Machinima Luvin'

Forgive me father for I have not posted in 5 days. These are my sins.

Where to start..where to start. I usually keep an ongoing list of links via firefox tabs and such for posting and they had been building up for a few days. Then I came in today and my machine was rebooted so I have to go from my pale memory.

I've been fairly busy outside of work writing and doing pre-production on my next short machinima film (target release of Sept.) and defending my ubergeek highscore status at Machinima Premiere.

But speaking of work, this has been an interesting week with having reached a milestone with Mass Effect. For those not aware there is a major gaming conference this week, E3, where all the game companies put their hype machines into overdrive on their coming wares, both hard and soft. Ours is a demo of Mass Effect. Unfortunately the show is only open to journalistic types so they can spread the word so I haven't seen anything we worked on released publicly, yet, although I will post once there is because it is tres cool stuff. Some quotes we're hearing are,

“In each area shown, from sprawling scenes on the ship Citadel to the dusty plains of worlds below, Mass Effect is clearly one of the best looking games for the Xbox 360.”

and

“…We only got a 10 minute presentation, but I had goose bumps for at least 5 minutes of the presentation. Mass Effect looks amazing and the game-play is fantastic …”

Looking forward to sharing visuals with everyone.

I could list a ton of cool footage released from the show. Including Halo3 (how cool is it to work at a company that announces on the overhead speakers to the whole company - to those of us left here who are not at E3 or post milestone vacation that is - that the Halo3 trailer is playing in our in-house theatre. Very cool. :), Alan Wake, Final Fantasy XIII and the list could go on. All these games/engines visually look amazing and may have great machinima potential. You'll also notice at the beginning of any of the Gametrailers video's is announcement of a movie making contest. The grand prize is an xbox360 and you have a week to submit.

Also Blur Studios (an amazing CG company) did a new trailer for WarHammer Online. This is state of the art 3D CG. I'd love to see a whole movie like this.

For machinima viewing, EP2 of BloodSpell has been released. And Spartan Life has this cool little vblog on Net Neutrality. The Return, Returns announcing a sequel with a well produced, exciting teaser trailer. And 'Sonic_Jihad12' has managed to get the American government interested in machinima, in a risk to homeland safety kind of way. After watching portions of this film I would think some subliminal message must be involved because it makes no sense otherwise, strange flick.

Once your eyes have bugged out of your head from all the watching. Give your ears a working with a podcast interview with Paul Marino

I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting but I'll post anything else I remember.

Update: I found this article on the Mass Effect showing at E3. The parts in the article describing when the player enters the bar, talks to the bartendar and goes upstairs to talk to the alien woman were all done by us (cinematic designers).

Update 2: Theres a cool little montage of game footage from E3 including about 4 seconds of Mass Effect. 1.5 seconds is from actual cutscenes.