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Planning for dream machines

Workshop is in 2 months, have found http://www.ventrilo.com/ and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24 and above all discovered Garry's Mod, a modification of half life 2 that allows you to position characters from the game, and the many sci fi characters that forum users have created and posted online, can be used to create situations, poses and scripted movements or multiplayer acting environments. The link I gave above was for a forum where people post the videos they're making, or making calls for actors to be in their movies.


But I have to remember that we aren't making movies. Maybe we're making archives, personal archives or documentation about things by encoding it in a three dimensional space. Or maybe parody star wars re-enactments?


Garry's mod costs 10 dollars, so I'm tempted to use it to create characters in the workshop on the second day, although that would mean windows machines again, and some of this is so limiting because it's all for the one platform and the software just isn't hasn't been ported yet, or has to be really open source etc...


With crystal space I've found the community to be very inspiring, involved with the Brazilian movement of estudio livre, doing work with puredata and 3d, or kitchen appliance instruments as the case may be.


It would be cool to play with the video projection by scripting a dialogue between live and video characters, but maybe if narration had to take place live or you could have live acting there, or how could we make it seem like it could be real or a game maybe, or ask people in the forums to join in with the workshop supplying skills in directing to help figure out a script that will be feasible in the time we have. We can choreograph a run through a map as well, and this might help create cinematics. The bluescreen might be valuable and we can offer to film sonething scripted by a machinima author. But I don't want to get too Machinima-centric. We're just looking at the whole idea of being in a 3d world and of using media from it, so the software etc isn't really the issue, except that a multiplayer creative environment like gmod, is not run by linden, it's a free play area...


I like the idea of geolocation as well. Maybe it would help to do a mapping from google earth to a geolocated group of maps in kml or with links to ongoing games in multiplayer engines that had representations of them and other users wandering them too, and could some be used to buy and sell, in person and using some kind of standard software? Or how about a geolocation for free sound, so that we have so many media in the same form? (Software is available for Sony Ericsson's Java enabled mobiles that can feed back their cell-id - an approximation of their location).


I've just found a new form of forum game: http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=365269&page=3
- a user posts some images and offers choices which are then added a few days later, following reader's votes. The thread goes well for a month or so then goes through various problems and finally fizzles out more than a year later. I wonder if interactive comics will one day be all the rage? http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=445148 Maybe not.


The play between the game based social aspect - maybe putting an audience of 14 people in front of another audience of, say, 15 first person shooter players. We could storm a multiplayer server - a modern boy's game room to a chorus of UR MOM SUX etc, playing strange instruments in a chorus of voice speakers as they scream their disapproval, and as we thrash them in the game at the same time.

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