This is a great clip featuring George Miller talking about the forthcoming Mad Max 4. He also talks about the state of the Australian film industry which is in a pretty shocking state at the moment.
George is spot on about what the industry needs. What he doesn’t say, however, is where the money is going to come from.
The experiment of having a pool of government money that is assigned by bureaucrats has produced a plethora of features that even Australian audiences don’t want to watch. The government simply can’t afford to spend the money needed to kickstart the industry and keep it going. Only private capital can do that. Ultimately only a tax concession will rejuvenate Australian film like it did in the late 70s and early 80s when a 150% concession was on offer to investors. It’s not a coincidence that our most successful and most iconic films were created during this era.
This is a test we did in Blue Mars. It takes the form of a mock film trailer. Blue Mars offers sublime graphics and New Venice, the region where we filmed most of the trailer, looks amazing. If the developers of Blue Mars can implement some decent machinima tools then it has a wonderful potential for making dramatic machimima, which is something Second Life never really achieved to its full potential.
Avatar-Reality have just released the SDK for their virtual world, Blue Mars. They are signing up a limited number of content partners to provide compelling social spaces, entertainment experiences, and creative content. They have also announced an art competition with the aim of rewarding and promoting artists and designers with talent and vision. Each participant receives a 3m x 3m x 3m exhibition space in a shared virtual gallery to display their work.
Back when we had some free time my wife, Nocifer Janus, and I used to wander around Second Life visiting all the art galleries we could find simply because there are some amazing artists in Second Life. Well here’s one that does house calls – kinda. Great stuff.
Over the last few years business has shown a great interest in using virtual worlds for enterprise. Everything from seminars and conferences to virtual trade shows and retail. However, after an initial flurry of activity many soon abandon them. For some the required learning curve is too high to be an effective tool. For others the return on investment is not high enough. Whatever the reasons, no virtual environment seems to have really delivered what enterprise needs for its mass adoption. That may be about to change.
Here’s a machinima piece documenting some of the things people did to celebrate the Winter/Summer Solstice, Hannukah and Christmas in Second Life. The creativity of its users is probably Second Life’s best asset.
And, sadly, you may be right...
