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!