It just wasn’t enough for Jossie Malis to win a coveted Freddie Award last week for Best Design for his film Bendito Machine. Nooooo. This week, he took home the SECOND best prize a filmmaker could ever win as well. Jossie just alerted me that he won the $25,000 grand prize at the Aniboom Film Festival!
Jossie, us here at Frederator are quite proud of you. Thanks for sharing your film with us, and when you’re trying to decide what to do with your winnings, we’ll remind you that we like tinted windows on our Porches. Thanks!
Playground Ghosts is a webcomic ring of sorts which hosts many fine and fantastic comics for your viewin’ pleasure, but mostly what I love about it is Chris Yates’ adorable sculptures in the Playground Ghosts Toy Shop.
I think you will agree.
~*Mercedes*~
Got cute? Submit it! cedesart (at) hotmail (dot) com
So we recently got a short test of our segment in 6 MONSTERS and “gulp” never posted it. In fact, the whole segment has been completed by YESON. The same studio that did BRONK and BONGO and they did a stunning job translating my poor chicken scratches into a coherent and colorful feast for the eye.
Alright, let’s do a quick shout out to some of the peeps involved. The backgrounds and props were designed by JIM (I’m not) Worthy and the BG’s were colored by Dazzlin’ DAN CHESSER. All of the segments were directed by ROB RENZETTI of TEENAGE ROBOT fame and who has a name that sounds like a pasta dish.” I’ll have the RENZETTI please.”
CLICK HERE to see the test animation. Sorry no sound, but feel free to make up your own dialogue. It couldn’t be worse than ours.
Lee has been designing what we call Channel Frederator “postcards” since he started as an intern last year. Now he’s collected his designs on a Flickr page. I love them (obviously).
At the religious school where I spend an occasional Sunday with 5th grade leaders-of-tomorrow, they clamored around the class computer watching and re-watching this flash movie.
It’s not well-animated. It’s not well-timed. It has no story to speak of. Is it well-edited? Eh. Does it have a snappy soundtrack with a simple equation that people of all ages can understand? Certainly.
I gave the kids a poll. Out of the roughly 10 kids, 2 of them [both boys] said they watched more cartoons on the computer than they did on TV.
We’ve known Elizabeth Ito for a few years as she’s bopped around at places like Film Roman since graduating from CalArts. I’ve bookmarked her blog and I check it every morning. She won the Producers’ Choice Award in the very first Nicktoons Film Festival way back in 2004 for her student film “Welcome to My Life”, which then slipped into development for a time at Disney Family Channel. I tend to gravitate towards artists whose styles evolve over time, and Elizabeth certainly fits that category. She’s still young and finding her footing in the animation industry, and, as you read her blog, you’ll see hers is a bright talent in search of a home and good fit. Sometimes I wish I could leap forward twenty years just to see where artists whose work admire wind up in this crazy old world. I can’t wait to see what Elizabeth has in store for us.
OK, so you missed the party (the podcasts will be posted next week, and hey, there’s always next year). But, you can indeedget the show’s best swag, the Channel Frederator Awards program.
It’s got over 40 illustrations contributed by some of the world’s great cartoon artists (like Joey Ahlbum, Signe Baumane, and David Baril), and essays by learned pundits (check out [adult swim]’s Mike Lazzo and It’s Jerry Time’s Orrin Zucker) on the future of cartoons. Which is not to forget to mention Frank Rocco’s beautiful cover art. It’s 96 pages in all.
It was the most stolen artifact at our party. If you missed swiping yours, here’s your chance.
I’ve been hardcore dabbling in machinima for over a year now, as those who have visited my website have perhaps figured out. Since Floyd recently shared a Sims machinima he found, I would like to share with you some of the great World of Warcraft machinima pieces that I and my fellow filmmakers have created, that, if you’re not tapped into the machinima community, you may have missed. World of Warcraft is not only a hugely popular online MMORPG worldwide, but has one of, if not the, largest machinima communities on the internet.
First off, here is a silly 2 minute piece I created, a fictional movie trailer for a 60’s teen beach type thing.
Next, another trailer, this one dramatic, from Terran and Ezra at Rufus Cubed Productions. They really show what you can do with the medium. Terran went on to work at Blizzard, and also on the South Park Warcraft episode.
A commercial for Xfire, from Clint and DW at Dementia/Myndflame, a couple of very popular machinima creators.
Jason Choi’s Edge of Remorse, a multiple award winner.
“The Ballad of the Noob”, a music video in a Johnny Cash folk style that I threw together. It has a few WoW gaming in-jokes, but most non-gamers seem to get it anyway.
While these films are officially classified as machinima, they all have been enhanced with programs like Adobe After Effects and extra added frame by frame animation to bump up their production value. Does this start to push their classification into actual animation? I have a feeling that the lines will become blurred.
The advantage of machinima is that it is, so far, a medium that is accessible to everyone. Even if a person doesn’t feel like they have the artistic or design capability to create animation from scratch, they can still create a machinima. For filmmakers like myself, the advantage is time and money – so long as you accept the limitations, capturing pre-rendered animation in real time is fast, and cheap – I can get an idea out into the world very quickly. And for the people who play these games – when they see a film made with a game that they play, they feel a sense of familiarity and interest when they watch said film. In other words, there is a built in audience, just like when a film is created from a popular book or graphic novel.
So, what do people think? Is machinima a viable new medium?
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