SErik

I was invited to the Games Convention in Leipzig by Animation in neuen Medien. Ingo Linde, Dirk Förster and Karin Wehn organised a stand for machinima.
I spoke about the “border areas” of machinima like live performances and live visuals and about game art and game movies outside the spectrum of the machinima community. Some people are producing machinima without calling them machinimas and some do things which are maybe not machinima anymore but call it machinima and then there are people who do not produce machinima and do not call it machinima but are using computer games to do it. The world is fuzzy.
I enjoyed the time there with all the nice people on the machinima-stand. Hopefully soon I will post some links about some works I mentionend in my talks.

As I finally decided to make some tests with the UT3 engine I noticed that the UDPlink function from UT2k4 is not implemented in the new engine. But I will need something to communicate with the outside. So I took a look around again and evaluated the Source engine a little bit. So maybe I will not use UT3 but Source from Valve instead.

There are several plus-points to the Source engine:

• It seems that it is possible to communicate with the outside over UDP. There is a class called CBlockingUDPSocket which was pointed out to me by Dustin Hulm aka Teddy from the mod Dystopia. Thanks for that.
• I like the visual aesthetic of Team Fortress 2 as you can see in the machinima Ignis Solus. And hopefully there will be soon the opportunity to make mods with the new version of the Source engine. A beta update is already there. I am waiting for the final.
• It runs better on my notebook. My notebook is my primary tool for working.
• The Source engine is older than the Unreal Engine 3. This lead hopefully leads to more experienced users with it, more tutorials and lesser bugs.
• There seems to be a good documentation from Valve for the engine: Valve Developer Community

I already bought Orange Box and set up some stuff. Hopefully I will find the time to do some testing soon.

In the meanwhile I hope I can register/apply my thesis soon. To be able to do this I need to find a second supervisor/tutor.

In the course where I worked on the interactive installation Dave with Florian another participants was Friedrich Kirchner. He worked on the Bob Block Show. I saw him using a Gametrak controller and I learned what machinima is. I liked the Gametrak controller, bought one and used it to make live visuals with vvvv. Later on I remembered a little story I wrote that I always wanted to use for a movie. First I thought about doing a stop motion film but I didn’t had the time to do this. And again some time passed and on the search for an idea for my upcoming master thesis I decided to work on an interactive installation which should be realized with machinima. I also thought about two different ways to use machinima: for live visuals and for a live puppet play performance in which I wanted to provide puppeteers an familiar interface. But I was not the first one with these two ideas. In my investigations I found theses two people/projects.

The first one is Friedrich Kirchner who mailed me what he was going to do after I asked him some things about machinima. This is a short video from his puppet show (realized with his moviesandbox):

The other one is Daniel van Gils (aka Hi Squeeky Things) who is doing live a/v performances with Unreal. Here is a short piece of one of his live performances: