Machinima
Machinima is one of the most exciting contemporary forms of film-making. Using commercial video games and other real-time audio-visual tools, machinima creators are exploring innovative forms of story-telling three times faster, and at a fith of the cost, of conventional film-making.
MOD Films has been involved in a number of machinima productions.
Sanctuary (2004-ongoing)
MOD Films is producing "Sanctuary" - the world’s first purpose-built re-mixable sci-fi, shot on 35mm and engineered for cinema release, real-time AV platforms and MOD’ing via social media. Large virtual team and input from many game MOD, VJ and fan film communities.
What's the Story (2004)
MOD Films founder Michela Ledwidge created and produced a half-day live event for the BAFTA Interactive Festival featuring original live and pre-recorded machinima. She hosted a game designer/director panel (Peter Molyneux, Don Daglow, Jason Kingsley, Marc Evans) and worked in collaboration wth Hugh Hancock (Strange Company, http://machinima.com) to create interstitial video segments using 3DS Max. Hugo used Antics to mimic the action on-stage and puppeteer avatars, for each of the guests, and control cameras in a virtual set created of the venue, the BAFTA theatre.
http://modfilms.com/archives/20040218_whats_the_st.html
Out of Order (2003)
MOD Films founder Michela Ledwidge, in collaboration with Damon O'Connell (Reelthing Animation) created the machinima character "Normalacta" - a real-time interactive talking head - for a series of club nights at the Electric Ballroom in London. Using 3DS Max, Poser, Mimic and Nintendo 64 MOD'ing tools, the character appeared on N64 consoles around the venue, in pre-recorded video interstitials, and was controlled live as part of Michela's live audio/visuals on the night.
Horses for Courses (2001)
MOD Films Founder Michela Ledwidge was Writer, Director, Producer, Editor, Animator on an award-winning 6 minute machinima short film – the world’s first multi-lingual web3D movie. Available online (Quicktime or B3D) this show won the Web3D Art Prize at SIGGRAPH 2001 beating Disney's US$60M entry "Toontown". A case study paper was presented at SIGGRAPH in 2002.
Horses for Courses official site
ten weeks in the head bin (1997-2004)
MOD Films founder Michela Ledwidge won the Brilliant Digitial Entertainment interactive screen-writing competition and subsequently developed a feature length title “ten weeks in the headbin” for Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s web3d format b3D. Using b3D Studio, b3D Player, and access to 30+ Multipath Movie titles, and the Altnet P2P distribution service, Michela gained early experience on real-time 3D titles which led to the founding of MOD Films in 2004. Michela revised the '10weeks' story IP for Brilliant company several times and liased with DC Comics, before re-acquiring the rights to the story universe in 2004 and commencing the Sanctuary project (see above).