The independent film community received a big boost today as IndyTrailers announced that it is launching its new website, IndyTrailers.com, a free service that provides a global showcase for independent trailers.

“IndyTrailers hopes to fill an important void by providing a free global showcase service to artists, students and professionals. Each month IndyTrailers plans to highlight a Golden Trailer winner from its library of uploaded/embedded film, webisode and game trailers as well as feature submissions from University film schools giving special recognition to its filmmakers and film students,” said Josh Gottsegen, Co-Founder and President.

Recently featured trailers include: Falling Awake (Augustine), Fruit Fly (HP Mendoza), Stanley Pickle (Victoria Mather), The Living Wake (Sol Tryon), and Winnebago Man (Ben Steinbauer). Also, A Crack in the Radio (Argus Productions), the controversial “rockumentary” from Afghanistan, captures the emergence of a contemporary music scene in Afghanistan.

IndyTrailers has also partnered up with the 2010 Los Angeles International Short Film Festival, and IndieFlix.com, a hybrid independent distribution company dedicated to bringing indie filmmakers and their fans together. “Working with IndyTrailers has been a fantastic experience. Their team has been on point and made the process easy and enjoyable. We look forward to continuing our relationship with IndyTrailers,” said Ian Dinsmore, IndieFlix.

Fantastic Arcade, the new independent games festival presented by America’s largest genre film festival Fantastic Fest, today announced the addition of Halo Waypoint as sponsor of their debut 48-hour Machinima Film Challenge. The challenge kicks off on Friday, September 10 and concludes on Sunday, September 12. Prize packages feature sweet loot from Halo Waypoint, plus hardware and software from event partners Dell and AMD.

Halo Waypoint, official event sponsor of Fantastic Arcade, is the online destination for “Halo” fans around the world, providing access to the latest “Halo” news and exclusive content ranging from interviews, trailers and screenshots to new insight into Halo’s epic narrative and exclusive, never-before-seen, original series you won’t find anywhere else. Additionally, Halo Waypoint will be announcing a new relationship with an Austin animation production company and will debut their new Halo Waypoint trailer at Fantastic Arcade on Sunday, September 26. After the Halo Waypoint premiere, members of the Halo Waypoint team will be on hand to host a post-screening Q&A and give away Halo prizes.

In addition, Alison Stroll, programming and community director for Halo Waypoint, will serve as judge on the official 48-Hour Machinima Film Challenge panel and will participate in the machinima film panel sessions and screening on Sunday, September 26.

Alison has worked on franchises such as Street Fighter, MechWarrior, Conker, Viva Piñata, and now Halo. At Halo Waypoint, she spends her days watching machinima and TweetBooking while simultaneously doing totally grown-up stuff like leveraging the synergistic zeitgeist, taking this rathole offline, and scheduling stand-ups to drill-down. Alison is responsible for soliciting and selecting all machinima content for Halo Waypoint, working closely with Rooster Teeth and This Spartan Life.

Beginning at 7 pm CST on Friday, September 10, 2010, production teams will have 48 hours to conceive, direct and edit a short film, four minutes or less in duration, using their favorite video games. The crew behind Fantastic Arcade 48-hour Machinima Film Challenge will provide a line of dialogue and a genre to each team at the start of their production launch. The main criteria for challenge entries is that each team demonstrates visual storytelling made within a real-time virtual 3D environment, utilizing a game engine. Interested teams can sign up online now at: www.fantasticfest.com/arcade/machinima.

The free-to-enter Fantastic Arcade 48-hour Machinima Film Challenge has been developed and organized by award-winning machinima production group Rooster Teeth in Austin. Machinima gurus in their own right, Rooster Teeth are world-famous for their online web series Red Vs. Blue, as well as other popular machinima works, The Strangerhood, PANICS and Supreme Surrender. Judging will be led by Red vs. Blue creator and machinima pioneer Burnie Burns, along with a panel of industry professionals in games, media and film.

Burnie Burns, owner of Rooster Teeth Productions and creator of Red vs Blue, offers, “The power of machinima lies in its accessibility. Millions of people have a movie studio in their very own homes without realizing it. Using just a videogame console and a typical home computer, they can create animated shorts or full length features. It’s an amazing technique for filmmakers — especially our young storytellers — who otherwise would not have access to advanced production tools. And with world-class venues like the Alamo Drafthouse and Halo Waypoint showcasing the work of these artists, I can not wait to see what the contestants produce.”

In addition to acknowledging the best machinima productions entered in the 48-Hour Machinima Film Competition, the fine folks at Rooster Teeth have added a new competition category by recognizing excellence in machinima acting, the Best Actor/Actress Award. Rooster Teeth is offering an awesome prize! The winner of the Best Actor/Actress award will have a chance to perform their very own walk-on role in an upcoming Red vs Blue episode.

The winning challenge team receives a Dell XPS 7100 PC including Eyefinity triple-monitor capability and hardware, plus 3 graphics cards ($ 2,500 value). The second place team receives a Dell Inspiron M501R notebook and three graphics cards ($1,500 value). Both team will also receive loads of valuable swag from Halo Waypoint. The winning machinima films will be screened at Fantastic Arcade and on the big screens at Alamo South as part of Fantastic Fest on Sunday, September 26.

Challenge semi-finalists will be announced online on Monday, September 20, while winners will be announced live at the Fantastic Arcade Awards Show at 7 pm on Sunday, September 26 at the HighBall Ballroom, followed immediately by the Fantastic Arcade closing night party.

Attendees at Fantastic Arcade will have a choice of a single day pass for $20, with access to all Fantastic Arcade films, panels, parties, happy hour and game demos for one day, or a basic $10 pass that provides access to the game demos and arcade for a single day. The VIP Fantastic Arcade Pass for $60 provides access to everything for all four festival days, plus a limited edition Fantastic Arcade T-shirt. Fantastic Arcade tickets can be purchased online now at www.fantasticfest.com/tickets-2/.

The Webcomic Factory presents The Horror of Colony 6 a brand new title debuting September 7th at http://www.thewebcomicfactory.com. Written by Christian Beranek and Tony DiGerolamo with art by Tommy Phillips. Trailer edited and directed by Ben Meares.

Wil Veeke has a wonderful character over at iClone Universe… for free! I can easily see this guy in children stories, fantasy tales, etc., etc. Zap over there, download Grumpy and see what you can do with him. While there, check out all the other characters offered. Many, like Grumpy, are made by some top names in iClone creations.

This is directly from Anima Technica:

Part 1 of “The Nobbit” premiers on Sunday September 12 2010 at 9 am pacific and then again at 4 pm pacific at http://www.tmutheater.com

This live premier event lets you watch the movie and chat with the actors, fans, and director of the film at the same time. If you miss the premier, no worries as it will make its way to the normal video channels – vimeo, youtube, tmunderground.

If you are interested in seeing what can be done in iClone, in machinima or simply want to have a good time with some members of the online machinima community, make it a point to be there. A good time is at hand! Of course, if you are of the belief that any parody of classic literature is “blasphemous,” you may want to take a chill pill and keep your snobby ass at home. Oops…

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Using two of the planet’s largest, creative online communities — World of Warcraft gamers and Etsy artists — as their laboratory, two Indiana University Bloomington researchers hope to understand how the inner workings of such massive, networked collaborations could benefit scientists, corporations and the very IT designers who facilitated the success of the two online communities.

“Massive communities of creativity like those represented by World of Warcraft (WoW) and Etsy have a structurally different model from the small teams of professionals working in the environments that major professional creative applications from Adobe, Autodesk and Microsoft were designed for,” said IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing Assistant Professor Jeffrey Bardzell.

Bardzell and co-investigator Shaowen Bardzell, also an assistant professor at the school, have received a $686,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems to investigate and construct a history of the two large-scale collaborations and to then try and model how the two online communities successfully created and distributed productivity on a scale involving millions of users.

“Such a model could lead to the design of software tools to support massive creative collaborations in the sciences, as well as help to clarify the organizational and communications environments needed to support them,” Shaowen Bardzell added.

With respect to WoW, a massive online player game with more than 11 million users, the researchers will study a sampling of a creative product called machinima, which are user-created videos that number upwards of a half-million on sites like YouTube, Warcraftmovies.com and machinima.com. Even though any given machinima video may have been made by a small number of people, the researchers will use critical and systematic analysis of major WoW videos to tease out the history of machinima and place that next to their inquiry into the nature of massively amateur creativity.

One WoW machinima on YouTube of a funeral created for an actual WoW gamer who passed away has received 4.5 million views, and another called Craft of War: BLIND, viewable here, has had 4 million views and received more than 17,000 viewer comments on various WoW-related sites.

The second massive creative network to be studied, Etsy, unlike WoW is dominated by women and has hundreds of thousands of individual vendors spread over 150 countries. Each month it accounts for almost one million product sales valued at around $15 million.

“Etsy’s modes of production, folk theories of creativity and what is ‘quality,’ and social understandings may be gendered in a way that differs from that of the male-dominated WoW machinima community,” Shaowen Bardzell noted. “The goal here is to not only understand network-based participatory creativity, but specifically to consider it from the perspective of a female mode of creative knowledge production.”

Examples of how Etsy’s members use the site to explain creative processes and educate shoppers about products can be viewed here and here.

Hoping to bring clarity to the relationships between the creative practices of small professional teams and those of massive collaborations like WoW and Etsy, the Bardzells, who are married, see new opportunities arising for the design of creativity-support software and for an extension of successful, emergent network-based creative practices into the areas of professional innovations and scientific collaboration.

“Our community, the human-computer interaction community, needs to develop an understanding of these new appropriations of creative software,” Jeffrey Bardzell said. “And the science education community also has a stake in this work as most of these networks have home-grown and successful models of teaching and learning as one of their core social activities. In other words, these communities not only innovate in aesthetics, but also in pedagogy.”

Source: I.U. News Room

It has been a rather depressing and painful few weeks. My neck and spinal problems do not seem to be improving at all, my physical therapy sessions are like traveling back to the Spanish Inquisition, my pit bull can’t get enough attention from me and my country is falling under the influence of the Dark Side. Add to that the fact that I can’t sit long enough to watch a full-length movie without first sucking down vicodin like a kid with a Slurpee. It has not been a good few weeks. I am not a happy camper. This teddy bear has gone grizzly. This… well, you get the idea.

So, when I turned on the tele today and flipped over to my Roku set top box and discovered there were new “channels,” I figured it would be an easy way to waste a few seconds. Lo and behold! There it was! Smilin’ back at me! Vimeo! A Vimeo channel! A friggin’ Vimeo channel! The clouds parted, the sun shone, my pit bull stopped nosing my crotch and all was right with the world… for a few seconds. Seriously, I am thrilled. I watch a lot of my favorite iClone, Moviestorm and other machinima films on Vimeo and now I can watch them on my television… in the comfort of my comfy chair. So what was my very first selection from Vimeo? What film blazed the path for all those to follow? Of all the films on Vimeo to debut on my television, what one was knighted by me to be my champion? “She Hasn’t Touched Her Soup” by Phil Rice. Why? I haven’t the foggiest idea. It just popped into my head and there I was bringing it up. That was quickly followed by “Male Restroom Etiquette,” “Clear Skies,” “The Nobbit” teaser, an episode of “Odyssey” and on and on and on.

I have a relatively small computer screen. 20″ measured diagonally. There honestly is not any room for a larger one since I have to use two monitors and they have to sit side by side. So, it was rather nice to see these films on a much larger screen. Very nice. And, since I am not permitted to lift or carry anything heavier than a can of beans, it was also easy and convenient. I like convenient… and easy.

Okay, so it was not a big news headline item or some genre breaking release. It was the highlight of my day. And after another trip to the Spanish Inquisition, I needed it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear a vicodin calling my name. And then it is off to watch “Clear Skies 2″… again.

Webcomic publisher DarkBrain, LLC announced this past weekend that effective immediately, all content on their website (http://darkbrain.com) – including over 240 pages of comics – will now be available to readers at no charge. Each comic includes graphic novel quality art, original music, and voice-over narration. Stars with voicework in DarkBrain comics include adult film actresses Tabitha Stevens and Raylene, as well as rock star Tony Campos (Prong, Ministry, Asesino, Static-X).

DarkBrain produces edgy content designed specifically for PG-13 and R+-rated audiences. At its inception, the site utilized a state of the art preferences system where readers control how intense they wish their viewing experience to be. With the restructure, readers will now have free access to 12 original series on the site with preset PG-13 content. In addition, DarkBrain.com will now offer advertising space.

To reach readers who prefer R+-rated content, DarkBrain.com now offers monthly memberships. For $4.99 a month, members have access to the preference system that allows them to choose the intensity of their content, as well as access to Members-Only and pre-released content and an ad-free environment. Members may also purchase a 6-month membership for $24.95.

To improve visibility and revenue to the site, site publisher Andrew Zar found this recent change timely and appropriate. Since the change, DarkBrain.com has had over 40,000 page views per day. As an added feature, DarkBrain is also asking all registered users to vote on the titles they wish to see continue, in an attempt to streamline their product line to the trends of its readers. In addition to the survey, the stories on DarkBrain.com have been organized by genre, aiding readers in finding the content that most appeals to them.

Source: Darkbrain.com

The Los Angeles Times has an article by Ben Fritz on machinima very much worth the quick read. It does a quick take on the community and “culture” of gaming and the interconnection with machinima. It also highlights a few of the machinima producers I have grown interested in over the past year including Rich Boylan, a.k.a. “Eddie Smithson,” and Jordan Mathewson, a.k.a. “Kootra.” And, of course, it details the genre dominating channel Machinima.com. The only bad news is that the article made me aware of why there has been a delay in new episodes of Kootra’s “Reprisal.” Bummer. Regardless, it was a well-written, if not overly in-depth, article that might just bring machinima to the attention of an entertainment hungry audience. It clearly makes it known that machinima has evolved and is still evolving into more complex and sophisticated stories and productions. Check it out.

From an animated interpretation of E.E. Cummings’ poems to a film in which “World of Warcraft” players battle a dragon in Baker-Berry Library, a wide array of works will be shown at the Virtual Cinema Student Screening on August 25. Featuring projects created by undergraduates in Film and Media Studies 49: “Practicum in Digital Culture and New Media Technologies,” Professor Mary Flanagan says the films are examples of “machinima,” which she describes as “machine plus cinema, or virtual cinema.”

“It’s an art form that’s been around for almost a decade—aspiring filmmakers make movies using computer game engines,” says Flanagan, holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities. “Using a computer game or virtual environment, one can integrate in-game elements as actors, sets, and scenes. There are seldom human actors used in the making of machinima. Primarily, these types of works feature 3-D characters who ‘act’ via manipulation by human game players. This emerging art form is a mix of puppetry and cinema, and has become a compelling way to make one’s very own ‘Avatar’ style of 3-D film.”

The event will be catered and is open to the public. Total screening time is around 45 minutes.

Virtual Cinema Student Screening
Wednesday, August 25, at 4:30 p.m.
Hopkins Center, Loew Theater
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755

Courtesy: Media-Newswire

I wish I had received this information much, much sooner. However, if nothing else it is further evidence that machinima is, indeed, making great strides in acceptance as a legitimate means of storytelling.