As above, but with fancy and gratuitously expensive night-vision goggles, and Moviestorm gives you it for free!
- Distort. Like looking through an old window. Or alternatively the effect that piece of out-of-date blue cheese that was left in the fridge had on you.
- Emboss. Grey. With lines. Kinda like you saw in Photoshop, but probably utterly not quite similar.
- Fisheye. View the scene as if it were on either the inside or the outside of a sphere (choose via the presets). Is this how a fish sees the world? Ask Spongebob!
- Frost. Brrr! It's frosty here in the U of K. And this filter... well it's more like pressing your face up onto a piece of frosted glass. Though it might depend on which flavour of frosting you were thinking of.
- Gradient tint. Adds a coloured tint from the top of the screen down, which is all but gone by the half-way point. Could be good for dramatic skies or alien worlds. Three different flavours to sink your synaesthetic teeth into.
- Overexposed. Replaces your screen with a static image of Justin Bieber. No! Seriously, before you ask for your money back, I'm kidding. Zealously boosts the contrast. Like looking at the heart of a star with a telescope. Three different types of blinding supplied, retinal implants not included.
- Psychedelia. Can't quite classify this and it gets varying results. But there's quite a bit of black and a lot of coloured lines that are rather pleasing on the eye (presuming you have any left after checking out "overexposed").
- Radial blur. Like your scene was a watercolour and you span it whilst still drying. You wouldn't catch Cezanne doing that, mind, but perhaps that's all the more reason to try.
- Sniper. Indulge your fantasy of assassinating Justin Bieber by combining a sniper filter and an overexposed filter. What's that you say? Nasty Jules won't let you combine filters? And there is no Justin Bieber filter anyway? Feel free to make a movie about shooting Jules then.
- Sniper (night). As above, but with less chance of getting shot back, but much colder too. Let's face it, sniping should be a summer activity.
Ssssh, he's sleeping...
Wednesday 24 November 2010
Moviestorm user manual
You can find it at http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/moviestorm/documentation/ (or click Documentation in the Web page footer).
Let us know if there's anything that doesn't make sense or which you think should be covered in future updates.
Monday 22 November 2010
Moviestorm on DVD
Friday 19 November 2010
Web site planned outage - Mon 22 Nov
Thursday 18 November 2010
Stormblades
Friday 5 November 2010
Damn Limeys! Can't you speak English?
Tuesday 2 November 2010
Well, thank you!
Wednesday 20 October 2010
One, two, three. THREE?
- One guy pins another guy's arm behind his back while a third socks him in the stomach.
- A wounded guy is carried with his arms around the shoulders of two others.
- Caught in an alley, fighting the guy in front, get sapped from behind (or kidney punched).
- Caught by a mob.
- Step between two fighters, push them apart. (Referee?)
Monday 18 October 2010
Help!
Tuesday 12 October 2010
Moviestorm 1.4.2
Monday 4 October 2010
Halloween horror, 2010
We've done a Halloween pack for the last couple of years, mainly because Chris just loves all that kind of stuff. In 2008 we gave you a bunch of traditional trick or treat goodies, and in 2009 we gave you a huge selection of monsters.
Thursday 16 September 2010
Bleach bypass
Wednesday 8 September 2010
The Moviestorm night shift
Oh, so close...
Yes... no... yes... no... release cliffhanger!
Monday 16 August 2010
While the cat's away ...
Now that the dust has settled on the early access release of version 1.4 I'm taking the liberty to let slip some other stuff that we've been doin
g that should be with you shortly, and some even more exciting things from the future!
First up we've got a new and incredibly useful content pack nearing release. It may not seem like the most exciting thing we've done when you first set eyes on it, but I can guarantee every serious Moviestorm film maker will want it and it should make character driven dialogue sequences all the more impressive.
Looking further in to the future we're tackling some stuff that we've wanted to do since day one. It should also make a fair few users happy, and save a few from having to struggle with their own mods of existing animations.
Yes that's right - we've finally had some fun with swords. While Dave would like us to break this down in to all the different sword types, weights, rules and other professional standards, I'm more keen on just whipping them out and hacking away a bit :D
While on the subject of violent acts, I've also been messing around with similarly unpleasant animations in my spare time, and given a good wind I should start handing out handy little packets of jumps, falls, punches and stabbings to help Moviestorm step up a gear. I know people have been shouting for this for a while, but believe me the video footage I recorded as a template was in the can so long ago I've had to get a cinefilm converter to play it back on :D
Don't bother asking for dates, you should know by now ;P
Chris
Friday 13 August 2010
Show us your heads!
Thursday 12 August 2010
Moviestorm 1.4 early access - grab it now!
Friday 6 August 2010
Moviestorm 1.4 is imminent
- For a starters, there's a whole new dressing room, and a completely new head creator. You can morph faces in a huge variety of ways, add make-up and decals, and you can create random characters to give you inspiration or fill out your extras quickly. Oh, and we fixed those annoyingly visible neck seams. That's something we've wanted to deal with for absolutely ages!
- There's a totally new lighting system, which gives you much better lighting and really brings out the relief in your movies. It's a tri-light system which allows you to create effects similar to the traditional three-light system used on real-life movie sets. It includes lighting presets, so you can quickly flip to day, night, or low-light scenes. You can still use the old ambient & directional system if you want, but once you've used this, you won't want to go back. There's also a new color chooser which remembers the last colors you picked, which is handy for so many reasons.
- The help system has been completely revamped. It's now much easier to use, and links through to the video tutorials. There's also a beta of the prop info tool: press one key and it shows you what every prop on the set can do. We also made a printable cheat sheet that you can stick in front of your keyboard or on top of the screen.
- One of the most important "under the hood" updates is the auto-save and backup system. You can store up to ten backups of each movie, which means that it's easy to experiment with a scene, decide you don't like the way it's going, and get back to a previous version.
- And, as we promised, we worked our way through a bunch of "papercuts", those little annoying things that irritate the hell out of you. Like the save dialog, which always confused people, and now makes sense. Or the load movie screen, which you can now order by date and quickly find the last movie you worked on. And when you load a movie, it goes back to the last view you were in. And so on.
Friday 16 July 2010
More from the logs
- Revision 24513 Committed by ben_sanders: - Deleting and moving female gestures
- Revision 24503 Committed by ben_sanders: - This has the reverted version of calloader.java, and the changes to animationremapper.java
- Committed by julian_gold: - New vidits.jar built for altered openapi.
- Revision 24479 Committed by dave: - Ignore .svn folders
- Revision 24501 Committed by chris_ollis: - Female dressing room anims again
- Revision 24471 Committed by ben_sanders: - saving wrong verb instance to library was causing all sorts of havoc.
- Revision 24493 Committed by ben_sanders: - More remaps; these anims were submitted after the first remap but still needed remapping.
- Revision 24495 Committed by alex_gowland: - Changed name of female decal so its recognised by the .bodypart
- Revision 24500 Committed by ben_sanders: - Republished (without neckbodyweld's which break publishing)
- Revision 24530 Committed by dave: - Possible fix for modshop crash on windows
- Revision 24429 Committed by chris_ollis: - Specular fix for female wet/sweat/rain