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From DM6 to Park City: Machinima at Sundance
Moe Napoli writes "Machinima producer/author Paul Marino recently posted on his blog that he will be attending Sundance later this month (Jan. 26th to be exact) to moderate a panel discussion about the rising artform of machinima (using 3D games like Half-Life 2 for filmmaking purposes). Amongst the panelists will be Red Vs. Blue/The Strangerhood creators Burnie Burns and the Rooster Teeth team (also featured in the Jan. 2005 issue of Wired), who will also present a live demonstration of how they produce their hilarious RvB machinima series. Pretty cool to see Sundance embrace this new form of independent filmmaking and even cooler to see how far it has come since some gamers started making Quake Movies."
The Guild Theater in Albuquerque NM was recently host to Tromadance NM, the first of what will hopefully be an annual local filmmaking event. This was grassroots, homegrown, micro-budget stuff I'm talking about, like about $100 here -- I think $3000 was the max including equipment. I'm sure a lot of the shorter peices were budgeted literally with change dug out from under the sofa cushions. Lloyd Kaufmann of Toxic Avenger fame (among other things) ushered the event in, and everyone had a blast.
I ran into a few folks that I'd known from high school a decade ago, who I them had the pleasure of seeing on-screen or as directors. It was a bigger thrill than meeting Redford would have afforded. Regular, ordinary folks *love* to make movies, and have some pretty cool stories to tell too. The innovation is amazing considering what some of these guys try to do with so little tech available to them, which ranged from simple Macromedia Flash animations to cheap Sony videocams to (rarely) prosumer-grade DV cams. I would have loved to see some machinima.
The governor's office in New Mexico has waded hip-deep into local filmmaking, by which I mean Hollywood comes to town for a few weeks and hires local crews. This isn't the kind of local filmmaking I'd *like* to see the governor pimping the state for (SUPPORT FILMMAKERS WHO ACTUALLY WORK AND LIVE IN NEW MEXICO, PLEASE), but I guess it's a beginning. Plus, it means there are plenty of "workforce training" and continuing education classes to get the mad film skizzills. There's a lot to work with for the amateur, hobbyist, and professional filmmaker alike.
Here are some links for the interested:
Albuquerque Independent Film Cooperative Forums
Albuquerque Digital Filmmakers Forum hosted by Blankstare pictures.
Exhilarated Despair Productions Forum run by Scott Phillips, producer/director of Stink of Flesh.
I'm leaving a lot of links out, but everyone is pretty much linked to everyone else, so those ones will get you well started.
And that's it. I'm done shilling.
No need to remember; It's still going.. Stunt Island Film Group on Yahoo Groups.. http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/sifa/
I've actually been trying to archive as much as I can of old stunt island films before they disappear forever. The archive is available here:
http://halelamien.no-ip.org/stunt_island/
Unfortunately, I've only been able to locate a little bit so far. If anyone has old movies lying around on floppy disks or something, please let me know at neuronexmachina@gmail.com
Also, Stunt Island runs like a charm in DOSBox, and you can typically acquire it from an abandonware site like The Underdogs.
Ahhh, Stunt Island. There's a program that's screaming out for a modern day remake.. It was like a machinima production studio years before the term "machinima" was even coined
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.