I met Todd Holoubeck at the Machinima Festival last Saturday, at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. He's got a laid-back, friendly demeanor and regularly peppers his conversation with "dude". He is part of a live improv Machinima group called Reverend FunnyPants. Taking inspiration from the medieval art of Commedia dell'Arte, the troop perform in a multi-user virtual public space. If you have trouble imagining what this looks like, don't worry - I've never seen anything like it, and you probably haven't either!
Todd teaches in the Interactive Telecommunications program at NYU. He graciously allowed me to visit. The topic of the day was examining narrative strategies through Quicktime VR - basically, you take a series of photos by rotating the camera in one spot. The cool thing is you can insert objects or people multiple times in one session, thus creating lots of surreal images.
Part of classtime was hands-on, making our own narrative - I got to participate! Todd put up the final product here. Click in the photo area and pull with the mouse to see. I'm in the sparkly pink sweater!
Yeah, Todd's a very cool guy.
The Commedia stuff was very interesting - I'm not sure that the example they showed used the archetypes behind Commedia to best effect, but the unique controllers and so on really were a very different way of doing things.
(For those who weren't there - their version of improv Machinima involves using these wierd steampunky custom controllers linked in via the serial port. Very cool stuff - do check out the Reverend Funnypants site. )
Posted by: Hugh "Nomad" Hancock | 11/01/2003 at 07:15 AM
That's really neat.
I rotated the camera enough times to make me dizzy. :)
Posted by: Draigon | 11/01/2003 at 10:20 AM
Holy Crap! that is totally awesome, I feel like I'm watching some sort of music video when I rotate the picture around. I definitely have to check this stuff out.
Posted by: lukeyes | 11/02/2003 at 09:21 PM
lol, I had the same dizziness experience! Cool stuff, though.
Posted by: Kyren | 11/03/2003 at 06:21 AM
Think simple. Learn different. Macinstruct.net
Posted by: Noe | 07/06/2004 at 07:09 AM
Think simple. Learn different. Macinstruct.net
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Posted by: outsider | 04/11/2006 at 07:46 AM