Little Big Planet

Little Big Planet is a new game for the PS3 from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe



It's main features are 1) The characters are made from sacking and 2) you can make your own levels and share them with other people. Everyone from their own advertising agency to the BBC's "Something for the weekend" have designed their own levels and then played around with them. The game provides an extensive range of flexible building blocks such as pipes, gears, cactus, rocks and houses that all interact with the physics in the game so that you can swing on ropes and roll around on drums.

As with Second Life and other similar games I imediately wondered if it will be used to make Machinima films. When I put the search into google the toolbar highlighted the fact that I was not the first the think of this idea, it's been discussed on Machinima.Com and there are already films up there on youtube.

Machinima Festival Europe

Next month De Montfort University in Leicester plays host to the Machima Festival Europe, a first for Europe.

The event runs for 3 days (12th-14th Oct) and will have workshops, debates, presentations and film screenings with of course an awards ceremony. The 3 days will be aimed at different levels, schools and students on the Friday, general and novices on Saturday with an expert day on the Sunday.
Speakers include:

• Paul Marino, Executive Director of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences
• Hugh Hancock, Director of Strange Company
• Martyn Ware (founding member of Human League and Heaven 17)
• Visiting Professor and CEO of Sleepydog, Toby Moore
• Alex Chan, independent film-maker
• Ricard Gras, Creative Director of La-Interactiva

There will be a separate exhibition area and the student union will be providing drinks.
Machima Festival Europe
12 - 14 October 2007 De Montfort University Campus Centre Leicester, UK

Iclone

Whilst following the discussions about Carrara 6 on the forums I saw a small comment about IClone having importers for Poser content. I followed up and was surprised to find that IClone was a full film studio in the computer. I've heard about people making Machinima films using various computer games and even online using Second Life. Now IClone's current content and films do look quite like most other machimima films with a noticable limit on the polygon counts. However with the ability to import from other sources such as all of the Daz3d, Content Paradise and Turbosquid plus all of the big 3D packages such as 3d studio, Maya, Poser and DazStudio should mean that there will be some quite sophisticated films.

Main site
http://www.reallusion.com/iclone/

Example films

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZunQYDt4c4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUYUVZgvbDw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeYotjLTqAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82kkc6p5VUc

Iclone Content
http://www.myclonesforiclone.blogspot.com/
http://animizemedia.com/wordpress/
http://www.iclonecenter.com/
http://www.coolclones.com/
http://iclone-daily.blogspot.com/

Tutorials
http://www.expertvillage.com/interviews/creating-characters-iclone.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AoE7DpusE0
http://www.iclonetutorials.co.uk/