3in6 Machinima
It is interesting to hear that the 3in6 movie competition will now permit animation entries that use a game engine such as GameMaker or Blender. This new classification gives recognition to the use of software to animate parts of big budget modern films beyond just adding in a few special effects.
This is called Machinima, a film making process that uses computer games technology to 'shoot' films in the virtual reality environment of a game engine. The ACMI recently put up an essay on Machinima and there may be some overlap with ScreenIT, a competition run by Vincent at the ACMI.
In theory, GameMaker or Blender could be used to program a series of interactive animations. A student could run the animation in the display window, 'rendering' it to make an AVI file then later add a title and vocalisations for an audio track. Tony has even sourced a Mines a Belkin F5U208 USB framegrabber device for under $100 that we can use to capture the 'movie' output of a GameMaker game. The processing load is shared on a second computer so that there is no recording lag.
I am no expert at this technology but I wonder if it would be too much to ask for students to generate and only use their own sprites and clip art? I generally encourage this of my students as it is easy enough to draw / scan / digitise and animate a hand drawn picture. For 3in6, we allow students to collect props and prepare titles in advance. With our Machinima category, we could permit students to storyboard their movie and prepare any drawings in advance, ready for scanning and animation.
This is called Machinima, a film making process that uses computer games technology to 'shoot' films in the virtual reality environment of a game engine. The ACMI recently put up an essay on Machinima and there may be some overlap with ScreenIT, a competition run by Vincent at the ACMI.
In theory, GameMaker or Blender could be used to program a series of interactive animations. A student could run the animation in the display window, 'rendering' it to make an AVI file then later add a title and vocalisations for an audio track. Tony has even sourced a Mines a Belkin F5U208 USB framegrabber device for under $100 that we can use to capture the 'movie' output of a GameMaker game. The processing load is shared on a second computer so that there is no recording lag.
I am no expert at this technology but I wonder if it would be too much to ask for students to generate and only use their own sprites and clip art? I generally encourage this of my students as it is easy enough to draw / scan / digitise and animate a hand drawn picture. For 3in6, we allow students to collect props and prepare titles in advance. With our Machinima category, we could permit students to storyboard their movie and prepare any drawings in advance, ready for scanning and animation.