Braving the Machinima whirlwind...
Woo-hoo! Post in a few days, my eye! (c: Nothing like a set of conferences to make a liar out of ya!
Anyway, I'm finally back in NY after having attended both the 2005 GDC in San Francisco and the Living Game Worlds Symposium at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Both events were extremely cool and great to be part of. It was also great being able to spread the word about Machinima.
The 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC)
This year, the Academy was invited to be part of NVIDIA's GDC Booth, to assist in promoting this year's Machinima Film Festival. Here, we owned a "pod" of the NVIDIA booth, and showed some great Machinima films such as Friedrich Kirschner's The Journey (Winner of the MSUC Machinima Category), Fountainhead's evergreen Anna, Ethan Vogt's groundbreaking Game On and Tom Palmer's fabulous Bot.
In addition to the films, I also demo'ed Fountainhead's brand spankin'-new Machinimation 2.0 for Doom 3 at the NVIDIA stage. We drew a lot of attention with their software, rivaling the crowds brought together by the Unreal 3 demo (really cool in its own right). In turn, we also gave away copies of my book and Academic versions of Machinimation 1.0. A very big thanks to FE in helping with this year's booth!
GDC presentations aside, we also had an impromptu GDC Machinima meeting, with the always-cool Friedrich Kirschner hanging out with the AMAS team and visits by Don Alvarez and Mark Parry (The Showdown's crack team), Jake Hughes (he says "Hello!" to all you Anox fans) and Tom Mustaine (Ritual big-wig and main man behind the Quake Movie classic, Operation Bayshield).
While I went to GDC with the anticipation of a great event, I could have never planned the exciting one we had. I'm already looking forward to the 2006! (back in San Jose -w00t!)
Living Game Worlds Symposium honoring Will Wright
Straight from SF, I flew into Atlanta to take part in the Georgia Tech's Living Game Worlds Symposium, honoring Will Wright. A cooler event to be part of, I couldn't have found. It's hard to describe all the great things that I experienced at this event.
The obiligitory "I hang out with cool people" photo - yours truly with Will Wright and Janet Murray at the Living Game Worlds Symposium
Between meeting up with such luminaries as Chris Crawford (who shared his recipe of work/life balance by chopping up firewood)), Bing Gordon, Ken Perlin (who I found shares Sideways as his fave film of last year ) and of course, Will Wright., it was a great feeling being included in this event - which I found out afterwards, was directly related to interests of Will's (Machinima being one of them). Will previewed his new game Spore at his address speech - which looks to be yet another extremely fun time killer. The game is based on Will's fascination of Charles Eames "Powers of Ten" (somewhat obvious given the Sim series of games), however Spore gives users the ability to create life at the organism level and cultivating it into more advanced life forms, eventually gaining control at the planetary (and intergalatic) level. It really looks like a great game - enough so that I was nearly repeating "Wow" at timed intervals...out loud.
During the last panel, I had the chance to present Machinima to the conference body. In the very beginning of the presentation, I first polled the conference attendees to see how many knew of Machinima. Astoundedly, about 2/3's of the 300 or so audience raised their hands. Looks like I may need to shelve the "What is Machinima?" presentation in the near future. (c: Anyway, while its hard to encapsulate the entire world of Machinima in 10-15 minutes, I managed to do so. I think it went off reasonably well and received lots of great feedback in the post conference reception. One really cool highlight of the discussion: Two of my panel colleagues were Blake Lewin of Turner Broadcasting and Chris Klaus of Klaus Entertainment. Both Blake and Chris had Machinima slides in their presentation, showing Machinima's potential in future entertainment. It's great to see our work is finally paying off.
In addition to all of the cool presentations, we also received a tour of Georiga Tech's facilities, getting to play with their current projects. Their augmented reality work, Four Angry Men (based on the stage play, Twelve Angry Men), was a blast to experience and they also introduced us to their mobile robotics lab - another really cool part of the institution. It was a great place to visit and definitely look forward to GT making this an annual event.
Finally, last but not least - 2005 Machinima Film Festival News
While we're still working on the official announcement, this year's festival is gaining ground. The official date is still being nailed down, but it looks like the festival will take place in New York in November 2005. We feel this will give enough ramp-up time for people to submit their works and attend the festival as well as for us to get all of the festival details lined up. We expect to make the official announcement for the festival in April.
------------------------------
While there's more to post - particularly some great responses to "Still Seeing Breen" - I have to get ready for a quick trip to Ohio to visit my brother. I will undoubtedly have some idle time while I'm there, so I hope to post more once I have connectivity again.
Anyway, I'm finally back in NY after having attended both the 2005 GDC in San Francisco and the Living Game Worlds Symposium at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Both events were extremely cool and great to be part of. It was also great being able to spread the word about Machinima.
The 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC)
This year, the Academy was invited to be part of NVIDIA's GDC Booth, to assist in promoting this year's Machinima Film Festival. Here, we owned a "pod" of the NVIDIA booth, and showed some great Machinima films such as Friedrich Kirschner's The Journey (Winner of the MSUC Machinima Category), Fountainhead's evergreen Anna, Ethan Vogt's groundbreaking Game On and Tom Palmer's fabulous Bot.
In addition to the films, I also demo'ed Fountainhead's brand spankin'-new Machinimation 2.0 for Doom 3 at the NVIDIA stage. We drew a lot of attention with their software, rivaling the crowds brought together by the Unreal 3 demo (really cool in its own right). In turn, we also gave away copies of my book and Academic versions of Machinimation 1.0. A very big thanks to FE in helping with this year's booth!
GDC presentations aside, we also had an impromptu GDC Machinima meeting, with the always-cool Friedrich Kirschner hanging out with the AMAS team and visits by Don Alvarez and Mark Parry (The Showdown's crack team), Jake Hughes (he says "Hello!" to all you Anox fans) and Tom Mustaine (Ritual big-wig and main man behind the Quake Movie classic, Operation Bayshield).
While I went to GDC with the anticipation of a great event, I could have never planned the exciting one we had. I'm already looking forward to the 2006! (back in San Jose -w00t!)
Living Game Worlds Symposium honoring Will Wright
Straight from SF, I flew into Atlanta to take part in the Georgia Tech's Living Game Worlds Symposium, honoring Will Wright. A cooler event to be part of, I couldn't have found. It's hard to describe all the great things that I experienced at this event.
The obiligitory "I hang out with cool people" photo - yours truly with Will Wright and Janet Murray at the Living Game Worlds Symposium
Between meeting up with such luminaries as Chris Crawford (who shared his recipe of work/life balance by chopping up firewood)), Bing Gordon, Ken Perlin (who I found shares Sideways as his fave film of last year ) and of course, Will Wright., it was a great feeling being included in this event - which I found out afterwards, was directly related to interests of Will's (Machinima being one of them). Will previewed his new game Spore at his address speech - which looks to be yet another extremely fun time killer. The game is based on Will's fascination of Charles Eames "Powers of Ten" (somewhat obvious given the Sim series of games), however Spore gives users the ability to create life at the organism level and cultivating it into more advanced life forms, eventually gaining control at the planetary (and intergalatic) level. It really looks like a great game - enough so that I was nearly repeating "Wow" at timed intervals...out loud.
During the last panel, I had the chance to present Machinima to the conference body. In the very beginning of the presentation, I first polled the conference attendees to see how many knew of Machinima. Astoundedly, about 2/3's of the 300 or so audience raised their hands. Looks like I may need to shelve the "What is Machinima?" presentation in the near future. (c: Anyway, while its hard to encapsulate the entire world of Machinima in 10-15 minutes, I managed to do so. I think it went off reasonably well and received lots of great feedback in the post conference reception. One really cool highlight of the discussion: Two of my panel colleagues were Blake Lewin of Turner Broadcasting and Chris Klaus of Klaus Entertainment. Both Blake and Chris had Machinima slides in their presentation, showing Machinima's potential in future entertainment. It's great to see our work is finally paying off.
In addition to all of the cool presentations, we also received a tour of Georiga Tech's facilities, getting to play with their current projects. Their augmented reality work, Four Angry Men (based on the stage play, Twelve Angry Men), was a blast to experience and they also introduced us to their mobile robotics lab - another really cool part of the institution. It was a great place to visit and definitely look forward to GT making this an annual event.
Finally, last but not least - 2005 Machinima Film Festival News
While we're still working on the official announcement, this year's festival is gaining ground. The official date is still being nailed down, but it looks like the festival will take place in New York in November 2005. We feel this will give enough ramp-up time for people to submit their works and attend the festival as well as for us to get all of the festival details lined up. We expect to make the official announcement for the festival in April.
------------------------------
While there's more to post - particularly some great responses to "Still Seeing Breen" - I have to get ready for a quick trip to Ohio to visit my brother. I will undoubtedly have some idle time while I'm there, so I hope to post more once I have connectivity again.
posted by Paul
at 1:09 PM
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