Volavola screening in Casino Luxembourg

From Creative Machinery

From 29 January to 1st May 2011 Casino Luxembourg is hosting an exhibition of Human Atopic Space presented in the “Aquarium” and the basement. The members of Human Atopic Space are highlighting artists at the centre of an exhibition where virtual realities are either at the heart of the creative process or are vectors of a reflection which engages them.

The exhibition AFK (Away From Keyboard)is curated by Margherita Balzerani. As a part of the exhibition Vola Vola will be screened thursday 21 April 2011 at 7 p.m.

4Jetpacks4 video at World Expo Shanghai

From Creative Machinery

I'm very honored that during the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai 4Jetpacks4 can be seen at the Madrid Pavillion as part of the Air Tree Exhibition.

The Air Tree, designed by Urban Ecosystems
is a self sufficient pavillion, where visitors can relax and enjoy performances or shows projected on the walls, in a nice cool breeze.

The show projected in Shanghai is curated by Cristina Garcia-Lasuen (aka Aino Baar), who initiated OPEN THIS END, a nonprofit cultural organization that classifies, develops and exhibits contents generated with new technologies.

The program consists in three exhibitions that present the theoretical classification of the three types and stages of the present video art:
Real (think projection in Real Space, for example the work of Rafael Lozano hemmer)
Virtual (cgi, for example Joaquin Baldwin
Machinima (movies recorded with game engines, like Evo Szuyuan :-) )

Up until now more then 2 million people have visited the Madrid pavillion, making it the most visited pavillion of the World Expo.

Many thanks and congratulations to Cristina / Aino !

Machinima Exhibition at QUT

From Creative Machinery

9 of my videos will be part of a machinima exhibition at the Queensland University of Technology.

"QUT presents a unique exhibition devoted entirely to machinima.
The exhibition features an historical timeline of machinima works with over 60 examples on display; from the first clunky DIY video game films created using games like Quake and Doom in the mid-90s, to contemporary film and artworks by internationally acclaimed artists like Friedrich Kirschner."

The exhibition will take place from 20 July to 7 August 2010 at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

Fly Me- Vola Vola wins Simona Gesmundo Award!

On May 18 2010, Berardo Carboni was given the "Creativity Award" for Volavola / Fly me, the first feature shot entirely in Second Life, for "it's novelty and the important results achieved by the film".
The award was given during the 4th edition of the International Prize Simona Gesmundo animated shorts at the Teatro Totò, which was held in Naples.
The "Creativity Award" is annually awarded to an author for the use of new technology, which foreshadows the future in the field of cinema and animation.

Simona Gesmundo, was a talented young Italian woman interested in artificial intelligence applied to cinema and an author of animation short films. Therefore, the International Award of Animation Short Films was created, which puts the attention on new technology and innovation.

Volavola at FilmForum and other places

Vola Vola got quite some media attention in Italy these last few weeks.
March 19 the movie was shown for the 1st time in Italy at the FilmForum festival in Gorizia.
There was a nice interview with Alessandro Haber and Berardo Carboni at affaritaliani.it.
This month the movie is also screened at 2 universities in Rome.
Check the movies facebook group for more media coverage links and scraps.
I wasn't there, but I'm told the movie is received very well by the audience!
Hopefully it will be shown in the Netherlands and other countries soon.

Orchestral Investigation #9 @ Stuttgarter Filmwinter

From Creative Machinery

Orchestral Investigation #9 will be showed in the exhibition of the Stuttgarter Filmwinter.

This 23rd edition of the Filmwinter will take place from Januari 21th, 2010 to Januari 24th, 2010 in Stuttgart.
The Media Exhibition is at H7 Raumaufzeit.

Orchestral Investigation #9, and seeing spOts, being dOts @ GAMERZ 05

From Creative Machinery

Orchestral Investigation #9 and seeing spOts, being dOts will be shown at festival GAMERZ 05, in the ARCADE program curated by Isabelle Arvers.

This 5th edition of GAMERZ international multimedia festival will take place from November 26th, 2009 to December 4th, 2009 in Aix-en-Provence.

Atopic Festival

From Creative Machinery

The Atopic festival will be held from 27 october to 4 november at La Cite des Sciences in Paris. It is an art festival dedicated to virtual reality art, and the first machinima festival in France.

I'm very happy that seeing spOts, being dOts will be screened in the "Creative" section.

Also november the 2nd Volavola will have it's premiere at the festival on the IMAX screen of La Geode.

Volavola article @ digicult

After seeing the preview clip of Volavola Marco Riciputi interviewed me about it, and wrote an article for the october issue of Digimag, the magazine of digicult.it, the Italiab e-magazine about digital culture and electronic art.
Here you can read the article in Italian. (Soon an english translation will be online).

Volavola Preview and Making-of Special @ art.clouds 2009

From Creative Machinery

I will be doing a presentation about the "The Making of Volavola" at the media festival art.clouds 2009 [ghosts in the machine] in Regensburg Germany.

The festival will run from 8 to 17 october, at several locations in Regensburg, and features movies, lectures, performances, workshops and more.

15 October at 20:00 I will talk about how Volavola was made, and show a preview of the movie at the Akademiesalon, Andreasstr. 28.

Please visit the art.clouds 2009 [ghosts in the machine] blog for more information about the festival, and the Volavola / Fly me post for details about my presentation.

Volavola on wired.com

Bruce Sterling picked up on Hamlet's Au post and blogged it on wired.com.
No in depth article or anything, but hey! we managed to disorient him ;-)

Also Domenico Quaranta mentioned our little sneak peak, which was picked up by gamescenes, a very nice blog.

Orchestral Investigation #9, and seeing spOts, being dOts in Brazil

2 of my machinima are (or were) shown at Itau Cultural in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
(My portugese is kinda rusty, and I see different dates on different sites)

From Creative Machinery

For the exhibition "GamePlay", Isabelle Arvers curated the machinima program "Mostra Machinimas". For this program she selected seeing spOts, being dOts (Vendo Marcas, Sendo Pontos), a collaboration with Juria Yoshikawa and Nnoiz Papp, and Orchestral Investigation #9 (Investigações Orquestrais #9), a collaboration with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse.

The entire machinima programme is listed here: http://www.itaucultural.org.br/index.cfm?cd_pagina=2716&cd_noticia=6635

Volavola Scene 61 on NPIRL and NWN, and some more about the toon effect

So far the reactions to the scene of Volavola we posted are pretty good!

Bettina Tizzy posted it on Not Possible IRL, one of my favorite blogs.
Hamlet Au posted it on New World Notes, elaborating a little on how we distinguish between what happens in Second Life, and what happens in Real Life, as all the footage was shot in Second Life.
Our solution, to apply a toon effect on the second Second Life footage seems to be received well by the Second Life community.
I agree with Gwyneth Llewelyn, who said "..it doesn't look like SL, but just as an incredibly detailed cartoon! If this catches on, the Japanese studios that spew out a cartoon per week for their so many huge series will start doing it all inside SL... :)".
Rendering this effect is far from RealTime though (about 3 seconds per frame), so maybe not so appropriate for that weekly tv show.

I'm also experimenting with this kind of effect for Woody, to emphasize the "comic" style of Ookoi.
It also has the advantage of not really needing all that detailed shapes and textures in Second Life during shooting.
I guess a "pure machinimatographer" would want to stay away from too much post processing work, but in my opinion it's best to just use the tools appropriate for the result you want to achieve.

Finishing Volavola !

Almost done postprocessing Volavola!

Here is a preview.



In this scene Sofia (puppeteered by Honey Fairweather, voice by Sofia Vigliar) and Matteo (puppeteered by Blued Food, voice by Flavio Aquilone) meet eachother in Second Life and visit the virtual gallery of Gazira Babeli.

The music is original for the movie and done by Andrea Gabriele. It's an adaption of a folk song from Abruzzo called Vola Vola.

Because this machinima version of VolaVola is entirely filmed in Second Life we needed to make clear what happens in Second Life and what happens in Real Life. For this pupose we applied a toon effect on the Second Life scenes.
In the Real Life version of the movie the original footage will be used.

Storyboarding HoT

From HoT

I'm currently working on the storyboard of another video I'm doing with Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. The composition is by Pauline Oliveros and called Heart of Tones.
It will be a music video of around 20 minutes, and I'm very excited about it :-)

Shooting Woody

From ookoi

Last thursday we've been filming for "Woody", a videoclip for the next hit by the sound duo Ookoi. The setting for the clip is the beautiful atmospheric virtual version of the dutch island Ameland in Second Life, hosted by Archipel MediaLab.

4Jetpacks4 at NPIRL

Alpha Auer wrote a very good article about 4Jetpacks4 and the importance of storytelling to 'get immersed' or 'attain presence'.

Attaining presence: 4Jetpacks4 and Bryn Oh

Machinima Vérité

Wagner James Au aka Hamlet Au interviewed me about the making of the 4Jetpacks4 video and posted it on New World Notes.
Since he was on the original tour, and starring in the video, I'm very happy he likes the result! "As an involuntary actor in the machinima, I'm slightly biased, but I think her final product is spectacular and unique, BioShock meets Fritz Lang." he says.. wow!!!
(For the record, I usually don't sneak up on people, and was actually asked to film)

4Jetpacks4

Just finished the video documentation of 4Jetpacks4, an interactive story telling performance lead by Bryn Oh.

In this performance a group of avatars was brought on a tour of a research facility. An unfortunate event results in the arrival of a tornado. The group must flee back to retrieve a jetpack in order to escape.

The video shows beautiful art by Bryn Oh, Glyph Graves and Nonnatus Korhonen, who also play the scientists. It also features a most amazing tornado by Tryptofaa Sands. The visitors are SLebrities Alpha Auer, Bettina Tizzy, Chimera Cosmos, Hamlet Au, Larry Pixel, Max Newbold and Tayzia Abattoir.

The piece was performed at the Caerleon Sim in Second Life, and curated by Georg Janick, for the Virtual Art Initiative, and the video will be exhibited in the will in the Harbor Gallery at the University of Massachusetts at Boston in April 2010.

More info at the Creative Machinery website.

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse at NRK television

Here is the archived stream of spekter interviewing Leif Inge aka Gumnosophistai Nurmi featuring Avatar Orchestra Metaverse containing some seconds of Orchestral Investigation #9 :-)

http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/klipp/480658

AOM starting at around 39:00

From Creative Machinery