The machinima bar has been raised

Check out Dracula's Guest created with "The Movies". It's pretty great.

Who is gonna step up to the plate and one-up them with SL?

I'll take a shot at it when LL adds in some keyframing and better camera controls.

Woah. What a cool idea. If only my compy could handle that kind of action...
I'm a HUGE fan of the RedvsBlue (Halo Machinima) and always admired the way they did their bits. Imagine what fun an Essellian Machinima would be!

The reason SLTV failed is because it takes an incredibly freaking long time to make anything 'polished'. Unlike RVB, we'd want seperate camera angles, boom shots, chaseplane shots, a scripted camera movement system so it's not always orbiting the same reference points.

Of course, sinch you mention RedVsBlue, check out This Spartan Life, google it.

You can script the camera by having a "cameraman" av and sitting it on a scripted prim.

"Still Seeing Breen" is the current standard to pass afaic.

OMG, I'm so embarassed. I literally thought there was going to be a movie about a drinking establishment in here. Well, I guess a "bar" wasn't literally raised, but the dead have been.

I haven't played The Movies for myself but I have heard some Resis say they like some of the approaches to customing the actors there, and wonder how it could be applied to our very own SL avatars.

Machinima, or particularly what I enjoy calling SLinema here, tho, is something I hope will be nurtured and bloom. Even with lack of certain advanced tools, it's nice to see what can get done.

Not to take away too much from what is a partcularly good machinima I'd say the bar is about where it was. There was a lot that could have been done better in SL although the character animations were really well done in some instances, rather funky in others.

Yeah that movie was lame, no bar were raised, I wasn't impressed at all. There was another one posted in this forum earlier, about KingKong, made with same program, and it was awesome. Just my opinion

"The Movies" really isn't machinema ... it's more of a low-end CGI movie-maker.

Satchmo, i'm sorry, but i have to disagree with you.. sort of.

my point deals more with the scripting and cinematography than the look of the scenes/characters.

sure, the lip-synching is cool.. and the animals look great, but that's a horse of a different color.

i found it to be a boring presentation. a large portion of that movie was just the one guy running around. we're left without knowing what that zombie/vampire(?) thing was all about in the graveyard. more time could have been spent on letting us know what was transpiring than watching the hapless fellow run around, get scared, faint and so on.

i've seen better stories come from both The Movies and Second Life itself.


on a side note, i received The Movies for Christmas and just installed it a couple nights ago. i can't wait to make my first movie with it.. and when i do, i'll post a link to it in the Off Topic forums.. just so you know.

All this talk of bars being raised - I'm going to pimp my project again:

http://www.alt-zoom.com/classroom/

Learn to make Machinima in SL, from brainstorming to editing. And pwn "The Movies."

Tarnished, I have some scripted cameras that might do what you want.

bbc

The Movies, while quite a leap forward in making Machinima accessible to the non technical masses, is kind of a 'cheat', really, since it is barely more than a game with that specific purpose in mind; make machinima movies. Wrapped up in a fairly inane sim game. Don't get me wrong; for something positioned as a game and priced accordingly, it's an amazing little piece of software.

But it's kind of a cookie cutter process - it's darned clever, none the less - whereby you insert specific costumed actors into 'slots' in a set piece scene. You can change the location of the scene, and by a series of sliders, you can change the mood and outcome of the scene.

With a little imagination, you can make some superb works. But doing it in The Movies is several orders of magnitude different from doing it in SL. In SL, you'd have to make your costumes, sets, make your own animation sets from scratch, no doubt, and physically choreograph and act each scene, not to mention being imaginative with the limitations on cameras in SL.

So whilst I admire many of the works I've seen with The Movies for good imaginative, creative use of the medium, ultimately that is all it requires for anyone from a young child upward to use; just a little imagination and patience to use the simple tools. By contrast, doing it in SL is just a whole other ball game requiring a huge range of skillsets to pull even the simplest of movies together, and I am constantly in awe at what I see people do with movies in SL.

Btw, My first couple of 'The Movies' movies are here

Easier to post a link to some of my earlier comments regarding this topic - Longtail.com comments section. Shorter too.

I thought the atmosphere was better than any other machinima I've seen. It's pretty creepy and the audio (music and vocals) are really well done.



The story itself is a pretty faithful re-enactment of Bram Stoker's "Darcula's Guest". Some think it's a short story and others think its a missing chapter from Dracula. In the end, I may be biased cause I'm a huge Dracula fan.




Rockin!

It needed more planets.