The digital revolution has made comic book publishing a thing of the past. See and learn how virtual computer technology will revolutionize this field and allow every artist to have their fifteen minutes of fame.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Video game sales break records

NPD Group reports a record-breaking year in video game sales.

Total video game sales rose to more than $17 billion last year, according to the NPD Group, making 2007 by far the biggest year in gaming history.

These numbers marked a 43 percent increase year over year, solidifying the games industry's strong lead in growth over movie box office revenue, which totaled $9.7 billion at a 4 percent increase.

Holiday shoppers made December the most lucrative month of all. Sales of both the Wii and Xbox 360 were strong, but it was the Nintendo DS that posted the biggest December totals, with a staggering 2.5 million systems ending up under trees nationwide. Sony's PS3, saw a strong rise in December, but the more expensive system still tailed its competition.

No prizes for guessing the top-selling game of the year, though: Halo 3 wound up shifting just short of 5 million copies.

By YVG Staff
Copyright 22 Jan 2008, Yahoo! Inc. All rights Reserved.

22 Billion Consumer-Generated Videos Viewed in 2007

22 Billion Consumer-Generated Videos Viewed in 2007
Accustream iMedia Research's "UGV 2005 - 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream" report shows that more than 22 billion consumer-generated videos were viewed worldwide in 2007, a sharp 70% rise over 2006 figures. According to research from Harris Interactive, in the U.S. adults 25-29 comprise the largest demographic for consumer-generated video viewership.

CHICK HERE...
http://www.womma.org/blog/2008/01/22-billion-consumergenerated-videos-viewed-in-2007/

Who's Watching User-Generated Video?

Hint: It's not silver surfers.

User-generated videos (UGVs) tallied 22 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006, according to Accustream iMedia Research's "UGV 2005 - 2008: Mania Meets Mainstream" report.

Need data for presentations? eMarketer subscribers can download charts instantly — over 50,000 choices.

Paul A. Palumbo, research director at Accustream, told eMarketer that the 22 billion views was a worldwide figure. In other words, user-generated videos on US-based Web sites drew 22 billion views from users worldwide.

READ MORE...

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005856&src=article1_newsltr

©2008 eMarketer Inc. All rights reserved

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

MMOvie Interview

Nate Taylor, Director and Pat Brady, Director of Animation

MIG
Hey guys. I still can’t believe this video was actually made. The reason why I'm so surprised is because the project started as a "wouldn't this be cool concept and eventually gained enough momentum to become a reality. You had a blank piece of paper, how did you come up with the concept for MMOvie.

Nate
Initially we were thinking of doing a single scene. Like a 3-5 minute scene from a longer film to try and hook people in and intrigue them. It seemed harder to get people into a quick short 3 minute scene than it was to do a real theatrical trailer, because it’s so dramatic… and there’s a chance to showcase much more of a story and more epic sweeping shots. You can also cover a lot more ground in a trailer than you can in a linear short story. So we decided on a trailer format and then from there it evolved into a parody trailer. We went through a list of 150 movie scenes we wanted to do and narrowed it down to what we could feasibly accomplish with the time frame and the constraints of the game.

MIG
Let’s start from the beginning, who thought of the name MMOvie.

Pat
I actually thought of that name when we were sitting around brainstorming about what to call this thing. It had so many titles, just in this big list… It finally just occurred to me, we’re taking this game and turning it into every movie we can feasibly think of… It just kind of came together that way.

MIG
What was the hardest part about actually filming the video?

Nate
One of the hardest things was, it was one of the first times any of us have done any Machinima. We’re all relatively accomplished filmmakers, but it was the first time we tried to shoot in the virtual world. So just sort of adjusting to the fact that you’re in a virtual world, rather than a real world… just asking people to walk in a straight line at the same time becomes really hard when you have multiple people patched in from different parts of the country… you’re dealing with latency and not everyone can see where they’re walking. Even just simple tasks in the real world, that if you asked an actor to walk from point-A to point-B it’s relatively easy. In a virtual world, it’s a little harder, plus we were shooting on a PvP server so we had the constant threat of our crew getting attacked and killed at any moment.

MIG
Was there any point in which your entire set got ganked?

Nate
We were pretty fortunate. We even shot a bunch of stuff out in Horde territory. The one thing that happened was we were shooting… ah, where were we? Pat, was it Loch Modan?

Pat
Yeah… We were at the Stout Lager Inn in Loch Modan and I was trying to wrangle people out of there because we had random players running into our shot. I would stand outside an yell, “Hey guys, I’m giving away 5 gold to anyone who comes outside!” Naturally, everyone came outside and then I saw, along the side of the inn, a level 30 undead-rogue. Without thinking I yelled to everyone, “Guys! There’s a Horde!” and the entire cast ran out of their spots, chased this guy down for 10 minutes, and killed him. Our producer was pretty pissed-off and everyone had to go back to one.

Nate
Victor, our producer, is the only one on the project that doesn’t play Warcraft… so he was trying to treat it like a regular shoot and keep everyone in order. He had no idea why the entire cast and crew just cleared the inn to go chasing after some “horde thing.” He didn’t even know what it was… he had a lot of adjusting to get use to with the game. Just learning all the terminology, telling people what zones to go to, and what places to meet at.

MIG
I can see it now, this is the beginning of the Massively Multiplayer Actors Guild.

Nate
The MAG or something?

MIG
Yes, the MAG. So how many hours you guys actually spend capturing video footage?

Nate
I don’t know… To be honest, we really lost track. I think there were 13 capture sessions.

Pat
Yeah, I think that’s about right. We had 13 or 14 capture sessions, with each session lasting five hours or more. I’d say we easily logged over 100 hours this, just in the capture phase.

Nate
It’s tough because we tried to shoot in instances so we could control the environment a little more. So we’d have to send a team in first to clear the instance, kill all the monsters, and then we could set-up for shooting. Just getting everyone onto one continent and then realizing you need everyone on Outland… then you need to travel over there, then you need to log in some Alts… everything took a lot longer than we thought.

AJ
Personally, the thing I thought would take the most amount of time was getting everyone’s costuming right. I thought it was genius, just how close some of the costumes were.

Nate
People kept running back to the bank and pulling out all this junk they had saved up for a rainy day. They’d come out dressed as some lunatic and I’d send them back for something different. It was hard find costumes that worked and looked interesting, because we ended up using a lot of the same characters, in a lot of the same shots. Pat spent a lot of time in Model Viewer building toons to look like people.

Pat
Yeah… that was a really interesting experience… using the Model Viewer program as a virtual studio for the virtual world we’re already filming in. I’d try to dress up the characters the best I could to match their movie counterparts. In on instance, we needed to shoot a character in a very specific costume and we managed to find everything we needed with low-level tailoring abilities. We needed to make this character look like Leonardo DiCaprio, get him in his Titanic-outfit, put him on a boat, and film him.

Nate
I think that toon is still parked on the boat, logged-out. He’s just sailing back-and-forth, back-and-forth. We had to shoot that like twenty times, zoning from one continent to the other to try and get the damn shot right. There was such a short window of actual open sea that was decent.

MIG
How long did it actually take to edit the final cut?

Nate
That would be a good question for Victoria, our intrepid editor. I don’t know how many hours she logged-in on this project, but it was weeks and weeks of work. A lot of times we’d capture footage and realize it wasn’t quite right and we’d have to go back and re-shoot it. Also, a lot of the scenes we shot longer than they appear in the trailer. We’d build a full scene out, like the Terminator 2 scene, where we’d have lot of dialogue back and forth. The whole scene was built-out and she’d cut the scene down, much like you would in a movie, to make it fit the trailer. It was a ton of editing, plus the sound design, mix, and music… I don’t know the final hours, but it was a lot.

MIG
If I’m correct, Victoria is also an avid WoW fan and she has several level 70 characters as well.

Nate
I think she has 3 level 70 toons… she made the tough trek moving from a PvE server to a PvP server.

MIG
What was the most rewarding part of working on the MMOvie project?

Nate
For me, one of the best parts is showing it to people who have never seen Warcraft, and the fact that they get it and can appreciate it. Showing it to a roomful of people who’ve never seen the game, and they get the movie references and they get excited about the project. That’s the big payoff for me.

Pat
For me, I really liked being able to do something this cool with a game I really liked to begin with. I really love it when we show it to people who know the game and seeing how they get it, and all the little jokes… there are lots of little Warcraft references in all the scenes.

Nate
The other thing, a large chunk of our crew said the film finally justified the hundreds and thousands of hours they put into the game.

Pat
I actually thought of that name when we were sitting around brainstorming about what to call this thing. It had so many titles, just in this big list… It finally just occurred to me, we’re taking this game and turning it into every movie we can feasibly think of… It just kind of came together that way.

MIG
What was the hardest part about actually filming the video?

Nate
One of the hardest things was, it was one of the first times any of us have done any Machinima. We’re all relatively accomplished filmmakers, but it was the first time we tried to shoot in the virtual world. So just sort of adjusting to the fact that you’re in a virtual world, rather than a real world… just asking people to walk in a straight line at the same time becomes really hard when you have multiple people patched in from different parts of the country… you’re dealing with latency and not everyone can see where they’re walking. Even just simple tasks in the real world, that if you asked an actor to walk from point-A to point-B it’s relatively easy. In a virtual world, it’s a little harder, plus we were shooting on a PvP server so we had the constant threat of our crew getting attacked and killed at any moment.

MIG
Was there any point in which your entire set got ganked?


Nate
We were pretty fortunate. We even shot a bunch of stuff out in Horde territory. The one thing that happened was we were shooting… ah, where were we? Pat, was it Loch Modan?

Pat
Yeah… We were at the Stout Lager Inn in Loch Modan and I was trying to wrangle people out of there because we had random players running into our shot. I would stand outside an yell, “Hey guys, I’m giving away 5 gold to anyone who comes outside!” Naturally, everyone came outside and then I saw, along the side of the inn, a level 30 undead-rogue. Without thinking I yelled to everyone, “Guys! There’s a Horde!” and the entire cast ran out of their spots, chased this guy down for 10 minutes, and killed him. Our producer was pretty pissed-off and everyone had to go back to one.

Nate
Victor, our producer, is the only one on the project that doesn’t play Warcraft… so he was trying to treat it like a regular shoot and keep everyone in order. He had no idea why the entire cast and crew just cleared the inn to go chasing after some “horde thing.” He didn’t even know what it was… he had a lot of adjusting to get use to with the game. Just learning all the terminology, telling people what zones to go to, and what places to meet at.

MIG
I can see it now, this is the beginning of the Massively Multiplayer Actors Guild.


Nate
The MAG or something?

MIG
Yes, the MAG. So how many hours you guys actually spend capturing video footage?

Nate
I don’t know… To be honest, we really lost track. I think there were 13 capture sessions.

Pat
Yeah, I think that’s about right. We had 13 or 14 capture sessions, with each session lasting five hours or more. I’d say we easily logged over 100 hours this, just in the capture phase.

Nate
It’s tough because we tried to shoot in instances so we could control the environment a little more. So we’d have to send a team in first to clear the instance, kill all the monsters, and then we could set-up for shooting. Just getting everyone onto one continent and then realizing you need everyone on Outland… then you need to travel over there, then you need to log in some Alts… everything took a lot longer than we thought.

AJ
Personally, the thing I thought would take the most amount of time was getting everyone’s costuming right. I thought it was genius, just how close some of the costumes were.

Nate
People kept running back to the bank and pulling out all this junk they had saved up for a rainy day. They’d come out dressed as some lunatic and I’d send them back for something different. It was hard find costumes that worked and looked interesting, because we ended up using a lot of the same characters, in a lot of the same shots. Pat spent a lot of time in Model Viewer building toons to look like people.

Pat
Yeah… that was a really interesting experience… using the Model Viewer program as a virtual studio for the virtual world we’re already filming in. I’d try to dress up the characters the best I could to match their movie counterparts. In on instance, we needed to shoot a character in a very specific costume and we managed to find everything we needed with low-level tailoring abilities. We needed to make this character look like Leonardo DiCaprio, get him in his Titanic-outfit, put him on a boat, and film him.

Nate
I think that toon is still parked on the boat, logged-out. He’s just sailing back-and-forth, back-and-forth. We had to shoot that like twenty times, zoning from one continent to the other to try and get the damn shot right. There was such a short window of actual open sea that was decent.

MIG
How long did it actually take to edit the final cut?

Nate
That would be a good question for Victoria, our intrepid editor. I don’t know how many hours she logged-in on this project, but it was weeks and weeks of work. A lot of times we’d capture footage and realize it wasn’t quite right and we’d have to go back and re-shoot it. Also, a lot of the scenes we shot longer than they appear in the trailer. We’d build a full scene out, like the Terminator 2 scene, where we’d have lot of dialogue back and forth. The whole scene was built-out and she’d cut the scene down, much like you would in a movie, to make it fit the trailer. It was a ton of editing, plus the sound design, mix, and music… I don’t know the final hours, but it was a lot.

MIG
If I’m correct, Victoria is also an avid WoW fan and she has several level 70 characters as well.

Nate
I think she has 3 level 70 toons… she made the tough trek moving from a PvE server to a PvP server.

MIG
What was the most rewarding part of working on the MMOvie project?

Nate
For me, one of the best parts is showing it to people who have never seen Warcraft, and the fact that they get it and can appreciate it. Showing it to a roomful of people who’ve never seen the game, and they get the movie references and they get excited about the project. That’s the big payoff for me.

Pat
For me, I really liked being able to do something this cool with a game I really liked to begin with. I really love it when we show it to people who know the game and seeing how they get it, and all the little jokes… there are lots of little Warcraft references in all the scenes.

Nate
The other thing, a large chunk of our crew said the film finally justified the hundreds and thousands of hours they put into the game.

If you missed it check out the movie all the hype is about Here

http://mmovie.voig.com/
©2004-2007 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Autodesk 3ds Max: Create stunning 3D in less time

Get ready to bring your best ideas to life with Autodesk® 3ds Max. Its forward-thinking features and dependable design environment help you successfully tackle even the most complex animation projects with unparalleled speed and ease.

From film and television visual effects artists to game developers to design visualization professionals, users agree that this powerful, adaptable software enhances every aspect of creative development.

Create rich and complex design visualization. Generate realistic characters for a top-selling game. Bring 3D effects to the big screen. Autodesk®
3ds Max® 2008 3D modeling, animation, and rendering software helps design visualization professionals, game developers, and visual effects artists maximize their productivity by streamlining the process of working with complex scenes.

Viewing and Handling of Large, Complex Scenes
3ds Max 2008 software delivers new viewport technology and optimizations that result in vastly improved interactivity of even the largest, most complex scenes. Common tasks and operations—selection, material assignment, transform, grouping, cloning, and many more—are now significantly faster, making 3ds Max 2008 the most streamlined version of the software ever. Plus, a new Scene Explorer makes managing large scenes—and interacting with hundreds or even thousands of objects—far more intuitive.

Review Rendering
Produce stunning photo-real imagery, faster. With the release of 3ds Max 2008, Autodesk unveils Review. This powerful new toolset supports iterative rendering workflows by delivering interactive previewing of shadows, the 3ds Max sun/sky environment, and mental ray® Architectural and Design material settings. Based on the latest game engine technology, Review gives you the instant visual feedback you need to iterate rapidly.

Support for Complex Pipelines and Workflows
Quickly extend 3ds Max or streamline multi-application workflows. The new MAXScript ProEditor provides you with an intuitive interface for working with MAXScript that will streamline the scripting workflow, making it easier to author scripts that automate and customize 3ds Max. Deeper support for the DWG™ and FBX® file formats results in faster, more accurate importing of data from other popular Autodesk applications; plus, new features facilitate working with this imported data.

Artist-Friendly Modeling
Enjoy a less menu-dependent modeling experience. 3ds Max 2008 gives you a more streamlined, artist-friendly modeling workflow through a collection of hands-on modeling UI options that let you focus more on the creative process.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE
© Copyright 2008 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
http://offers.autodesk.com/7/m_e/3ds.php

Friday, January 11, 2008

HOW TO ANIMATE REALISTIC CLOUDS

One of the most popular elements of Flash Professional 8 and Flash CS3 is the new
"Filters" feature. It's almost too much fun!

Add blurs, drop shadows, glows and other effects to your objects -- Quickly AND Easily.

This short-but-informative video shows you how to animate realistic clouds. In this example, they move toward the viewer and disappear off the screen. Way easier than you might think!

So if you want a great way to add depth, animation and more interest to a site -- check it out here:

http://newsletter.learnflash.com/t?ctl=1682720:4F9E0CDC42B85F6B4CC0190B5B8C5F6981140A4E81E74E85

Even if you don't have Flash Professional 8 or Flash CS3 -- you'll want to sit back and watch! Don't "get to it later" -- do it now so you don't forget -- It'll only take a few minutes.

- Craig
TechnicalLead.com, Inc.
1191 W. Main St., Suite 6
Hendersonville, TN 37075

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Antics V3 Special Sale

Antics Technologies is making Antics V3 ProPack available to all Animation Co-op members at a highly discounted rate of $295 (LIST $595).

The Antics Sale will end Monday, January 14, 2008.

Antics is an easy to use 3D animation software application for producing rapid 3D animations, whether for pre-viz, storyboards, pitching ideas, fully polished 3D animations, machinima, legal reconstructions, education, military/police simulations or emergency response training. As a V3 ProPack user, you are entitled to loads of FREE premium content in the Antics online warehouse at www.antics3d.com.

Antics also has a FREE version of V3 called the V3 BasePack. This is a fully-functional perpetual version of Antics with a small sample library of content and soon BasePack users will be able to purchase premium content packs from Antics on their webstore.

For a list of all of the product differentials between V3 ProPack and V3 BasePack, please see http://www.antics3d.com/index.php?ac...content_id=117

Now for the details on how to take advantage of the V3 ProPack special offer:

• Go to the Antics website, www.antics3d.com and register on the site. (You will need to do this for both V3 ProPack and V3 BasePack.)
• Once you’ve registered and activated your account through your confirmation email, you can go to the Antics webstore (select either US/Canada webstore or UK/Rest Of World)
• If you have any issues with registration or aren’t receiving the confirmation email, please email support@antics3d.com and they will activate your account for you!
• Once on the webstore you can either download V3 BasePack for FREE or purchase V3 ProPack for $295.
• To get the special $295 price, please remember to use the following coupon code: ANT3PSP304
• Again, this sale is valid through January 14th, 2008.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

"Your Grassroots Are Showing"

User Generated Content and the Distribution Revolution

"Your Grassroots Are Showing" examines the progression of independent content distribution from festivals through online to mobile, touching - among other things -upon the concept of "user generated content" and the "Machinima" phenomenon.

User generated content (UGC) has revolutionized the world of entertainment. Programs and films that rain down from the heavens on pre-ordained schedules are being supplanted by content that springs freely from the ground up.

User generated content provides multiple points of entry for an eclectic group of creators who dwell outside of the traditional networks and studios. The output of these artists and filmmakers not only resonates with the viewing public on a grassroots level, but also breaks down (or simply ignores) Old School distinctions between content "producers" and content "consumers".

What motivates independent content creators? Fame and fortune? Perhaps. But more likely the motivation, consciously realized or not, is akin to that expressed by Bronwyn Kidd in the quote on the left: the need to create with a unique voice, and the ability to do so unconstrained by conventional media concerns. And while Kidd here speaks specifically of short film production, this guiding principle can be applied to most user generated content.

The reference to "markets" is noteworthy. There is a market for such work, and there is money to be made. Independent artists owe it to themselves to learn as much as possible about the business of entertainment, even as they proceed to reinvigorate and redefine that very business. To neglect to do so is to risk exploitation by those who do pay attention to such things.

READ MORE by Kevin Geiger

http://www.animationcoop.org/pages/features/monthly_Grassroots.htm
©2007 The Animation Co-op
2340 Overland Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90064 USA
(310)689-6062