Hugh Hancock, the man who helped shape the word machinima itself and founded Machinima.com in 1999 left the website for good and stepped down from his editor in chief position to fully concentrate on his filmmaking with Strange Company.
You can read his open letter here.

Machinima.com has been sold about a year ago to a company called Machinima Inc. who are now taking over the site.

Paul Marino, head of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences is hired as "Acting Creative Director".

A Q&A in article format will be released at the end of the week. You can pose questions on this forum thread over at M.com.
More info as things emerge.

Daniel Bliton writes:

The entries selected for inclusion in the 2006 DC Independent Film Festival & Seminars have been announced!
We would like to thank all those who submitted their films for consideration.
We were pleasantly surprised at the number and variety of films submitted to us for consideration.

See http://www.machinimadudes.com for the Machinima selections.

This year DCIFF received a record amount of submissions, over 1300 films! The teams of evaluators looked at all films in real time and scored the films on 10 categories at a scale of 1 to 10.
Any Machinima film selected was judged against all other entries in that category, either Shorts or Animations.
The DCIFF staff had never heard of Machinima when we first approached them, but they were highly impressed with the Machinima submissions that they reviewed.
Once more, MachinimaDudes thanks everyone who submitted entries to us. We encourage those directors whose films were not selected to try again for the 2007 film festival.

Edited by Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche

The Machinima Reader will assemble the first collection of essays to critically review the phenomenon of Machinima from a wide variety of perspectives.
Machinima is on the verge of stepping beyond its chaotic mix of artistic, ludic and technical conceptions into established traditions and vocabularies of contemporary media. As machinima invents itself, the flexibility of its form poses an interesting challenge to academics as well as artists and critics.

We want to offer an inaugural reader for the further development and critical discussion of Machinima, one that charts its growth from several angles and also provides a foundation for critical studies in the future.
The rapid development of Machinima is closely connected to the culture of computer and video games. In a repetition of early cinema's history, many of Machinima's milestones are formulated as mixtures of artistic expression and technical achievements. In our organization of The Machinima Reader, we will recognize that the creators of Machinima have been at times just as concerned with demonstrating mastery of technology and gameplay as in artistic expression or narrative performance.
At the same time we acknowledge an artistic maturing process that has led to more professional production methods and results of higher quality.

Consequently, we are looking for essays that address a range of topics.
These include (but are not limited to):

* Culture: History of Machinima - definitions, technology, and context; performance practices; evolving and new presentation platforms, theory

* Technology: Promise and impact of real-time engines for animation; future developments in hard- and software; technical relationship and dependencies among games, technology and machinima

* Communities and Contexts: Machinima as community-based practice and performance; legal issues; use in classroom; relationship to other media; machinima as guerilla film making; Machinima and modding; players as performers; machinima in MMOs

* Art: Aesthetics and poetics of Machinima; Machinima and new media; from game to Machinima - what translates what does not?

Please submit a 500 word abstract via email as RTF document to

michael.nitsche[at]lcc.gatech.edu or lowood[at]stanford.edu

by 3 April 2006.

We expect that final essays will not exceed 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006.

Dr. Nevermind, Underboy and analog Bill just finished their newest Podcast episode called "Critique" over at machinimalive.com.
With one podcast a week running at over an hour each, they truly deserved their permanent link on the newsbar to the right.
You can also subscribe to their site feed here.
Keep it up folks!
(and stay away from flash...)

Aaron Koenig writes:

The *Realtime Film Festival* will take place from May 2 to 4 in Stuttgart, Germany, as a part of the FMX conference for animation, effects, games and postproduction and the Stuttgart Festival for Animated Film.

The Realtime Film Festival deals with the artistic challenges through current realtime graphics and screens the most interesting Demos, Machinimas, CutScenes, Flash Animations and VJ Visuals of the past year.
You can submit your work in the following categories:

Cut Scenes
Films and sequences which are part of computer or console games based on realtime technology like intros, trailers etc.

Flash
Films in the SWF format, using realtime features of Macromedia Flash (eg. Actionscript,tweenings)

Machinima
Movies shot in real time with game engines

Demos
Small EXE programs that make the computer generate 3D animations in realtime

VJ Visuals
Realtime shows by VJs mixing visuals live to the music (please send in a showreel that documents your live performance).

If you're interested, head over to the submission formular.

Nikki Marsh writes:

VirtualStage Version 3 is available NOW!

Dakine Wave is delighted to announce the release of Version 3 of VirtualStage.
VirtualStage is a toolkit aimed at the machinima filmmaker. It provides all of the tools necessary to create 3D animated movies in an easy-to-use package. You design and build your own sets, position and control the cameras, and configure the lighting. The virtual actors perform each scene by following your directions. You can define their actions and gestures using a keyframe animation tool that does not require any previous animation experience. The actors' speech is generated by voice synthesis engines or, if you prefer, you can make and use recordings of real voices. Lip synchronisation is automatic with the synthesized voices.

You can even add new actions, gestures, dialogue and sound effects during replays of the scene. There is also a powerful Timeline Editor that lets you change the timing and ordering of events within a scene. VirtualStage will allow you to import your own character and prop models. Finally, the software will automatically generate a screenplay based on your input.

To coincide with the new release and due to popular demand, Dakine Wave has also released a FREE Lite Version of VirtualStage. The Lite Version includes two high resolution characters and, although it does not include the props and synthesized voices that you get with the Full Version, it will work with any compatible voices that you already have on your computer.
The Lite Version will let you see the potential of VirtualStage for creating your films and dramas so why not add it to your machinima toolbox today?

You can download a free copy of VirtualStage Lite and get more info from:
http://www.dakinewave.com

Dakine Wave is also looking for investment and reseller partners.
Please contact NikkiMarsh[at]dakinewave.com (UK, Europe & Australasia)
or LynneMcMinn[at]dakinewave.com (USA & Canada) for more information.