Depeche Mode Suffers Well in Machinima

Ok, moving right along from the cheesy blog title, this post appears before some of the other items I promised to blog about, however I thought to quicky mention this while it was somewhat timely.

Depeche Mode recently completed a Machinima music video for "The Sims 2: Open for Business" expansion pack. The music video, which I believe only shows/plays a clip of the actual Suffer Well track, shows the doomed romantic advances of a robot towards a human woman, intercut with performing shots of the band in all their Sims 2 glory. While this is, in of itself, a great event, Depeche Mode extended this video for "Suffer Well" one step further by recording David Gahan singing the lead vocals in Simish (that unintelligible language between Sims - and sometimes, maternal twins). I felt this approach was a pretty clever marketing angle and brings a bit more uniqueness to the work - one-up'ing it from being merely a Machinima showpiece developed with an extremely popular musical group.

Kudos to all of the folks involved - it definitely shows how to use Machinima not only effectively, but also creatively.

Dusting off the HTML and CSS

My apologies for the unanticipated moratorium of postings here. I've been swamped with a number of projects which have been taking up quite a bit of my schedule. Thankfully, some light is at the end of the tunnel for these, and I can get back to focusing some time here.

In that, I've been plowing through my inbox and there's been quite a bit happening in the Machinima world since January 25th. Nearly a month a half later (that's about a year in Internet time), we've seen the announcements of the Blizzard/XFire WoW Machinima contest winners, the first Second Life Machinima to premiere at SxSW (this past weekend in fact), a call for entries for HD Machinima, as well as pornographic Machinima, and the launch of a new Machinima site. Yow - I will have to spread out some of this over the next couple of days, so that this March 11th posting doesn't turn that horizontal scrollbar of yours into a barely visible sliver.

This week, XFire announced the winners to their World of Warcraft Machinima contest, which spun out a few highly-produced entries. The categories were diverse and glad to see some pretty specific awards in there. However, I highly doubt the Academy will ever hand out a "Best Pun Award", but, hey - you never know.

Best Comedy Category:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Atkins - Switcher 2
- 3rd Place: The Brothers Tauren
- 4th Place: WoW Action News
- 5th Place: The Chalice of Silvermoon

Best Dance Category:
- 1st Place: Billy Maclure
- 2nd Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 3rd Place: Purple
- 4th Place: The Man Who Can
- 5th Place: Anyway You Play

Best Drama Category:
- 1st Place: Served Cold
- 2nd Place VC
- 3rd Place: Aria Part IV: Retribution
- 4th Place: Redshift
- 5th Place: Yoshio and Masaru

Best Editing:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Billy Maclure

Best Pun/Line:
- 1st Place: Chalice of Silvermoon
- 2nd Place: WoW Action News

Best Original Music:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Billy Maclure

Best Dialogue:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: The Brothers Tauren

Best Action Scene:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Served Cold

I haven't had the chance to view them all, but it looks like the contest was a resounding success. Given the response, and with the WoW player base surpassing the six million mark (!), I would expect XFire to turn this into a somewhat regular event.

Congrats to all of the winners and we look forward to your next productions (hint, hint - the Mackies later this year (c: ) .

More in a bit....