Working, working, working

This week's blog entry is more status than news. I'm revising the blog's design and overhauling the backend - which is an uncomfortable switch from Blogger to Wordpress. There are pros/cons to such a shift, but I think Wordpress is a much more flexible system - a number of my fave sites use (Free Pixel, Overman's blog, The Animation Podcast, etc.) and provides a lot of support by way of community development and discussion. It wasn't an easy decision and took a fair amount of testing to make the final call. The one pretty large task is backing up the previous years Blogger posts and whipping them up into something that WordPress could then digest and display. Thankfully, it can be done-but does require some coaxing.

So tech decisions, along with the hitting the design reset button a few times, had slowed the effort quite a bit. However, things are now moving forward and I hope to have the blog relaunch sometime in May, along with some guest bloggers putting in a appearance or two.

2008 Make Something Unreal Contest!

Some cool news on the Machinima front. Epic Games has announced their latest Make Something Unreal Contest - an Unreal Tournament 3-fueled follow-up to their 2005 contest of the same (that one was based in Unreal 2 tech). This latest contest, offering $1 million US in cash/prizes, and sponsored by Intel, also includes a Machinima category (in phases 2-4).

The 2005 MSU competition gave us great Machinima works such as Tom Palmer's bot, Folklore Studio's Scrap & Friedrich Kirschner's The Journey.

I highly encourage anyone working in Machinima (or thinking about working in Machinima) to enter. The competition might be tough no doubt, but a fruitful experience as well. More info is available at www.makesomethingunreal.com