Felicia Day

Very excited please keep us posted

Smart. I’ve said before that I don’t understand why musicians pay thousands for music videos when there are some machinima masters out there would do it half for fun. I love the fan machinima for Flyleaf’s “I’m So Sick”.

In animation, the barrier to imagination is the tedium of the medium. The vertex is economy is detailed so the game engines enabled puppetry. As long as the art meets the need, everything else is in the soundtrack and that (barring talent) is cheap.

Mark Pesce told me no individual could produce a good animation without a team. I took that bet and created the River Of Life in VRML97 (not Dead Yet!). If I had to do it again I would have used X3D. I swapped time for team. It took me ten years on and off. At the end, the VRML list helped me, other modelers gave me models (Thanks Cecile Mueller!). What I was after was a virtual reality album. What I got was a dream world with a lot of poetry and script-driven music. Plotted a goal but the work took over. Still… there is sheer beauty in real-time rendered colors that won’t be there without the engines.

Still some bits of unsolicited advice:

1. Machinima be fun. But someone else did the hard work: the modeling.
2. Modeling can be fun. But it takes time and chops or a really good library.
3. Programming required. No way out of that yet.
4. It won’t just stretch your imagination. It can exceed it.

I’m a musician first and a software exec otherwise. Still, I can do it and so can anyone. Non-linear media is a different and new emerging media. You can think of it as games but it can be more. With ROL, I can open it up and most of the time it does what I expect and coded. Sometimes it does more. That ability to surprise even the creator is beyond machinima and film, IMHO. It can be more like music where a good player can improvise and surprise themselves. In fact, the more I do, the more music I see there.

To quote an old bad line to Maximillian Schell: “This is where the Iron Crosses grow.”

len

Since Machinima uses game engines it is fast and easy since the poly count is low to speed the rendering time and make it play faster. Since most of the objects and scene are premade it is easier to plug in the characters into the backrounds to make the animation.

But that that can also be a downside since it is a lot harder to get something original out of Machinima and all the compromises that have to be made to adapt the story to the limits of what can be made with preset game engines.

I’ve seen a lot of videos done by Machinima.com and they are pretty good since they use the existing genre of the games made from the engines. But that does put certain limits on what stories and plots that can be done with them.

Other software like Poser is a lot more flexible in animation since it doesn’t have the limits of machinima since the models and the scenes can be custom designed to fit the story with a much greater range in the animation that can free the plot from the limits imposed by machimima.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1b5wajK5Bk

Volume 1 of four. It is the movie I am making using the IrishSpace presentation we created for the Kerry County Museum, Tralee, S.W. Ireland in 1997. The complete piece will be about forty minutes but youtube only allows ten an episode of course.

No “oily chests”. Sorry ’bout that but tech that good wasn’t free in 1996/97 when the models used in this were originally created.

It’s pretty good over cornflakes. Old style but pleasant.

len

I agree, although one could take something like Unity3D, build the object libraries and get good results. My advice is stick with engines that can export and import common formats like X3D, Collada, etc. The IrishSpace movies use 12 year old code that still runs well in the current engines. In the long run if you care about using and rehosting the content in ten years when engine evolution moves on, you need to use a common language format over picking just the engine, in other words, standard formats like anything else do better than simply picking hot tech.

But you're right about originality. I suspect at Day's level of work, she knows she needs to own those models because it is art IP and brandable. Over time, like paintings, they will become more valuable although they'll get ripped like other digital content. The upside is they are instantly recognizable. We openly share a lot of this in the VRML/X3D community as protos. I make sure the names of everyone who contributes goes right up front.

That is also the other reason to use the standard language: sharing models is a whole lot easier and you can evolve art keiretsu that way.

I need to check back in on the Buffy world. I campaigned for that one on my blog and some lists for two years. Someone finally bit. It will be cool to see if anyone from the old cast will claim their avatars there. To make a profit in those worlds, it works like any nightclub: celebrities. So far no one I know about has reprised a meatspace role in a virtual theme world a decade later but it could turn into an interesting side gig for actors and actresses somewhat like doing animation voices. Yet Another Way To Make Shekels eventually. We'll have to see how the market looks after the upcoming shake out.

I put the second volume of IrishSpace up at YouTube tonight. Going faster now. http://www.youtube.com/clenbullard

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/nowak.html

A good research paper on the qualities avatars are chosen by. The gist:

“Interface designers who wish to elicit attraction in users might consider anthropomorphic, non-androgynous, feminine, child characters for their interfaces. Future research should examine other contexts and varied child-like images to assess the extent to which these results are generalizable.”

Lewis Caroll was right. Alice is archetypal.

Here’s the link
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/gallery/v/riding+the+fire+eagle+danger+day+animations/fireeaglesmall.wmv.html

;( makes me kind of sad that you do a machinima project since i love to see you acting, but im very excited to see how it turns out and happy to see you interested in this kind of projects. That talks alot about your creativity and comitment to your fanbase specially the one you got from the Guild, honestly im glad you turn your head and take risks with Machinima and dont sell out to do something more hollywood alike…

Really looking forward to this one! Machinima is a great medium for web shows.

This is awesome, id love to see your take on sci-fi. I’ve just begun working on my first web-series and its sci-fi myself. I’d be damn curious to know what you think as its doing something thats never been done before – its purely alien and has no humans in it!

Sci-Fi and Sit-Com? Have you ever watched Red Dwarf? If not it is time to click over to Netflix and watch low budget BBC comedy. Best watched with a six pack of GOOD beer.

Looking forward to seeing what you have come up with! Love everything else you have done – hoping this is a hit as well. You know… a great place to show off some work with this would be a LAN party! I am just an attendee, not an employee so I am not trying to promote anything. PDXLan in portland Oregon. Lots of loyal fans out here in the northwest!

Hey,
Any recent news on when this might be coming out? =D

This gets to be more fun. The WoW viewer can export the X3D and the HTML page. While still emerging, I guess it would be fun to have a real-time 3D block on a blog or other related page with a player’s character in it. Other things being equal, that’s got to be better than those lame images and photos people use today. Eventually games will merge into the page at first with simple but eventually complex interactions. As usual this will go a lot faster than predicted.

http://www.youtube.com/user/tobold47#p/a/u/0/16P6_e7VUmw

The best part is if one spends a lot of resources on the model, one can actually own it and repurpose it.