The Prince and the Paint Can: Finished!

Uploading to Blizzard as we speak...

Blizzcon 2011 second contest progress

Blizz is having a second Blizzcon video contest this year, and this one isn't accepting webcam vlogs so more machinima folks are actually entering. I know Mushanga, Zimtower, and WowCrendor have horses in the race, so there will at least be honest competition.

The Memories of Blizzard winners announced

Blizzard's 20th anniversary contest

So, I made a movie for Blizzard's 20th anniversary contest in 48 hours.

I really hadn't planned to enter, but Paus convinced me that I had to, at least, try if I actually came up with an idea. So I fooled around with some thoughts, but then gave it a rest, not really liking anything. Then I suddeny had a silly little idea and banged it out.

I learned that perhaps the most important thing is not to rush, though- I nearly killed my computer trying to multitask too much. I ended up losing more time with rebooting my computer and poking around inside it to see why it wasn't giving me a display than I did waiting for a render to finish to move to the next part.

Voice acting was done on extremely short notice, completely by amateur talent(including myself!), and thanks to Rob(the guy who plays the original Cad character) for wrangling some actors up for me while I was busy animating. Sadly, my usual suspects like TotalBiscuit wern't free on such short notice(can't blame them there, of course) which probably would have slammed th.

Given all the problems I had(including having to replace a video card during it) I'm pretty happy with the result, though I woulda liked to have had longer especially for dealing with the voice acting.

Assuming it gets into the voting round, I'm gonna need all the help I can with the votes!

Memories of days gone by...

Brain Chili: The Trailer!

My entry for Baron Soosdon's starcraft beta contest. I had to cut it down to a trailer due to length- I'd originally thought the rules were 'over one minute long' instead of 'exactly one minute long'. My bad.

Second life is more tentacular for my efforts.

My forays into second life have been pretty tentative, with my being dragged about by Moo and watching Caruu strut his stuff, but my first solo attempt saw me taking second place in a building contest with my little glowing, wobbling eyeball thingie. So now it looks like he'll get his own little place in the pond at Sweet Mariposa, very neat...
Second life is an incredible pain to make anything in compared to, say, any 3d software developed in the past 10 years, but it's fun to do model edits that other players can see.

Oh, yeah, and my name on there is Haye Abbott. Totally classy.

A Very Northrend Christmas entry: Trees Things Happen

Well, after various trials, I managed to hack and cobble together my entry for Machinima.com's christmas contest:




I had to cut the movie for time pretty severely(around a minute) after the music and sound was already done, so you'll probably notice some discontinuities- sorry bout that. I had to make the movie in sections because of constant crashes(the source footage for this movie was ginormous), and when I assembled it the pieces seem to have been much longer together than I'd expected. Think I dropped a zero in my math somewhere. In any event, expect an uncut version eventually.

Special thanks to every who helped, especially my voice actors, and to Moo for forcibly convincing me to enter- I'm very glad I did!

A little something...

Happy new year, everyone!
Made this little texture edit for my Machinima.com christmas movie, "Trees Things Happen"...

I'll update when my movie appears on Machinima.com...

C-C-Candy comes out!

Featuring my voice acting debut, as well as such talents as Selserene, Kilh, Caruu, Rob(the guy who inspired Caddington) and even one word shouted by Ian Beckman! I was kinda sad that the compression killed his FPS like shout of 'CANDY COMES OUT' during the fight scene... Perhaps if I get round to making an updated version it'll be all there.

Machinima Film Fest 2008

Quick little update from the hotel- the fest was fun, albeit steeped in pretension.
Not many wow folks there, though I met a few, and also a few folks in other platforms that I liked, so that was neat.

I'll probably post more when I get home, so here's a couple pictures.

The Eyebeam place.

Steve Mullane, Jun Falkenstein, and Ian Beckman, the rest of the WoW delegation

Machinima.com interview

So today the interview I forgot to mention went up on Machinima.com's blog.

Machinima.com Blog

I'm not very good at being interviewed, but Moo did a good job of not letting me make a jackass of myself, so huge thanks to her! It was a lot of fun.

Alienware, part II

So now, the gripping finale! I promised everyone I'd finish it by the time the Dell laptop arrives...

Where we left off...

Well, now that I've installed the replacement RAM in the Alienware(the big spiky heat sinks on them were a bit frightening to install though!) it is pretty awesome.

So, here are some more pictures!

I've gotta say, when this guy turned on it sounded somewhat scary. It made an unholy wail...


And promptly failed to boot.

Turns out that the unholy wail is the Alienware equivalent to bios beeping, and the RAM had loosened in shipping.

That taken care of, a spooky glow suffused the machine- it looks really cool in the dark.







It's a lovely thing and for once I'm glad I don't have a cat- given that a good third of the computer is fans and intakes, I shudder to think how must dust the thing is sucking up even without having a feline sucked in like a pigeon with a jet engine.

And of course, the most important part... The interior!

This is with the original RAM- I'll take a picture of the super saijan gundam spiked replacement RAM sometime soon.

And of course, the dual GeForces SLIed together like a tasty layer cake of hardware acceleration.
Yum.


A huge thanks to WeGame, and to both Gorndt and Oxhorn for keeping tabs on things, and to Alienware for promptly replacing the bad RAM! Now I need to get a couple games more recent than wow to try out on it(though it is really nice to see the WOTLK beta with max graphics/shadows enabled and still get better frame rates than my old computer with FRAPS running!). My rendering is super fast too, especially with multithreading.

Alienware intermission

I have more pictures, but the computer kinda doesn't work very well, so I'll hold off on more posting until I either have a techno-epiphany or manage to pry answers out of Alienware.

The thing is gorgeous, though. And the only game I've managed to run on it so far(minesweeper) runs like a dream.

Alienware, part I

My WeGame contest prize has arrived! And now, since Baron is demanding that I cater to his voyeuristic urges instead of playing with my new toy, pictures:

Big box, or tiny couch? Or is it a weather balloon...?

They aren't joking about the "heavy" thing, either,
but the bulk was more problematic.

Ok, I have my hat now. What's all that other
junk that came with it, though?

It looks better than the cheesy alien props from the
latest attempt at an Indiana Jones movie...

More later. I need to hook it all up now...

Dun dun dun...

Well, it looks like my Alienware has shipped, so expect some pictures soon!

Sadly, it seems that neither Dopefish or I have been accepted into the Machiniplex festival, which i a shame- I was looking forward to it, since it'll be the first fest I might be able to attend in person.

I'll try not to feel to bad until I see what got picked instead of us! Baron Soosdon did get a nomination for best editing, for The Device has been Modified- so even if that's all I get to see on the big screen, that'll be neat. I can point out the mechamurlocs!

Max on Spooncraft

The Dell XPS M1730 Machinima Contest, Pinkhair’s MAX | Spooncraft

Max

And, in the nick of time, here's my second entry to the Dell Machinima Contest: "Max"



Huge thanks to Drewbie on the voice acting, and another big thanks to Michael Martin, who provided the first draft of the voice and helped me with the script.

This movie is one that I came up with last night while I was still not sure that I'd finish Ultimate in time for the contest... so finding myself with about 20 hours to kill, what did I do?

That's right, I made a second movie.

And it felt great.

Even if it was a pain.

Ultimate

My first(and main) entry for the Dell Machinima Contest:



Huge thanks to Caruu and Selserene!

Workwork

More job hunting the past few days... Without a car... in a suburban area...
Anyone wanna hire me to make them pretty pictures? I've grown accustomed to having a place to live.

The Alienware prize hasn't shown up yet from the WeGame contest, but this has:

Ooh, shiny!

And here's a hint of what I'm workin on...