The 48 Hour Film Project is returning to machinima!

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours. On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete.

2012:  the 48 project machinima promises to be special.

In 2007, machinima was included in the 48HFP, as one of their cities. Filmmakers from all over the variety of virtual worlds and games are competing to see who can make the best short 3 – 5 minute film in only 48 hours.

The winning film will goes up against films from around the world for the title     “Best 48 Hour Film of the year”.

In 2012, machinima has it’s own website, and a big prize for the winner: 3,000 dollar.

As producer for the 48HFPmachinima, I am proud to introduce Tom Papas as my co-producer. He is awesome!  Tom is the 48HFP producer for New South Wales (Australia), and us joining forces will bring new opportunities for machinima. For example, your films will be shown in Australia at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre in Sydney ánd in Second Life, on the big screens.

Oh and did I mention the grande big prize of 3,000 dollars for the winning team? And head of jury will be Tony Dyson?   Don’t wait and sign up now!

The dates for 48machinima 2012 are set: March 30 – April 1

The 48machinima website:   http://48machinima.project48.com.au/

Please sign up for the 48HFP twitter account for news

Register HERE

Facebook Group

Facebook Page

See you there!

Chantal Harvey & Tom Papas

48HFPmachinima producers

December 17, Rockcliffe University hosted a Q and A session with Jessica Lyon and Nigma Sterling. Topic was the Phoenix and Firestorm viewers. Jessica answered questions from the audience, and from the blog, in this 190 minute long session. http://www.phoenixviewer.com/

“Lets have a conversation. Your Q’s, Our answers.

Lets Talk…
There has been a great amount of anger, frustration, confusion, misunderstanding, fighting and tension among our users with regards to the status and future of the Phoenix and Firestorm Viewers. I think it’s time we give you a venue to constructively vent, have your questions/concerns answered and allow me to explain our position.

I have organized a Q&A event that will be held in the Rockcliffe Universities 4 region auditorium. It will be hosted by Nigma Sterling of Rockcliffe Uni. The format will be similar to our Office Hours with a host taking questions and me answering them. The event will be video recorded and made available for those who cannot attend.

We will take questions both from the audience and from the comments section of THIS blog post. So if you will not be able to attend but have questions, concerns or criticism you want answered please write them down as a comment on this blog post. But do note, I will not answer things like “You suck!”, “Your viewer sucks!”, “I don’t like it”. Questions, concerns and Constructive criticism only. That means you need to provide actual reasons for your complaints so that I can address those reasons.”

Filmed in Second Life, on Rockcliffe Conservatory, by Chantal Harvey. See the full video click here

Ataro Asbrink is presenting his revolutionairy idea on Coded Movies during two MachinimaMondays sessions. You are invited!

SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA4/27/37/21

Coded Movies are movies that are written line by line with a programming language. Normally individual scenes of a Machinima are grabbed with Fraps and then joined together with a video editor, scene by scene.  With Coded Movies it is different.You write your screenplay, build in SL all the required elements including the sounds and then you code scene by scene with LSL (Linden Scripting Language).

It looks like this:
Cameraview(<70.915138, 76.942871, 20.937574>,<71.239334, 78.342018, 20.945393> );  //Regional coordinatesllSleep(6.0);   // This means that you can see the scene for 6 seconds

Subsequently, the film is immediately ready for showing in Second Life or for streaming on/to a website.
The main difference to regular machinima is that a coded movie has no individual frames anymore, but consists of direct views into Second Life reality. While the movie runs, you can even take control of the camera and have a look around on the set; with pressing ESC you return to the current movie. The movie consists of individual elements, each of which can be changed. Furniture, time of day, sky, weather, costumes, everything on the set can be changed at any time, without having to change the programming code.

As long as there are no “actorbots”, as the condition is that you have to work with avatars and/or pre-produce avatar actions with a bluescreen (chroma keying) and paste it into the scenes.
To synchronize lip movement with sound in an invisible sound prim is a problem to be solved in feature films.

Ataro came up with the term “coded movie”. He tells me that you could also call it cyber movie.
As an example you can look at “NOT Melancholia”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaORD-R8IY
Ataro tells us: I didn’t invent anything, I saw similar things in SL (“Metropolis” performances from the CARP group for instance), but I try to use existing things like LSL camera functions strictly on making real movies with all the elaborated language of film has to offer.

Imagination and ingenuity is needed now!
I would like to see a lot of coded movies from different people and genres in the near future.
Today Ataro shows a few small examples to a group of invitees (come and join us) and applications – and we can talk about it.

MachinimaMondays meeting place today is at parcel LEA4  InterACT!
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA4/27/37/21

Meeting Date/Time: Nov 28 2011  7 pm SLT and Dec 5 1 pm PDT

MachinimaMondays – special meeting on October 24, 2011.

2 pm and 7 pm PDT/PAC time; click this link to go to the virtual location.

http://www.facebook.com/groups/147969981941243/

Suzy Yue (K. DaVette See) is a film director. Suzy founded the Directors Guild of Second Life with the goal of seeking out those in SL with directing experience and bringing them together with both those interested in directing, and those seeking directors for their projects.

Tonight at Machinimamondays (2 and 7 pm PDT/PAC time) Suzy will screen her latest film,  “Coffee Schlock with AJ”  and will lead a discussion of the work of a director of machinima. Suzy be will be joined by Avajean Westland, who wrote, stars in, and co-produced this film.
Olaf Barbosa, the announcer in “Schlock” and a actor who has worked with Suzy on a number of projects will also be available for questions.

Watch the film here.

DGSL Group (directors Guild Second Life)

Mission statement:

Dedicated to the art of directing in the areas of screen and stage. In particular we hope bring focus to the necessity of including the skill of artisitic directing to the art of filmmaking and live performance of dramatic works to the virtual environment of Second Life.

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Member Welcome Statement

Welcome to the DGSL!  I hope that the next few months will be exciting ones for us all. Thanks Gnueon Aeon for the great new logo.

First of all, we are not associated with the Director’s Guild of America, though there may be members in the group who are affiliated with that organization.

Next,  I hope everyone will be able to attend an informal get together next week so we can get to know one another and talk a bit about the goals, purpose and structure of the group.  I’ll send out more information about that this weekend.

Below are a couple of things that we will be putting together over the next few weeks.

1)  The DGSL office will be located at Running Lady Studios.  I’m still setting up a parcel, but will send out the LM in a few days.

2)  Screenings – There will be occasional screenings in-world of films with time afterward for discussion. that we could discuss afterwards.  These should be films that are generally accepted as good examples of good direction. Towards that end, please send me a list of films you’d like to see included in this group.  You can forward your choices  via email or notecard.

3)  Speakers/lectureres – If you would like to be on the list as a speaker or if you know of someone in or out of SL who would be willing lecture or lead a discussions on directing, please forward their name and credentials to me via email or notecard.

4)  Activities -  If you have an idea for and activity or event that this group might put on or sponsor, please let me know via email or notecard.

5)  Notices – I would like to keep the number of notices going out from this group to a minimum, so notices will be limited to announcements about group activities, meetings, and events. I will be putting out as a blog or newsletter once a week with notices from group members about their activities or events of note.

Talk to you all soon and thanks so much for being a part of this group.

Suzy Yue