Admittedly, I've been spending more time working on tools to make movies rather than the movies themselves. The possibilities for machinima are almost limitless, yet the knowledge to do so is often difficult to obtain. I am trying to do my part to advance the medium, which should benefit anyone who wishes to learn (including myself). Here are a few of the things I'm currently working on.

Biped Animation Database
Biped animations can be hugely useful when making machinima. However, there is no easy way to share these with others. I've been working on a database that will allow people to upload, download, search, and preview animations. There are many people who just want to tell a story and don't want to deal with the pain of creating custom animations. Hopefully this will address that.


Machinima Database
While I love watching and creating machinima, I've found it can be difficult to find the good stuff. The term "machinima" has been twisted to the point where more people associate it with a company than what it really is. As a result, this has thrown off search results and you get a lot of game commentary with "machinima" in the title. I'm working on a site that will list only real (story-based) machinima, if nothing else just for my own use.

Machinima Tools
If you've taken a look at my tutorials you may have noticed I use a bunch of messy PHP scripts to convert data. While it's not pretty, it gets the job done. I've slowly been teaching myself Python with the hope I will be able to create a standalone program that can replace those scripts. Don't expect it anytime soon though, there's a lot for me to learn.

In other news, Source Filmmaker looks like a really interesting new tool. I haven't started working with it yet, but some of the videos other people have created look fantastic. Valve has taken a big step in the right direction by releasing this tool.

You may notice there is now a Tutorials section.

Over the years I've experimented and done lots of trial and error when working on machinima. I've taken many notes and have turned them into a collection of tutorials and reference guides, complete with any custom scripts (maxscript and PHP mostly) that I've used along the way.

Machinima to me is all about taking shortcuts. I don't want to be an 3D animator or modeler, I just want to make movies. With that in mind I'm always looking for new ways to speed up the process, whether it be automating a tedious task, or reusing old assets in a new way.

If nothing else it provides a behind the scenes look at how some of my movies were made.

Over the years I've worked on a lot of small little tools to help with machinima creation. Some of these are web-based and I've created a tools section to share them with anyone who may need them.
» 3D Ripper DX Compatibility Chart

» Valve Phoneme Tool

» WoW ADT Map Preview

I've been working on a lot of other conversion tools which are currently a big mess of PHP and Windows batch files (a strange combination I know). I hope to be able to recreate those in a stand alone GUI once I learn a little C++, although that may take some time. Regardless, I plan to start posting some examples of the things I've been working on so stay tuned.

A long time ago I mentioned I was working on tutorials. I never gave up on them, I just wasn't happy with how they were coming out.

You see I'm not an expert in making movies by any means. Often times I'll know what I want to do, but not how to accomplish it. I've spend a lot of time learning and taking notes, then trying to turn those notes into tutorials both for my own sake, and for the benefit of anyone else who wants to learn from my experience. Most tutorials are aimed at animators or 3D artists, but my only interest is to make movies, so I like to take shortcuts wherever possible to cut down on the production time. I wouldn't consider them finished, as I'm always changing and rewriting things as I learn new techniques, but hopefully they will still be of use to someone.

I'll be releasing what I have very soon, and hopefully other people will join me in the pursuit of furthering this medium.

In other news, I attended Blizzcon this year where I got to see a lot of old friends, and meet some new ones. I had a really great time and will definitely be going next year!

Every so often I get an email from someone wanting to translate one of my movies. The problem is they need the dialog before they can start. Rather than making them wait for an email response, I've uploaded the dialog from all my movies here.

Any future scripts will be added to this directory as well. Anyone is welcome to translate my movies. All I ask is that the credit remains intact.