machinima

Beginning at the end

4 comments in conference by

The last few days I have been here in Amsterdam at the Metameets conference and the MMIF (machinima festival). I have to collect my thoughts and write about the whole thing and some of the ideas that where shared and combined over two days. The good news is I know what they are as I had to pay very close attention to everything as moderator. (A harder job than it sounds, but a blast to MC such an amazing set of speakers and delegates).

However we finished the presentations yesterday with the wonderful Chantal Harvey/MaMachinima showing and talking about some great pieces of work. It was also a bombshell moment when she announced she was no longer doing machinima to concentrate on doing a feature film. I think the room was just shocked and stunned, but I think that this is a beginning at an end.

Chantal makes some great very well produced, very well delivered pieces and I know that the scope and the size of any of her projects will not diminish that.

Her swan song “final piece” in this phase of the life of machinima was this.


Watch this space

Is that a dancing shoe or a shoe dancing?

No comment in games by

E3 this year had some announcements about the Xbox and its Kinect. I was surprised that the Kinect Fun Labs arrived straight away on an update. These are a set of kinect toys and apps, many inspired by the open source pioneers who built applications with as part of kinect hacking.
The one I tried was Googly Eyes. You hold up any object and the kinect scans in the front, and then the back. It then processes for a few seconds and adds comedy googly eyes to give the object some character.
The thing on screen is then controlled by your body movements. So it is just a few seconds from static real life object to a virtual puppet. As you can see here is is one of elemming’s shoes dancing.

It is very well done, I a sure with the right lighting and object you can make things that are much more complicated.
There are another few apps and more on the way to show off advances in what kinect can do. There is also an avatar creator that makes an xbox style AV but that resembles you (something the nintendo 3DS does well too 🙂 )
Very cool, very interesting and I will be exploring it some more.