ChristopherGrant
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Stanford machinima panel recap
Thursday's WoW machinima event at Stanford showcased the winners of the World of Warcraft Summer Movie Contest. Following the screening of the best videos, Daniel Kayser of GameTrailers.com hosted a panel discussion with a few Stanford professors and other machinima luminaries. Also, Joystiq's Christopher Grant sat on the panel.For an hour, Kayser led the group through questions about the state of machinima, its history, and its future. In general, the participants anticipated a bright, creative future for machinima, but they were uncertain how the art would change once corporations tried to exploit the style.Matteo Bittanti, from Stanford's Humanities Lab, commented on the continuing shift of machinima from in-jokes to a general artistic tool; many of the contest winners relied on WoW jokes, but the grand prize short, The Edge of Remorse, bore no direct relation to WoW as a game. Bittanti anticipated that the balance would continue to even out, with more machinima stories unrelated to games able to find a broader audience.Machinima's practical definition was another topic. Ezra Ferguson of Rufus Cubed Productions said that a feature-length machinima production is inevitable, especially as the game tools continue to evolve to show facial emotions and better acting. Animation director and one of the night's winners, Jun Falkenstein questioned the point at which those machinima tool updates would change the technique into a standard animated movie. Are the rough edges in machinima part of its definition?Henry Lowood, Curator of Stanford's History of Science and Technology Collections, also stressed that accessibility and rapid production are the root of machinima. He mentioned French Democracy, a story created with The Movies that responded almost immediately to last year's riots around Paris. He said that this method of quick reaction is "a power we really have never had before."Will machinima become regular-old animation once the results mirror other computer animation tools? Are accessibility and quick response the real root of the style?
Chris Grant co-host on Gaming Steve podcast
Joystiq's very own Christopher Grant is not only posting from the 2006 Game Developers Conference, he's also starring in a podcast.Okay, so technically he's just co-hosting an episode of an ongoing podcast with Gaming Steve, but you can't miss this opportunity to hear Chris's laid-back, sweetly smooth voice. (There are reports that Chris also sounds somewhat like a stoner, but we wouldn't be able to tell you what those kind of people sound like anyway, so what can we say?)As for the podcast itself, Chris and Steve go into the events of the last day, enthusiastically sharing about Microsoft's bloggers breakfast with Peter Moore (inset), Phil Harrison's PS3 keynote, what the new Battlestar Galactica might have to do with games, and everything else that they saw in San Jose. And, hey, maybe if we're lucky, we'll get another guest Joystiqer co-hosting with Steve today. More from GDC as we get it...See also: Direct download link for the podcast in question [55 minute-long MP3] Gaming Steve's "Day 3" report on GDC 2006 [where we got the pic] Joystiq @ GDC: In the beginning... [w/a little bloggers breakfast info] GDC: The PS3 keynote blow by blow
