Getting hands dirty
A guided tour through the wonderful world of machinima with all the basic questions what?, how? and in which game engine? kicked-off the brainstorm of the participants on their workshop projects. Some had come with a goal in mind, but most started from scratch.
Proposals were discussed and tuned either up or down to the possibilities of a time frame of a 4 day workshop and to the (wide!) collection of game engines available.
Everybody tried their hands at three important tools: Machinimation, Sims 2 and MovieSandbox to understand the different principles, but half the participants choose yet other environments (the HalfLife engine; an online multiplayer world for small children; online chess) to work in.
There was a bit more pressure than usual on the participants, because it was the intention to present some of the work on the Machinima Salon, a large public event in the context of the CrossMedia week. And indeed the workshop led to some quite astonishing results.
Notably the project of architect Olga Vasquez-Ruano, who used the Quake3 level editor to build a virtual generic hallway with rooms on the sides. She dressed up the walls with pictures taken in a real office hallway of different proportions, and experimented with the visual effects of those differences. Then used kitchen utensils to create game characters that lead a life of their own in this eerie place.
Peter Jäger and Jan Marquard made a project in which they blended three games: an online chess games that supossedly is played within the Sims2. But zooming in on the chess pieces, they turn out to be a characters in an Unreal level.
Michael Rasmussen set out to tackle the intricaticies of the HalfLife script tool, and came up with fascinating sketches of a game that is all about trying to silence a preacher that keeps going on with his sermons.
Machinima Salon
The workshop finished with the Machinima Salon in the packed Ketelhuis Cinema at the Westergasfabriek, where Paul Marino showed the audience around the highlights in the history of machinima, Olga and Peter showed their clips and worksprocesses and Daniël van Gils impressed and entertained the crowd with his midi-steered Doom3 level, that allows him trigger events in the game space using his dj set. Do check out the reactions in the Adformatie blog
