Free Pixel

Matteo Bittanti sent me a pointer to the work of Marco Mendeni, whom he interviewed for Gamescenes some time ago. One quote stuck with me: I Am Niko Bellic, one of my first machinima, was the result of my wild, random meanderings in Liberty City. I would often stop and use the camera to rotate [...]

Now the trailer for Disney’s Infinity is out and promises the world (see Forbes for a short write up on the press event). Skylanders landed with a splash, so it probably was only a matter of time to see the next version of this. When John Lasseter sells the product the jump via the “toys” [...]

ETC just published a book about modding edited by Erik Champion and including a chapter by Friedrich on From Games to Movies. Meanwhile our own project here at Georgia Tech – which had Friedrich as one of the early researchers – has been underway and we have been hard at work to put together a [...]

Machinima is always a kind of performance. To make that point, I often refer back to great machinima performance examples such as Chris Burke’s This Spartan Life (which finally saw episode 7 released in April ). His latest endeavor continues this approach on using game worlds as virtual stages at live events. But now the [...]

By now, the exodus into the virtual has been in so many movies, one does not care to count. But this commercial by Toyota plays with the reversal of that idea. At the same time, it is a kind of a deja-vu. … that is if you still remember Ethan Vogt’s Volvo 50 machinima Game [...]

Being the old fashioned person that I am (meaning: still unclear what I should use Facebook for apart from personal yellow press behavior) – I posted a question to some friends on the status of the Machinima blogosphere. The starting point was that Machinima.com in all honesty barely qualifies as a “machinima” blog these days. [...]

Pooky recently pointed me to her latest creation: a public announcement machinima to deal with environmental issues in California. Here it is: It has always baffled me why there are not more “functional” machinima films. Like technical “how to’s” and the like. The precision and fast production methods of machinima seemed to be poised to [...]

It is not really machinima but the use of cinematic means in video games has been a rather close cousin to machinima at large and one of my marvelous MS students, Nick Porier, has just finished his final project on the use of dynamic camera systems in 3D platformer games.The main idea was that camera [...]

My old alma mater is staging a roundtable on Machinima and I really regret that I cannot go. Given that there is also Moviestorm nearby, it might be a stimulating event. Here is their round up: Jenna Ng (facilitator), Newton Trust/Leverhulme Early Career, CRASSH ) University of Cambridge William Brown, Lecturer in Film at the [...]

Via Puppetvision (which has it from the Muppet blog Tough Pigs which ultimately links to the TED talk). It is Scooter himself “I’m talking puppets vs CG.” He makes his point pretty clear: “puppets are the pioneers who made CG possible.” But it feels a bit like a missed opportunity to just deliver a rant [...]