Janus Syndicate

LONG POST AAAHHH! Hi everybody, time for a lengthy recap of this year’s Machinima Festival at Eyebeam in New York City, which was the first one I’ve been to. So many awesome people were there that I got to meet in person for the first time and everyone had lots of fun, meeting new people like I did and/or reuniting again with people they saw at previous festivals. I’d say about 50-100 people were in attendance throughout Saturday. That’s me in the middle of the top-left picture on the student panel that I don’t think went too well, but moving on. Sorry in advance for the pictures that are blurry or have poor lighting, my camera is outdated, but the content is still there. Also, pretty much all of my indoor pictures were of the PANEL area ONLY. Eyebeam (where the fest took place) was not that small, and in fact, it had a very large theatre area and a whole area behind of where you see the angle for all the pictures. Seems people think Eyebeam was just one room from the pictures that I took..I snapped pictures of the theatre and TV setup but they are even poorer than some of these, but i’ll be uploading them to the album linked below anyway soon. With that aside, let’s go!

On Friday there was the “Meet and Greet” impromptu setup at Eyebeam. I met Freidrich Kirschner (Festival Director), Paul Marino (Jesus of Machinima), Lenny Correa (Festival Co-director), Two guys from As the Hamster Wheel Turns were there, two lead cinematic designers at BioWare for Mass Effect came later in the evening who were both fascinating to listen to, Sam “Zuckerman” Midwood (This American Hero) arrived later, Freidrich was there all day working his ass off, staff members from MovieStorm arrived, Annie OK, Chris Burke, and more. Apart from that, Friday was fairly quiet, so a good majority of us went to a nearby diner.

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Top Row, L-to-R: Ken Thain (BioWare), Seth Webber (ATHWT), Kevin Cianek (Xanatos), Armando Troisi (BioWare) Bottom Row, L-to-R: Friedrich Kirschner, Sam Midwood (This American Hero), Kevin Nuut (ATHWT)

I stayed with Nefarious Guy (Clockwork). His great family kept me well fed pretty much all weekend and gave me a roof to sleep under. Thanks a million. Then came the festival on Saturday! What a turnout too, not a small or very large one, which I think suited very well. It began with a nice introduction from Paul Marino (“Thinking Machinima”, Still Seeing Breen), and then came the panels and screenings for the rest of the day. It was pretty hard to turn away from. Unfortunately, the panel I was in did not go the best in my opinion, but the rest of the panels made up for it. So in the end, Nefarious and I ended up being there for a total of over 12 hours on Saturday along with many of the other attendees. Man, did I meet a lot of sweet people. I’m going to presume that many of you reading this are a part of my youtube audience and therefore are not familiar with too many people outside of the Source Machinima community. I’ll tell you, check these guys out right away, these are people I met in person for the first time, many of them remembered me for one or two things in the past but weren’t aware of my later videos, anyway, here we go! FYI – I jump a bit out of order.

-The Ill Clan (made up with the talents of Frank Dellario, Kerria Seabrooke, Paul Janicola, and more) This is a group pro at machinima. Literally. They’re the creators of the former TrashTalk and other historic machinimas including Apartment Huntin, Hardly Workin, etc, and even were apart of an episode of CSI: NY. They’ve been around for ten+ years and are all sweet as hell. The trio took part in a number of panels this year and blew me away with their minisode of their new series Tiny Nation. Check this out. It was definitely one of the top highlights for me in the festival. Made in Second Life, it only bares resemblance to it in about two or three shots. I was hoping to also meet Matt Domaniani, “Ill Will” of TrashTalk, whom I even once showed him around in Garrysmod long ago, but he couldn’t attend the festival due to real life matters. But meeting the other three was incredibly rewarding, as they sure remembered when I submitted clips of our first larger-scale rough, machinima video “Lol Another Day 2″ and they used it in the episode entitled “New Game Roundup”. Paul Janicola even sang the chorus of the spies song at the end too. So it was pretty cool, I’ll have to email them some of the stuff I’ve done since they only were familiar with that old piece, and it’s cool because they weren’t aware that i’ve stuck with the scene since and continued productivity, so everything was a bit of a surprise. Also, to show how Ill clan also has future-seeing powers, they once did a live episode of Trashtalk that included Johnathon Coulton as a special guest. This was before Portal was ever conceived, so he was not nearly as well known back then as he is now. Pretty funny for those of us who followed Trashtalk and learned of Coulton that way or another, and then saw his popularity explode due to his credits song in Portal. The cool guys knew him before that.

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Panel with Seth Webber and Kevin Nuut of ATHWT (LEFT), and Paul Janicola and Kerria Seabrooke of The Ill Clan (RIGHT), moderated by Freidrich Kirschner (CENTER). The Ill Clan duo premiered their hilarious minisode of TINY NATION – Click here to watch.

-Phil Rice (Male Restroom Etiquette, Apology) and Ricky Grove (Voice actor in Jill’s Song & more, actor). Two of Machinima’s kings, in the flesh! Creators of what is definitely the best machinima podcast around, they also were apart of a panel on sound, which was both hilarious and incredibly informative. When the recording for this panel gets up, i’ll post it, as it’s great. All panels and the awards were filmed and should be online soon. What an honor to see them there.

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Panel with Ricky Grove (LEFT) and Phil “Overman” Rice (RIGHT) on the importance of sound. A sample of Ricky’s advice from one slide: “Read the fucking script.” Huge honor to hear something in style of the Overcast podcast live.

-Robert Stonemann and Zachariah Scott of Lit Fuse Films. Zach and I didn’t talk a whole lot, and Steinmann came down with a pretty bad headache at the fest, but him and I later talked for a while after the awards ceremony. Was cool seeing each other there for the first time, only Nefarious and I kept bailing from the fest at different intervals than they did so we didn’t see each other a whole lot. Congrats to them and their music composer, Lars, for picking up a “Best Music” win with Ignus Solus. It’s a shame Smooth Few Films didn’t come in order to have a true Source machinimator gathering.

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Panel with Zachariah Scott of Lit Fuse (RIGHT), with Michael filming it (LEFT). The moderator of this panel called Jill’s Song “Emochinima”. Zach’s response: “That hurts.” Zach and I seemed to get the short end of the stick with panels, as I was paired up with a schoolkids organization and he was paired up with two Halo kids who kept saying shit like “Oh..you know, we film our stuff on Xbox live, and uh, kids are kids…” Are you kidding me? Zach pretty much cleaned their clocks, though. Rob had to sit out of this panel due to his feeling ill.

-Ben Grussi, aka zs|gamemaster. #1 Machinima Aficionado. He’s in a number of the pictures taken with my camera.

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Awkward picture with Ben in the background. To the left of the picture is Ricky Grove. A fun fact about Ricky is that he was the character Duke Henry the Red in the Sam Raimi Film “Army of Darkness”.

-Chris Burke of This Spartan Life. Met him on Friday and he was at the fest on Saturday with the entire TSL crew. He’s a kickass dude, who with his team picked up a win for Best Series. Congrats!

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Chris Burke (LEFT) of This Spartan Life and Frank Dellario (RIGHT) of The Ill Clan

-Matt Kelland (UK) and Johnnie Ingram of Moviestorm. Matt remembered me from ages ago when I made one of my very first videos in 2004 called “Battlefield Stuntacular” and he emailed me asking for a writeup on it in his book on Machinima. Since then, I contacted him a few months ago for the first time in ages, showing him HL2 Anxiety & Nightmare, which he included in the Cambridge Film Festival’s Machinima portion. He’s one badass looking dude, and it was cool meeting him. Johnnie Ingram is also one hilarious dude, coming to Saturday at night wearing a suit and a kilt…awesome! Was great talking to him too. Here’s his writeup on the festival: http://is.gd/6kdo.

-Bllius, author of the Shattered Keyboard blog. He has an excellent writeup on the fest as well, and we talked for a bit. Totally cool guy.

Also congrats to Sam Goldwater (“The Monad”) for picking up three wins and for the team behind “Clear Skies” for winning the Best Long Format award. And of course, one big thank you to Friedrich Kirschner, the co-hosts, and the judges for accomplishing the what was probably the daunting task of organizing the festival. All the hard work paid off and it was a blast.

See more pictures at my facebook album, add me too if you like. The album is still being tagged with names and I’m uploading more pictures, so check back again later: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2007743&l=d85c5&id=1404969708

UPDATE 11/4: MORE PHOTOALBUMS!
Facebook album of the MFF 2008 by John C. Martin

And there was a post about the festival on the Wired.com blog! http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/10/game-engines-dr.html

Gman Squad Ep.5 underway and a potential prequel to a previously released film could come afterwards!

-Xanatos