Just a quick heads up that the machinima Tool i am working on, Moviesandbox, has now entered BETA stage.
That basically means that it's still not finished (i guess it never will be) but that there's a possibility for people to play around with it now.
You can find more information on the Moviesandbox website.

Eric Anderson writes:

A new contest is pushing the limits of machinima to new levels. The
contest, currently running at WarcraftCinema.com through the end of
the month, offers machinima creators over $700 in prizes for creating
advertisements with the World of Warcraft engine.

Intended to introduce the machinima community to the :30 second spot,
the contest could raise the use of machinima in advertisements to a
new level. The contest is only for ingame products at this time, but
if successful could build into launching pad for a vibrant "machinima
in advertisements" community.


For more info, go to the contest website.

The Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), a non-profit organization that provides advocacy, education and awareness for Machinima (filmmaking using real-time 3D videogame technology/virtual realities), today announced the 2006 Machinima Festival and the 2006 Machinima Awards ("the Mackies").

Expanding upon its previous format, the festival will take place over two days, November 4th-5th, 2006 (Saturday and Sunday) and will include screenings of Machinima films, Q&A with machinimators, special presentations, and seminars about Machinima production techniques.

CALL FOR ENTRIES:
The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences will begin accepting entries to the 2006 Machinima Awards on July 24th, 2006. The Awards Competition is open to all Machinima works, provided they haven't been submitted to the Machinima Awards previously. In revising our submission process, entrants will now be asked to supply links to low-res versions of their work for selection review. Once this year's selections have been made, the Academy will notify the entrant and request a high-quality version (DV AVI or MPEG2) of the work to be uploaded to the Academy FTP site. The full rules and regulations will be posted to the competition submission form.
Deadline for entries is 11:59pm EST on Sept. 22nd 2006.

PRESS:
Inquires about the 2006 Machinima Festival and Awards can be sent to: festinfo{at}machinima.org.

For more information, go to the festival website at festival.machinima.org.

Claus-Dieter Schulz writes:

the Bitfilm Festival has extended its deadline for the last time.
As we want to be able to include entries finished just in time for Siggraph
(Boston) and Assembly (Helsinki), we have decided to postpone the deadline to
August 8, 2006.
More info on the bitfilm festival website.

I tried to start a machinima related festival calendar on google calendar. Anyone interested in participating should contact me (it's open).
This is the calendar, the RSS feed is here.
Remember, it's a start. The more people commit to it, the more useful it gets.

And by the way, July 31st is the deadline for the Backup festival in germany and the Animatu digital animation festivalin Portugal. Today is the deadline for the Bitfilm Festival!

Nina Koell writes:

New media, multi-media, video art, experimental film, video-gaming ...
the boundaries between film, video, and other audio-visual mediums
have become more and more blurred in the past few years. New labels
have been applied in order to try and classify what is essentially
multi-disciplinary. What many of these ingenious outputs have in
common is film as their underlying language, their root or their point
of convergence. What is more, many artists of varying backgrounds
(visual, theater/performance, and music alike) have made use of film
in order to reach a wider audience. Film is, after all, a mass medium.

This is why Amsterdam Film Experience intends to focus on 'cinematic
experiences' (to quote Peter Greenaway), because we believe that
cutting-edge cinematic experience is the common ground for a new media
artist and advertising creative alike. We want to showcase short films
by artists who often do not get the chance to present their work to a
broader audience and create a venue that includes filmmakers,
audio-visual artists, VJs, webdesigners, television producers,
advertising creatives, musicians, as well as performance artists; and
everyone else who seeks to be stimulated and agitated by film.

what is the program going to be like?

some of our categories are:

- Sound & Vision
- Guerrilla Techniques
- New Directions
- Narrative - Time - Space Continuum
- Crossover Animation
- Buzz, Clicks & Visual Chaos


more info at amsterdamfilmexperience.com.