Dragon Age: Wardens Fall is an original Machinima series that chronicles the final mission of a Grey Warden. This is Episode 5!
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.
“When we talk about population-level creativity, we don’t mean in a single video per se, but rather in the visual language out of which the video is made,” Jeffrey Bardzell said. “By analogy, a thriller in theatres today may have influences of Hitchcock and Polanski in it, because these two directors have helped construct today’s cinematic language of the thriller. But we obviously don’t say that the film was directed by Hitchcock and Polanski.”
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
An expedition unearths Ancient ruins on the unexplored world of Calypso; Ryan meets an old flame, Frost has an unpleasant encounter with something unknown, and the Odyssey crew discovers the first inklings that something dangerous is lurking out amongst the stars…
The story is based on an extract from the my novel “Memories of Eternity”, which is still a work in progress.
Remember when I stated that the new longer time limits for YouTube would allow more ambitious and, in many instances, better quality films to be presented? This is one of those films I was thinking of. It was done with iClone v3.2. I found myself viewing this several times just to pick up on little details that many filmmakers might have overlooked or simply left out. Even if you’re not into this genre of film, it is well worth watching to see what can be done with iClone and to understand what goes into the visual composition of a scene.
A more action oriented teaser for “The Nobbit.”
“The Nobbit” is an irreverent take on JRR Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.”It follows the story line fairly closely but with more warped characters such as a ill-tempered, foul mouthed old wizard, a reluctant nobbit and a vain aristocratic dwarf
Part 1 coming Early September and Part 2 mid-October.
Dost thou doubt where I be in early September?
I’m loving this already. 
Take a quick gander at the credits at the end of the preview… there be talent and imagination there!
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.
There have always been two reasons to see “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.” One, it is a great film. Two, it is a great film directed by Peter Greenway that stars Helen Mirren. There is now a third reason… Peter Greenway, the director, will be judging at the 48 HR Festival Machinima. I do not wish to steal the thunder from the folks over at 48HFP or at the Moviestorm News site where I first read this great news. So, set your course and steer over there to read further.
For what it is worth, two other favorite Peter Greenway films that I would definitely recommend are “Prospero’s Books,” of course, and also “The Draughtsman’s Contract.” Though “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” and “Propero’s Books” do get the attention they so much deserve, I very much like “The Draughtsman’s Contract.”
Dragon Age: Wardens Fall is an original Machinima series that chronicles the final mission of a Grey Warden.
In the final episode of season two, the battle for Blood Gulch moves beyond just Red versus Blue. Originally released at RedvsBlue.com in summer 2004.
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.
