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Huge World of Warcraft Machinima Contest
wyndairn writes "Blizzard Entertainment and Xfire have just announced the largest ever machinima contest with over $10,000 in prizes from AMD, Hypernia, Creative Labs, XFX, D-Link, Corsair, ZBoard and Time Games. The contest involves entrants producing movies using the Blizzard Entertainment MMORPG World of Warcraft game engine to create imaginative movies in the three main categories of Dance, Comedy and Drama. Six prizes will be awarded for each category. An additional Twenty prizes will be awarded in special categories including Best Music, Best Dialog, Best Action Scene, Best Pun or Line, and Best Editing and Special Effects. A special prize from Hypernia will also be awarded to a selected movie. Entries must be submitted by January, 21st 2006." Good luck to folks who decide to enter. If you aren't already familiar with it, the Curse Guild's Blackwing Lair: The Movie may give you an idea of what is possible with WoW Machinima.
Comedywise, this is another prime example of WoW mixed with excellent talent.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
The winners of the Blizzcon Movie contest can be found in the following link.
o ntest.html
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_blizzcon_videoc
Not the same contest, but we'll probably see some of the same participants or similar entries.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Is your winner for Best Comedy. Hands down.
VOTE!
This looks really interesting, and no doubt a lot of people would like to try their hand at some WoW-based machinima, rather than just looking at the work of others. The very widespread use of customized UIs in WoW certainly suggests that the platform is quite flexible.
Does anyone have any useful links to development tools and procedures for using the WoW engine in this way? Can the director's camera be driven through the Lua interface? And is there a way to move entities programmatically, rather than by using live players operating their clients through storyboarded actions?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
If Filefront and the others are distributing the movie to whoever wants it, is there some legal distinction between this and file-sharing? It would save the distributors lots of bandwidth. Even Blizzard releases its patches in a distributed way now.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
There would be an order of magnitude more interest in this contest if they would add a Porn category. Of course, not all the interest would be positive...
The song is originally from a musical called Avenue Q. It is a good WoW video though.
On a side note, and although it will fall on deaf ears, I make this plea to any author of videos: Please do not put your video out in WMV format. Use DivX, Xvid, OGM, or even MOV; anything but WMV3 which cannot be read on anything but Windows.
The last prize company's name is actually "uTime Games" - it looks like the mu in the name didn't make it through.
Of course, I'd post the #181 html code here so it looks right, but apparently that gets filtered out, too. So, um, picture the 'u' with a tail.
That green slime had it coming.
Time to make a Brokeback Mountain machina in WoW like: Bareback Magician, a gay love story between a gay Undead and also equally homosexual human Mage, set on the fields of the Badlands... which is perfect to keep the "Cowboy" thing going.... Ride Em Cowboy Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Hawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
Necrohomophilia?
I have no idea what you call it when an undead has the hots for the living though.
Sometimes my arms bend back.