Huge World of Warcraft Machinima Contest

wyndairn writes "Blizzard Entertainment and Xfire have just announced the largest ever machinima contest with over $10,000 in prizes from AMD, Hypernia, Creative Labs, XFX, D-Link, Corsair, ZBoard and Time Games. The contest involves entrants producing movies using the Blizzard Entertainment MMORPG World of Warcraft game engine to create imaginative movies in the three main categories of Dance, Comedy and Drama. Six prizes will be awarded for each category. An additional Twenty prizes will be awarded in special categories including Best Music, Best Dialog, Best Action Scene, Best Pun or Line, and Best Editing and Special Effects. A special prize from Hypernia will also be awarded to a selected movie. Entries must be submitted by January, 21st 2006." Good luck to folks who decide to enter. If you aren't already familiar with it, the Curse Guild's Blackwing Lair: The Movie may give you an idea of what is possible with WoW Machinima.

For Porn

[Southpaw018]

Comedywise, this [youtube.com] is another prime example of WoW mixed with excellent talent.

Re:For Porn

[Andre_PC]

LMAO this is the funniest WoW video I have ever seen! Do you happen to have the lyrics? Some parts I cant understand due to english not being my mother tongue. Thanks!

Re:For Porn

[Southpaw018]

Here you go. Not the best of transcriptions, but something you'll be able to read at your own pace :) http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,13967511 [dslreports.com]

Re:For Porn

[Andre_PC]

Thanks for it!
For those like me who want to download the video, here you go:
The Internet is for Porn - WoW Version [filefront.com]

Re:Avenue Q

[Psykechan]

The song is originally from a musical called Avenue Q [avenueq.com]. It is a good WoW video though.

On a side note, and although it will fall on deaf ears, I make this plea to any author of videos: Please do not put your video out in WMV format. Use DivX, Xvid, OGM, or even MOV; anything but WMV3 which cannot be read on anything but Windows.

Previous Winners

[MeanderingMind]

The winners of the Blizzcon Movie contest can be found in the following link.

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_blizzcon_videoco ntest.html [nzone.com]

Not the same contest, but we'll probably see some of the same participants or similar entries.

Leeroy Jenkins

[amrust]

Is your winner for Best Comedy. Hands down [leeroyjenkins.net].

Re:Leeroy Jenkins

[Chyeld]

I'd vote for Zinwrath the Movie myself. ^_^

http://www.warcraftmovies.com/movieview.php?id=755 8 [warcraftmovies.com] (hope that's the right link,I'm at work.)

WoW-based machinima *dev* resources?

[Morgaine]

This looks really interesting, and no doubt a lot of people would like to try their hand at some WoW-based machinima, rather than just looking at the work of others. The very widespread use of customized UIs in WoW certainly suggests that the platform is quite flexible.

Does anyone have any useful links to development tools and procedures for using the WoW engine in this way? Can the director's camera be driven through the Lua interface? And is there a way to move entities programmatically, rather than by using live players operating their clients through storyboarded actions?

Re:WoW-based machinima *dev* resources?

[HarpyG]

Short answer is no, all the movies you'll find are recorded gameplay, wich is another beauty of it if you know the game a bit, like getting dubbing right can reveal quite hard, and your camera is always centered on a character.

Re:WoW-based machinima *dev* resources?

[C0rinthian]

There is a hunter ability (Eyes of the Hawk, I think) that allows you to focus your vision on any point within sight of your character. While this is pretty much a useless ability gameplay-wise, I've always thought it would come in really handy for movie-making. You can stick the camera just about anywhere: High on cliff walls, on trees, on top of buildings, whatever.

Re:WoW-based machinima *dev* resources?

[Chyeld]

You can also use the Warlock spell, Eye of Kilrogg or the engineering made Ornate Spyglass to get similar effects.

Re:WoW-based machinima *dev* resources?

[Joel from Sydney]

If you don't need character included in your shot, you could also grab the WoW map viewer from www.curse-gaming.com. It reads the map info from the MPQ file and allows you to fly around the entire world on your local machine. AFAIK it's not outlawed by Blizzard, but I wouldn't recommend running it while trying to play.

Why don't WoW movies turn up on Limewire?

[ockegheim]

If Filefront and the others are distributing the movie to whoever wants it, is there some legal distinction between this and file-sharing? It would save the distributors lots of bandwidth. Even Blizzard releases its patches in a distributed way now.

Re:Even More Intersest if

[Kookus]

The interest would most likely be very stimulating though.

A correction to the summary

[Xaroth]

The last prize company's name is actually "uTime Games" - it looks like the mu in the name didn't make it through.

Of course, I'd post the #181 html code here so it looks right, but apparently that gets filtered out, too. So, um, picture the 'u' with a tail.

Golden Globe Nominee = Idea!

[DJLou]

Time to make a Brokeback Mountain machina in WoW like: Bareback Magician, a gay love story between a gay Undead and also equally homosexual human Mage, set on the fields of the Badlands... which is perfect to keep the "Cowboy" thing going.... Ride Em Cowboy Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Hawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

how necromantic

[snuf23]

Necrohomophilia?
I have no idea what you call it when an undead has the hots for the living though.