Unfortunately due to a schedule conflict (RL and TZ are bitches!) I cannot attend to the Koinup Machinima Contest ceremony at Orange Island. But the winners are already announced on Koinup. Myself and Tao Takashi each chose a winner and the community chose their own favourite, which was also my first choice.

Here are the top winners:

• The Little Newbie by Alienhearts (community winning machinima)
• “The Cats Will Play” Grindhouse Tribute by Bkiddo
• ChouChou by ChouChou

They will receive a cash prize from Koinup, and a license for MachinimaCam HUD Pro as soon as I can go inworld to deliver it.

There was a very high amount of outstanding work presented for this contest, the choice was very hard. I encourage all participants to continue working on doing machinima, many of you are extremely talented and are showing some real skills for the art.

Again, congratulations to the winners, and thank you all for your very active participation to this contest. Thanks to Tao Takashi for co-judging this contest, and thanks to Pierluigi of Koinup for giving me this opportunity to see all those marvelous pieces of work.

I will be giving a 1h presentation on making Machinima movies at Orange Island on Thursday this week, 9h30AMSLT, for Orange’s Machinima Week. Check the schedule for more information.

I got commissioned by Jacek Antonelli of Cuddlefish Junction to make a demo of her Bubble Ride product, so I thought I could as well make it artsy and nice to look at. So I used Windlight to capture this movie, using a mix of presets and custom settings for the sky and water. I then made the final cut and editing using Sony Vegas.

Hope you will enjoy it, especially on this extended downtime day.

High resolution version available here:

WMV Format (60 megs very high res)

Flash Format (high res)

I am proud to announce that I have been requested by Koinup.Com to be a judge and to provide MachinimaCam as prizes for the new Koinup Second Life Music Video Contest.

Here is the integral communique:

——-

Videos and Music tell more than thousands words! So we had this idea to create a Second Life Music Videos Contest.

The theme is totally free. You can create a video, which features your first 100 days in Second Life, or create a whole story, directing other avatars! Otherwise, you can show us footage from your favorite sims. Or just create a sequences of wonderful images and stream them, as a slideshow, Just remember to add your video a good soundtrack!

You can submit your entries from April, 2 until April, 29.
The winners will be announced on May, 6 here and on the Koinup Blog.

Here are the latest entries.
Rules and Guidelines

• In order to take part in this contest, you must have an account on Koinup. Registration is free and takes only a few seconds.
• All the videos have to be shot in Second Life.
• Add some good soundtracks to your videos. Remember: all the entries have to be music videos!
• All the submissions in the contest must be tagged with this tag:
  secondlifemusicvideoscontest
  (copy this tag and paste it in your entries)
• Videos can’t be shorter than 1 minute or longer than 6 minutes.
• We accept .mpg, .mpeg, .mov, .wmv, .asf, .avi formats up to 150 MB in size. We do not support files with more than 2 audio channels and Windows Media Audio Professional (WMA Pro) audio codec.
• Submissions can’t be videos already hosted on Koinup. We accept videos already published on other websites. So if you have a machinima that meet the rules, you can submit it!
• Videos must remain on Koinup after the end of the contest, but you are free to publish them also on other websites and blogs.

PostScriptum: Don’t you know how to tag pictures? Look here!

Here are the latest entries.

Regarding the music

Some SL musicians has been so kind to gave us permissions to use their tracks as soundtracks of the contest!
Here are the links to download:

• Funk Shepherd & Dizzy Banjo
• Lyn Carlberg
• Melanie Fudge
• Rich Palmer
• Kim Seifert

Pay attention:
you can use these songs, but only for the contest. you have to type credits (authors, titles and links of the tracks you have used)
If you want use other music, we highly suggest to use only contents released with Creative Commons licences. You can find good sources of CC music here:
http://ccmixter.org/
http://creativecommons.org/audio
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Music_Podcasts

Winners and Prizes

The price is totally Amazing!
20,000 L$ plus the MachinimaCam created by CodeBastard Redgrave.
MachinimaCam is an effective and highly useful tool to control your SL camera and help you to make machinima.

Winners will be selected by our authoritative judges: CodeBastard Redgrave and Tao Takashi.

There will be three winners. Two of them will be selected by our jury. The third one will be the Community winner and will be selected by the Koinup Community.

How become the Community Winner? Well, your video will be the community winners if it will be the coolest once submission will end. Coolest video is the most commented, faved, viewed!
Here you can find exactly what is coolest on Koinup.

Here are the latest entries.

Hope you will be a large number to participate!

I’m very glad and honored that I was invited to participate to Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon. One of most very interesting person I met recently in SecondLife, Sophrosyne Stenvaag, is the immersionist behind the Extropia Sim, which I visited lately. She released this communique which I’m copying here.
Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon: Art, Machinima & Immersion in SL

Come rock the house with the Red Queen!

I’m very glad to have the occasion to present my work at Extropia Core, this is going to be one awesome experience. Thank you Soph!

I am so honored that you guys chose me as the Avastar of the Year 2007. I was already honored of sitting in that list with some of the most extraordinary newcomers, including people I admire greatly including RightAsRain Rimbeault, Ana Lutetia and Nicholaz Beresford among others. I’m still a bit under the shock that you guys chose me.

Now I’m getting more feedbacks about how that could happen because honestly I couldn’t believe it. Many people sent me emails and letters to tell me they encouraged my candidacy for that title through their mailing-lists, forums, groups, blogs, even Flickr threads. You people just proven me you can be sweet to the core. That just flatters me to an unimaginable level that I could influence your Second Life, be it just a tiny little bit. For me it’s a world of difference. It means that sometime, somewhere, I have tried my best to be good to people around, that all my efforts to contribute to the community in a positive way have been acknowledge. And acknowledged by you people.

I want to thank each and everyone of you. If I could do it personally, I would. I want to thanks the Avastar for nominating me with all those marvelous people. I want to thanks everyone that voted on that poll and that supported me through that stressful but enlightening process. I want to thank all the candidates for being such good sports. I want to congratulate Ana Lutetia as a Second winner and RightAsRain Rimbeault as the Third winner.

This has been my honor and pleasure to serving this amazing community in my first year. I will try to make my second year even better. I love you all to bits.

Sincerely,

Codie

(Myself and 2nd winner Ana Lutetia. Credits: All pictures by Ana Lutetia. Thank you for your permission to use them.)

Before vacations I got some news about the Avastar making a poll about which newbie did the biggest impact on SL in 2007. Turns out this poll is going online today.

Well of course, when I see names like Nicholaz Beresford and Ana Lutetia, i’m just honored to be cited beside them.

Anyways, here’s the link: Class of 2007

Our dear Raul Crimson made this little machinima movie, about his lovely home. He made it using the MachinimaCam he won at the last SL Blogger party contest.

Please note the video is laggy because he apparently shot it at full resolution, something I would NOT recommend doing for that exact reason (read MachinimaCam Instructions for tips and tricks). But nevertheless, the result is quite sweet.

Since I sold a lot of MachinimaCam HUDs it was just a question of time before someone used it to make actual machinima.

So taadaaaa! I present to you the first (and hopefully not the last) MachinimaCam Showcase!

Starring this month, my witty friend Ina Centaur, machinimaker extraordinaire, talking about her shopping addiction. Hope you will enjoy!

Just a quick update on the MachinimaCam development. Well it’s going on roundly, I believe I am rather close to completion of the MCAPI framework. Of course there’s much try and testing to do but I’m slowly but surely closing in to something workable. I achieved complete interface separation.

Now all voice/gesture commands and menus are independent. I’m rather proud of my menu system which will allow very easy addons for plugins. The menus are now uniformized and consistent. I’m working hard on the API structure itself, I have a few things to figure out yet but it’s all going in the good direction.

After that is done, I will be ready to move all the effect routines in independent scripts and do more testing for usability and consistency. As for the intercom architecture, I will have it worked and extended while I add on the most popular feature requests, namely targeting other avatars and maby some other surprises.

I really hope I will have a somewhat functional demo this weekend. If it’s the case, of course, you will know about it.