SIGGRAPH Asia Day Two

Yesterday I did the first presentation on our film Shelf Life. The first time slot was at 11:30 AM but technical difficulties made us reschedule for 3:30 PM. The second time went smoothly and a nice little crowd gathered around.

I handed it over to the director of the machinima association in Singapore Mr. Chee Yue at the end and he presented the awards. Mr. Nagahama was also present and received awards for his two award winning films in the SHOOOT festival.

It was great to meet everybody and Sayuri was really helpful the entire time. It turns out Sayuri used to live on the same block as us in San Francisco, so strange!

I watched a Pixar lecture about Pixar's core rendering technology, RenderMan and the movie UP. Last night I went to a great two hour screening of animated short films. I have another presentation today and then that is it for me at the convention. Hoping to head over to Tokyo tonight or tomorrow morning.

Yokohama Japan!

I made it to Yokohama Japan! It is pretty strange being here all alone and lost and not knowing any Japanese. Where I am staying it is a convention center and it looks like a carnival off to one side.


Tomorrow I am supposed to give a little presentation. It is very casual booth style presentation, we will see how it goes.

I met the girl who was helping me organize the trip and it turns out she used to live in a building next to mine in San Francisco. So strange.

When I found the booth Shelf Life was playing on a TV off to the side.

I will try to post more after tomorrow. I plan to watch a Pixar lecture and I have pass to the electronic theater so I will have to figure out what that is about. :)

SHOOOT Awards : Best Overall Machinima

The SHOOOT Awards concluded on December 6 and Shelf Life took Grand Prize as Best Overall Machinima and also received wins in the sub-categories of Best Long Machinima and Best Games Machinima!

We really felt honored by this win because the competition was very strong. There were five other finalists in the International Best Long Machinima category and two other finalists in the International Best Games Machinima. Below shows the listings as seen on the Shooot site.





Please watch all of the finalists:
Shelf Life - Source Engine
Dear My Father - Second Life
Death in Venice - Moviestorm
Clear Skies - Half Life 2 / EVE Online
The Ship - Unreal Tournament
The Stolen Child - Second Life
Resident Evil 2 in GTA - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Granado Espada Nobody Dance - Granado Espada

We would like to congratulate all the finalists for creating such great films. We would also like to thank the SHOOOT Awards for presenting us with such a great award!

The Grand Prize includes a trip to Japan and a pass to attend SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 in Yokohama! So we are off to Japan! We will also be doing a presentation on machinima and Shelf Life on two days at the conference. What an amazing award!

Of course I am a bit nervous about the presentations since they have slotted 30 minutes, but we can talk about movies, games, coffee and mahcinima for that long easily, I hope! :)

iClone vs Garry's Mod: Excited to Compare

We were honored to receive the jury award at MachinExpo 2009 that included full versions of iClone 4 Pro and 3DXchange from Reallusion.

It is exciting that we won this award because we were wondering how the movie making software packages out there that are being used for machinima compare to the actual games being used to create machinima and iClone 4 Pro seems to be one of the best.

Now at some point we will need to put our thoughts in on the debate over whether movies made using software solely designed for making movies should be fully considered to be in the machinima proper genre but either way the outcome is still animated films created in real time so they are definitely in the same family to say the least. It may be that there should just be sub genres for machinima so all the platforms still fall under machinima but developers can specify there area...but again this is another discussion that would take over this post.

We have never used any movie making software to create films and so it will be interesting to compare the difference between at least iClone and our working environment, Garry's Mod.

It may take us a while to get deep into iClone because we are busy with Shelf Life but eventually we hope to see how far we can take it as well. It may be that we separate the two into sub genres since the production process and techniques are so very different.

This will likely also lead into a discussion concerning how festivals are conducted and how it may be useful to separate genres considering the vast differences between production platforms.

At first glance though iClone 4 Pro appears to be a very powerful platform that perhaps opens the door to a lot of film makers.

We would like to once again thank Reallusion for sponsoring the MachinExpo 2009 and awarding us with this great software package. Also a big thanks to the organizers of the Expo for making it all possible and creating a great machinima event for the community.

YouTube Partner Experiment: Doors closed

A few posts back you may remember that we were going to test out accepting an offer from YouTube to enable revenue sharing on our machinima videos. This offer came after we applied for the YouTube partner program for the second time.

We had some hesitation because even after repeatedly trying to contact Valve we received no replies from them about us joining the YouTube program. Well, we decided to go for it anyway, and here is what we got back from YouTube:

"Thanks for submitting your video(s) listed below for revenue sharing. Because you have not provided adequate documentation that you have the necessary rights to commercially use all the video material and music, we have disabled revenue sharing."

OK, now we sort of expected something along these lines even though we hoped for the best. But here is where the unfair practices kick in, you see, our video is actively being sponsored by the YouTube revenue sharing program over on the Machinima.com YouTube channel.

Yes, that is correct, YouTube says they cannot allow us to join the revenue sharing program on our channel because our videos cannot be verified but we have a video that has revenue sharing allowed on the Machinima.com YouTube channel. Here it is with ads all over it.

Machinima.com is allowed to make advertising revenue off the very same videos that we are not allowed to make advertising revenue on. Not to mention the hundreds of other machinima on Machinima.com YouTube channel that do not contain as much original content as ours.

This has nothing to do with Machinima.com and we are not trying to imply anything negative toward them, it is not their fault YouTube is not clear on what is going on here. Machinima.com is a great site and they have a great YouTube channel and they should be a YouTube partner. But if YouTube is going to let Machinima.com be a YouTube partner by using our videos then why won't they let us be a partner using our videos?

It is very defeating to say the least. It would be one thing if no machinima was ever allowed partner but that is clearly not the case. If we upload all our machinima to Machinima.com then ads will be placed all over them and Machinima.com will get all the revenue sharing but if we upload our machinima to our site, nothing.

Also, the YouTube response is a generic cut and paste denial because we said all the music was original and fully owned by us but they say "...necessary rights to commercially use all the video material and music." We could not possibly have more rights to the music. It is 100% original, created and owned by us. So there is not even any indication as to what the actual problem is so we can try to fix it.

The only assumption that can be made is that Machinima.com somehow has some sort of contract with all the game companies that all the machinima on their site use and have been given full rights to use anything they want on YouTube and has supplied that evidence to YouTube.

So that concludes our YouTube partnership experiment. YouTube will not accept our machinima without some sort of written agreement from Valve (we assume) and Valve will not respond to us in any way about anything we are doing.

Doors closed.

Where to now?

3D World #122 - No machinima

Issue #122 finally arrived of 3D World magazine here in San Francisco.

This issue contains a disc that along with the standard 3D World disc contents has films from the 2009 Bitfilm Festival.

We were excited to get this issue since we were a part of Bitfilm 2009 and because of this little bit found on the Bitfilm official site:

"All selected films will be published on a free DVD on the cover of 3D World Magazine in September 2009. Each selected filmmaker will receive a free copy."

:) Fun! Machinima on a disc with 3D World magazine! But wait, no machinima on the disc. :(

The only categories are 3D Space, FX Mix and Politicool.


Oh well, I guess it was a bit much to ask for machinima to be advertised like this in a major magazine. And I don't think Bitfilm was being misleading or anything. I guess it just turns out that machinima did not make the cut yet for this level of distribution.

Still a cool disc and it is cool that we were all part of such a big festival! But in all honesty I only got it to see if the accepted or winning machinima films made the disc. ;p

Shelf Life Wins Best Short Film!

It has been officially posted over at the Cinemanila website that Shelf Life was awarded Best Short Film at the first annual machinima segment at the Cinemanila International Film Festival!

Thank you Cinemanila judging panel for awarding Shelf Life with this high honor!

We appreciate that Cinemanila decided to have a judging panel award and also an audience vote award. We think it is an excellent format to have awards based off an official panel and also awards based off of popular vote. This format allows different aspects of the film makers achievement to be awarded and makes it possible for some new comers to the scene to win even if they have not established a strong fan base yet.

Best Music Video went to Inside Your Head by Erica Cruz. Congratulations Erica!

Then there were the audience choice awards that were decided by online voting. Audience Choice for Short Film went to Shrink Wrapped by Russell Boyd and Audience Choice for Music Video went to Worship the Will by Ian-Dean Loreńos.

Congratulations to all the winners!