On our way to Park City

Well, Happy New Year, everyone. It's been nearly a month since my last posting. Haven't posted as nearly often as I had hoped - oh well - I'll do like most - chalk it up to the holidays and intermittent blackouts caused by a little too much merriment.

While I may have awoken in dark alley or two more than usual, there's been one or more cool things in play behind the scenes.

The first and most exciting part of the aforementioned stuff takes place later this month. During the last week of January, I will be visiting beautiful Park City, Utah attending the indy film fest extravaganza known as Sundance. There, I will be moderating the fest's first-ever discussion panel about Machinima. Yep, its true. Honestly. Yes. I swear it has nothing to do with a Christmas dare to maintain a BAC of .491 for 24 hours (well, maybe a bit).

Martini drinking aside (aside drinking being the only way a serious Martini man lives), this is going to be a great panel discussion. We're still in process of confirming the panelists, but I can say that along with me will be Machinima producer par-excellence Burnie Burns and the Rooster Teeth guys - who will be talking Machinima shop and showing off how they produce that wee-little side project of theirs, Red vs. Blue.

The panel will be introducing Machinima to the festival audience, showing off the different production methods as well as the panelists thoughts around Machinima and its future. As the moderator, I may throw in a few curve balls (yeah, like maybe some Quake Movie trivia) - just to keep the panelists on their feet and provide an infusion of screwball comedy at Sundance.

There's a bit more information on the Sundance site (sorry for the indirect link - you'll need feel around in the dark for the actual info). Overall, it should be a great panel and I'm really excited to be part of it. I would definitely recommend stopping by, particularly if you happen to be skiing through.

In other news, I've been toiling away with Half-Life 2 on and off for the past month. It definitely has loads of Machinima potential - particularly with FacePoser in the SDK. I've started a short Machinima project using HL2's various demo recording features and FacePoser - which I will show a bit at the Sundance panel - and post shortly thereafter.

Additionally, I've been playing with a HL2 mod called oddly enough, Garry's Mod, over the last couple of days. The mod allows the user to play with objects and physics of HL2. Essentially you can open up HL2 to any map, spawn a number of different items - furniture, tires, ropes, ragdoll versions of the game's characters, etc.. Once spawned you can use a special version of the grav gun known as the "Manipulator" to move the objects into a desired position. This allows you to pose the HL2 characters in interesting tableaus. For instance, one person took to recreating famous images using the mod - images like the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, Marines raising the flag over Iwo Jima and so on. Believe it or not, some even went as far as putting the characters into suggestive and lewd positions (which gave birth to another mod, i believe). You can also use Garry's mod to construct weird HL2 items, as some of the weapons give you the unique ability of attaching objects to other objects. Thus, you can attach wheels to the garbage dumpster and !Voila! -- instant vehicle. Of course, my textual depiction of "cool" doesn't do this justice so mosey over to the Garry Mod's site to get started. I'm not sure if I'm going to use it yet in my work, but it definitely has potential.

Looks like its time to figure out the title of this post and then off to bed to dream about sleep. I'll post more once my synapses find each other again.