Winner of Moviestorm BETT 2013 Future Products Survey Announced

Moviestorm are delighted to announce the winners of the BETT 2013 Future Products survey. All entrants were given a Moviestorm Education Annual licence, and the Department of Art & Design at the University of Minnesota Duluth were the winners of the prize draw, and recipients of annual Multiple Concurrent licences for the university, worth $3000! Thank you to all of you that submitted feedback to the survey.

We asked educators to tell us how to shape our future products to ensure that they deliver the ideal video creations tools to support teaching and learning across the curriculum.

Assistant Professor Joellyn Rock had this to say of the win:

"We are super excited to have Moviestorm available for creative projects on our campus. We have a growing Digital Art area within the Department of Art & Design at the University of Minnesota Duluth."

"As a digital art professor, I am always looking for ways to expand our student access to emerging technologies. I am also part of a team who are developing a new motion capture / video production VizLab studio on our campus."

"I am particularly interested in how emerging media is shaping the ways that stories can be told. My interest in machinima, avatars, and game engines led me to Moviestorm as a tool for creating digital narratives. I am especially excited by it’s cinematic tools, allowing the user to think like a filmmaker."

“I plan to use Moviestorm with students in several classes I teach. Students will create characters and interactive scenarios for digital narrative assignments. They may use the Moviestorm tools for previsualization on filmmaking projects. Some may generate animated sequences to remix with live action video. Others may explore customizing avatars and backgrounds for use in game prototyping. Students in our new Media Arts Club on campus may experiment with creative uses of Moviestorm in their collaborative projects in the Multimedia Hub."

“A few years ago, I created the Digital Art Workshop for Youth as a way for local middle-school students to be mentored by college students in our Digital Methods in Art Education class. Perhaps this year they will also have the chance to collaborate on animating characters using Moviestorm in our lab."

“The students and faculty at University of Minnesota Duluth thank you for making Moviestorm a new tool available for our use in diverse areas of creative project collaboration."

Joellyn's University of Minnesota Duluth links

Digital Filmmaking: Visual Narratives
http://www.d.umn.edu/~jrock2/viznar_spring.html

Interactive Media > B L O G
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/jrock2/art3018/

Digital Art Workshop for Youth
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/jrock2/workshop09/

Moviestorm launch on IGGY

Moviestorm are very pleased to announce our launch on IGGY, a new social network created by the University of Warwick designed to encourage gifted 13-18 year olds to realise their full potential. IGGY is a paid for service, but has committed to offering free memberships to disadvantaged students.  IGGY members can access a number of helpful educational resources, learn independently, and collaborate with other gifted young people across the globe.

“It is firmly in line with our aspirations to get Moviestorm into the hands of a creative and talented student user base at the critical 13 to 18 year old age range. We look forward to working with IGGY to engage their community via film-based experiences that support media studies and cross curricular learning” said Andrew Kennedy, CEO of Moviestorm.

“Moviestorm is a fast, fun and flexible tool and we are excited to see how our members will use it across all of our subject areas. It will encourage IGGY members to develop modern communication skills, express themselves in new ways, improve their media literacy – and simply enjoy making their own films” said Adrian Hall, Managing Director of IGGY.

A Moviestorm download is completely free for IGGY members. For more information about IGGY please click on the following link: https://www.iggy.net/moviestorm  

Moviestorm Education 2013 Updates

We are delighted to announce the release of the Moviestorm Education 2013 updates. You can download Unlimited or Junior builds, for Mac or PC by clicking on the following links:

Moviestorm Unlimited (PC) - http://cloud.moviestorm.co.uk/download-1.5/Moviestorm_Windows_Education_Unlimited_1.5.4.exe

Moviestorm Junior (PC) - http://cloud.moviestorm.co.uk/download-1.5/Moviestorm_Windows_Education_Junior_1.5.4.exe

Moviestorm Unlimited (Mac) - http://cloud.moviestorm.co.uk//download-1.5/Moviestorm_Mac_Education_Unlimited_1.5.4.dmg

Moviestorm Junior (Mac) - http://cloud.moviestorm.co.uk/download-1.5/Moviestorm_Mac_Education_Junior_1.5.4.dmg

If you have a current Moviestorm Education license, please feel free to download the new updates and benefit from the enhanced performance, new functionality and additional content. 

There are installation guidelines here - http://support.moviestorm.co.uk/kb/technical/updating-moviestorm-education-versions

IMPORTANT MODDING NOTE - When installing, please be attentive to the user's mods which reside in the Addons folder.

If you have any questions or issues, please contact support.team@moviestorm.co.uk

Next gen iPad technology demo at BETT

We are delighted to have been invited to demonstrate our next generation technology on the Epson stand (Number D284) at BETT 2013, from Wednesday 30 January to Saturday 2 February. 

Are you visiting the Bett Show? If so, please come and find us on the Epson Stand D284, where you can play with our new iPad app, and discover the ease and creativity the app offers to make simple movies with just a few screen touches. You will also be able to enter a prize draw to win a FREE Moviestorm Education Site License for your school or college, worth up to £2000!

Come and get involved, we'd love the chance to meet some of you, to show you or new Moviestorm iPad app AND for you to enter our prize draw. 

For more information about BETT, click here: http://ow.ly/gTFdV 

For more information about the Moviestorm iPad app, click here http://www.moviestorm.co.uk/hub/ios/home

Moviestorm 1.5.3 nearly ready

We're currently finalizing the release of Moviestorm 1.5.3.  If all goes well, it'll be ready by the end of this week. Here are the highlights of what we're hoping it will include (note that some items may not ship if they fail final QA):

New features

• Look At now has a customizer which allows you to change the duration of the look at blend, where on the target the character is looking, and to do the look at with just the head, just the eyes, or both the head and eyes
• Switching between the Cutting Room and the Camera View or Director's View keeps the timeline position, if the Cutting Room is showing a view of the scene.
• Ceilings now cast shadows, provided Interior lighting is disabled.
• The Script Editor now has a 'clear timeline' option when right clicking on the current scene, which removes all activities in that scene.
• The prop customizer in the set workshop now has an option to stop a prop casting shadows. This will also stop it reducing shadowmap quality, which can otherwise happen for props near the edges of your scene.
• The 'Home' key now centers the view.

Bug fixes

• The 'Dead' mood now prevents any automatic look at activities, or any improvisation.
• Very long (eg over 6 min) clips now display correctly on the Cutting Room timeline.
• The say record buttons are now play/stop buttons rather than having a separate stop.
• Loading a multi-scene movie that was saved in the Cutting Room will go straight to the Cutting Room rather than asking which scene to go to then going to the Cutting Room.
• Having a broken video in your movie no longer stops it from loading.
• When changing the duration of a walk, it should move later activities along to provide space.
• When using the image browser, images over 4 megapixels now warn the user to resize them, rather than risking breaking Moviestorm.
• Remove mark now works on marks that do not have an associated walk.
• When taking screenshots in the Camera View with the snapshot button, the resulting images now include depth of field.
• The cel-shading tick box on the lighting settings no longer overrides the movie cel-shading tick box on the script settings unless you tell it to.
• Memory leak fix: Moviestorm no longer holds onto copies of videos that were used as previews, or that were used on the Cutting Room timeline, or that were deleted.
• Modders workshop: changed the 'Move to' menu so that you can scroll through the list of addons.
• Modders workshop: fixed the 'Browse' button so that it works for props that have spaces in their folder names.