Fallopian Magazine - Machinima in Education

The latest edition of Fallopian has just been released. This machinima publication promotes experimental, innovation and emotive machinima art. Published by Kate Fosk and Trace Sanderson this months subject is Machinima in Education. I have two articles in this issue; 'Machinima 101 - How to Introduce Machinima into the Classroom', and 'Digital Matchstick Men - The Salford Foundation Machinima Project'. You can read the publication by following this link.

Controlling the expressions of virtual characters

In this video Torben Sko demonstrates how to control the facial expressions of a virtual character using a webcam. This demo uses a piece of software called FaceAPI (created by Seeing Machines) that can tracks facial features and uses the data to drive the expression of a virtual character. This work was recently exhibited at the Australian National Portrait Gallery as part of the Youth Self Portrait prize. You can read about Torben's PhD and his other project on his website.

Ephemeral Media Conference - Machinima

I noticed this video over on the Pineapple Chunks machinima blog. It's a very interesting presentation from machinima expert Hugh Hancock. This was shot during the Ephemeral Media Conference at the University of Nottingham on the 23-24th June 2009. You can read about the event on Susi O'Neill's blog here or have at look at the conference website here.

Augmenting Google Earth with Video

Using motion capture data with CCTV cameras students at 'Georgia Institute of Technology' have succeeded in mapping and animating the real time movements of cars, people and clouds to Google Earth. Although this is not machinima I can see this technology being adapted to virtual film production.

Gaming takes on Hollywood

Guardian columnist Keith Stuart has posted an interesting article under the 'Game Theory' series. In the article Keith looks at the recent announcements of game inspired films announced at Comic Con 2009. One section of the article looks at how French publisher Ubisoft is developing a series of live-action shorts for Assassin Creed 2. This will use the game's 3D engine to create 'green screen' GCI backdrops. You can read the full article from the Guardian by following this link.