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Have you seen the machinima gaming news show, Tra5hTa1k? http://trashtalk.illclan.com/

But seriously, this kind of automated thing baffles me. Even though I'm a machinima director, I'm not sure I would want to watch an animated talking head deliver my news.

IIRC, a goodly portion of the Ill Clan machinima stuff is done with Quake. And since they're based out of NYC, I bet they'll be there.

In fact we still sometimes use a modified version of Quake 2 called Qfusion which allows us to use Quake 3 assets within the open source Quake 2 game engine. A nice example of this can be seen in a series of shorts we did for SpikeTV called Gamer Gags.

The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences has announced the 2005, not so annual, Machinima Film Festival. The festival will once again be held at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York.

Machinima in general has grown in popularity and commercial success since the last festival in 2003 with such recent work as Paul Marino's Half Life 2 music video, "I'm Still Seeing Breen" appearing on MTV2's Video Mods, Rooster Teeth's recent series of shorts for IFC, the Nisha Chronicles for GMD Studios' latest A.R.G. promoting the Audi A3, and The ILL Clan's "Gamer Gags" for SpikeTV.

In all it's been a good year for Machinima, and it's only August.

ILL Clinton Machinima Movie Maker

That's similar to how the electoral map looks.

ILL Clinton
Maker of Machinima movies.

Well, they're getting some press alright.

ILL Clinton - Maker of Machinima Movies

Reminds me of the Retro-Encabulator...

The original machine had a base plate of prefabulated amulite, surmounted by a malleable logarithmic casing in such a way that the two spurving bearings were in direct line with the pentametric fan. The latter consisted simply of six hydrocoptic marzelvanes, so fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft that side fumbline was effectively prevented. The main winding was of the normal lotus-0-delta type placed in panendermic semiboiloid slots in the stator, every seventh conductor being connected by a nonreversible tremie pipe to the differential gridlespring on the "up" end of the grammeters.

ILL Clinton
Live Machinima Comedy Performance-August 28th-NYC

Why have more than one console, if all the games are available on all consoles?

It would seem better for the consumer if we could buy whatever console we want, and play all the games. But if it means that a company like Nintendo will go out of business, then the world would be deprived of games like Wario, et al. That can't be good.

Sega stopped making consoles, but they still make games. I don't really know. I guess I'm just posing a question for people to think about.

And using these posts to promote my upcoming show. :)

ILL Clinton
Live Improvised Machinima-August 28th NYC

Yet Nintendo is losing market share, and as a result, developers (like Capcom who developed Viewtiful Joe exclusively for GameCube) are shying away.

It may be better to have a great game like Viewtiful Joe available on other consoles, but then what is left to distinguish one console from the others?

Winning awards is nice, but winning customers is apparently more important.

ILL Clinton
Live Machinima Performance, August 28th, NYC.

But here's my favorite part of the article...

"I hope there will be a time when people will be able to use this for their home videos. But at the moment it's not a one click process," said Cohen.

Wait a minute! Isn't that patented by Amazon!

ILL Clinton Live Machinima Show, August 28th, NYC.

I actually own the n52, upgrading from my earlier n50.

As a gamer (yes, I admit it), I do find these devices useful. After about 4-5 gaming sessions, I became extremely comfortable with the device, and began integrating its usefulness into more traditional applications (like 3DS Max). Given the included software (albeit Windows), you are able to map keystrokes (macros as well) to the device, to which you can reconfigure/reinitialize the mapping through an app that sits in the systray (Loadout Manager).

Now onto the bad stuff. The n52 makes some improvements over the n50 (extra row of keys, dpad, thumb shift key), however the response of the keys themselves seems to have suffered a setback. While I was never completely satisfied with the response of the n50 keys (not enough tactile feedback for these fingers), the n52 has this even less so. More importantly, the keys sometime stick, making you depress some of the keys more than once in order to execute the keystroke - a pretty large issue when it comes the one thing a keyboard should do well.

Hopefully, the problems I encountered with this n52 is a defect with this particular unit (/.er's, chime in!).

All-in-all, the n50/n52 are good and versatile products, and I recommend them for those looking for a one-hand input device - particularly if you come across them at a cheap price (I bought my n52 for $35). The software support is a little flimsy, but Belkin seems to be more focused on this as their products are growing in popularity.

Another extremely interesting input use... The ILL Clan (a Machinima team I co-founded) use these devices to puppeteer their virtual characters during their Machinima productions/live performances - mapping the keys to facial gestures, lipsync and triggered animations.

That said, as someone who uses game technology for uses other than playing games (ie machinima,) I can say that the real-time lighting effects in Doom 3 are a huge change, and a sort of breakthrough in terms of what's possible.

When making Machinima, we are able to come very close to the techniques of real film-making. But the lighting has always been a limitation. Film-making is all about light. So the fact that we can now position lights in-game in real-time and create shadows, means we are that much closer to real film-making techniques.

Of course, if the past is any indication, we won't actually start to use Doom 3 for Machinima until Doom 4 is released. ; )

The ILL Clan - Machinima Pioneers

The ILL Clan - Machinima Pioneers

Thanks everyone for the great suggestions. Looks like I've got enough authors in this thread to last me all summer.

ILL Clinton
The ILL Clan - Machinima Pioneers

I've read a lot of good sci-fi writers, but so few are as good at character development AND hard core science fiction writing.

If Vinge didn't spend so much time teaching, he'd probably have time to write more novels.

Anyone have some suggestions of writers who come close to Vinge for great sci-fi? (I've already read most of Gibson, Stephenson, Simmons, Bear, Sagan, Haldeman)

ILL Clinton
The ILL Clan - Machinima Pioneers

That's what some of us do. I would love to get advice from /.ers on using open source techniques to create a good machinima mod.

The ILL Clan often uses game developers from all over the world to make movies. Being a part of the Machinima community makes us part of the Quake Mod community, and since Quake 2 is open source there's a lot of interesting things going on.

The BeefQuake mod let us upgrade to 128 bit color. qFusion allows us to use Quake 3 assets with our own Quake 2 camera and puppet mod.

We're at our best when we put it all together and perform Machinima live in front of an audience.

Larry & Lenny for President

It's great that things like DV and Machima have made it easier for movies to be made without millions of dollars in budget...but as we should all already know - having a lot of gear and money to throw at a bad story doesn't make for a good movie. And you can have the crappiest production values in the world (Clerks), but if the story is compelling, that doesn't matter. If you've got a good story and know how to tell it, you can shoot your film on one of those old Fisher Price camcorders that recorded on audio cassettes.

That being said, I have always found the work of ill clan to be pretty entertaining and well done. Perhaps it's because the creators are all skilled improvisors and know how to tell stories. Or maybe just because I think lumberjacks are inherently funny.

Here's a good line from one of the finalists' website...

"30fps is fine for streaming video, but if you have what it takes you'll want to render The Showdown on your own rig and watch it at 120fps. We don't call 1600x1200 Machinima, we call it film resolution."

Cool.

ILL Clinton
Larry & Lenny for President

One of the things I mentioned (as does the article) is that we do live machinima performances in theaters and clubs. Then we post Quicktime movies of those live performances for people to watch on the net. We don't post them as in-game files because no one would be able to watch them unless they have BeefQuake.

Actual real-time performances.

There are a lot of reasons we don't do that anymore, and they have nothing to do with protecting assets. We release our movies in Quicktime so that people can watch them. Not many people have a copy of the Quake 2 mod, "BeefQuake" on their system. Quake 2 is free, but most other games cost $50. We don't want to limit our audience to just the people who happen to own the game we used for our engine. And the game engines tend to be very fickle about how they display the images, different processors and 3D engines deal differently with the graphics.

Another important reason is that we don't do any editing in-engine anymore. Back in 1999, when we were using Quake, it wasn't so easy to edit video on a PC, so using Machinima was actually a better solution. Now, editing video is technically easy, and editing in-engine is a major hassle.

So, we create the movies in-game, we edit them in Premier or Final Cut, and we release them in web-friendly, easily downloadable video formats.

Incidentally, there are still some Machinima movies out there that you can watch in-game. Our first two movies, "Apartment Huntin'" and "Hardly Workin'" can both be viewed in their original formats, Quake and Quake 2 respectively. But how many people still have those games on their system, or want to spend 2 hours downloading them, when they can just watch a Quicktime?

Others (Like Anna) are created using a game engine, but the character and camera movement is all plotted in advance using Machinimation software. It's still called Machinima because the rendering is all real-time.

One really interesting thing (if I may say so myself) that the article mentions is that real-time animation allows for live productions. So what we have done is set up our server and laptops at a club or theater and project the video directly from the camera's POV on the server onto a large screen for the audience to see. Then we control the camera and puppets right there in the theater, and "perform" the animation. Our latest show involves two characters running for President and Vice Pres. and we answer questions from the audience. We have a few years experience doing comedy improv on stages in NYC, so we like to interact with the audience.

Perhaps you didn't have a chance to read the whole article, but the reference to live comedy doesn't involve audience members connected to the server. We actually do this in front of live audiences at film festivals and clubs in New York City.

Only the performers are connected to the server. The "camera's" view is projected onto a large screen, comedy ensues. Everyone, including the performers are together in the theatre (or club), not connected via the internet.

You can see excerpts from one of these live performances on our website.

We use Quake 2 because it's Open Source, allowing us to modify it to do what we do.

ILL Clinton

Paul Marino of the Ill Clan also wrote a piece on this program, which you can find here.

There's a little stuff on RvB there, as well as details on the Ill Clan's Machinima ballet (!) piece.

As an avid gamer with a reasonable & somewhat steady income, I have purchased almost every console worth its weight in silicon. Not that I have money to throw around, but with these systems costing anyhere between $150-$300, having your many cakes & eating them too, is not entirely out of the question.

I purchased my DC last year @ launch, and have been extremely happy with the purchase. My PS2 just arrived this past Thursday & I'm very happy with it as well (I'm also glad I pre-ordered in February). I'm also looking forward to the Tribes2 release later this year as the original one of my favorite PC games.

Bottom line, there's plenty of room in the toy chest for all of these systems. And if your funds are limited, buy the one that has most enticing set of games/features for yourself. Either way, your purchase will be a good one.

ILL Robinson
The ILL Clan
Makers of Machinima shorts,
Apartment Huntin' & Hardly Workin'

Ooh, look at those flames go. Brief intro to point out biases: I'm Hugh Hancock, the CEO of Strange Company mentioned above (although I should point out that we're far from the only motivators of Machinima- other groups like the Ill Clan have been instrumental in its growth). I'm also, I think, even more extreme in my views on IPR and its upcoming demise than Jon.

Yes, Intellctual Property Rights as we know them, or indeed at all, are doomed. Count on it. Why? Because they're not "rights" at all. They're abberations forced upon us by the primitive nature of the distribution media we've had, up to now, available to us.

I think that a key point of Bruce Sterling's brilliant Viridian Manifesto is apposite here: ideology doesn't transcend technology. Technology transcends ideology. And technology, in this case digital distribution, is forcing a change in thinking, back from a top-down distribution model, where a few companies crank out CDs for the masses to a, well, distributed version.

Distribution is only the first stage. The thing that's really going to do horrible things to the whole concept of owning either and idea or an expression (thanks to the poster who pointed out the difference) is the freedom to not only copy, but copy, alter and release your own version of a song, a film, a TV series- whatever. It's not the freedom to distribute an unaltered version that counts- it's the freedom to find something you like, take bits out of it, change it, combine it with something else and then release it.

That's where Machinima comes in, of course. In the next year, there will be the technology to allow Star Trek fans to create their own episodes of Voyager or Deep Space Nine. There will be the capability for fans of the Heavy Metal series of comics and films to go and create their own movies in that universe. There will be the potential to take any fictional universe, any story, and extend it, re-tell it or alter it, and then distribute it, in a way that's almost impossible to stop until it's too late. (For the curious, there's an article covering this concept in more detail over at http://www.machinima.com)

At the same time, we should look at other ways in which the concept of "plagiarism" is being destroyed: with fan-fiction, distributed over the Web. With "re-mixes" and "covers", now an accepted part of modern music, where an artist takes an existing track, changes it or re-records it to suit himself, and re-releases it. Hell, even with sophisticated photo-manipulation software: are you sure you haven't seen a similar picture somewhere else before?

So, does that mean that we're entering a new age? No. It means that the abberation of the last 400 years or so, and most pervasively the last 80 years or so- the concept of "intellectual property"- is about to come to an end.

Intellectual Property as a concept grew up with the spread of books as a means of recording information, but it became important with the creation of the printing press: a device that allowed mass reproduction of identical copies of a work. However, the important thing to note here is that IP is tied very closely with the notion that reproduction and distribution of a work, whether it be the printed word, music, a picture or a film, is difficult, and that distribution of the same is even more difficult. In every industry where there is a major fight currently underway to prevent "piracy", there is the situation where the monopoly big players had- the monopoly of distribution- is suddenly being undermined, as the ability to distribute freely is given to every player in the market.

The last time that was the case ended around 200 years ago, with the printing press and common literacy started to spell the end of the oral tradition of storytelling.

In many ways, the oral tradition mirrors the current situation on the Internet very closely. There was no ownership of an idea- a particularly famous storyteller may have been credited with the creation of a story, but that didn't mean he had the right to decide what happened to it, any more than nowadays Linus Torvalds has the right to decide what you, gentle reader, do with his source code to Linux. There were no "royalties", and by the very nature of the distribution medium- the human tongue- it was kinda hard to stop people changing a story to what they thought was an "improved" version.

Many people have conceptualised the Internet as a "group mind". It might be better to think of it as a "group campfire": a place where we can trade tales and ideas with, rather than just the people of our village, the people of (oh, horrible buzzword) the global village. And in that situation, the concept of preventing people from distributing the latest film or the latest CD becomes as idiotic as George Lucas trying to prevent someone from recounting the story of Star Wars in a bar to his friends.