Law and Order Trailer competition open for submissions

Just as one competition ends, another begins! This time we'd like you to wow us with a trailer designed to promote a hypothetical TV Cop Show (or a real one if you've already got a series in the works). The Cop Show has been a television staple for decades, so you will have plenty of inspiration to draw from.
Have a look at some of these great examples:

• The Wire
• Life on Mars (US)
• Life on Mars (UK)
• Ashes to Ashes
• Rockford Files
• Dragnet
• Adam-12
• Criminal Minds
• Cops
• Hawaii Five-0
• The Professionals (long version)

For our competition, we want you to use assets from our latest Law and Order content pack. It also needs to be shorter than 3 minutes long. It can be any sort of Cop Show format, including documentary cop shows. Winners of this competition will get 1300 Moviestorm points, while two runners up will each receive 700 points.

Read the full rules and enter your movie into the competition here.

Holiday Greeting Competition winners announced

We’re very pleased to announce the winners of our recent Holiday Greeting Competition! Watching the entries was a little like watching a holiday variety show on Christmas day. There were comedies, musical acts, dramatic readings, even some alien invasions. It was a difficult decision, but we’re very excited about the winning entries.

Our second runner up is a hilarious spoof of the Queen’s Christmas Message. As the Short Fuze offices are based in the UK, we particularly enjoyed this.

First runner up was a brilliant musical greeting card produced for a local TV station. Go on and tap your feet to the TV Continental Xmas Greeting.

And our winning entry? Merry Christmas Sweetheart is a touching and very sad Christmas message from a man to his long passed and dearly loved wife. We cried. Really, we did.

You can see all the other fine entries to the competition here. Enjoy!

Book ‘em, Danno!

The Law and Order content pack is here!

This pack is by far the best and biggest content pack we’ve ever released and is packed with useful props, buildings, vehicles and set dressings.

But it’s not just the moving police vehicles or the great costumes or even all the other useful props and sets that makes it such a fantastically useful pack; it’s also got hundreds of new gestures and animations for both male and female characters. From handcuffing and frisking, to new firearms actions, report-taking, megaphone-using, badge-waving and much, much more. There are even a wide variety of shooting and dying animations. And blood. Lots of blood!

This is such a great pack! Go get it now!

Moviestorm on Click!

Did you see us on TV at the weekend? Did you? We were really pleased and excited to see Moviestorm featured on the BBC’s flagship technology programme Click! which charts the best of the web. You can watch it online at the BBC website.

Santa’s dropped down the Moviestorm chimney again!

You've all been so good this year that Santa has popped down early with a big fat stocking full of updates to the Moviestorm software. We've made a variety of really useful changes that we hope will make animated moviemaking easier and the resulting movies even better.

At the top of the list are a couple of useful changes to character movement. Walk paths can now be edited in the Director's View and can follow curved paths that can be easily set. You can now ensure that your characters avoid each other or objects on set as well as make walk paths smoother and more realistic.

The technology behind the walk paths has also enabled us to provide moveable vehicles. Our vehicles now follow some basic kinetic rules, so the wheels rotate and turn, and the car body will bank when turning. This is only the first step though - we are already working on further vehicle functionality that will move cars to the forefront of your future productions! Just as cars are now moveable, so are other set objects, such as the Retro Saucer, Shuttle and TV Camera. More will follow...

We've also added a simple swaying motion to trees to give them a little life. This motion is automatically applied to any trees on your set. Control will follow in the next release to provide sway adjustment.

Finally, we've updated the recent free Holiday pack and you can get all the new features by simply starting up Moviestorm and letting it go off and grab the new code. If you haven't downloaded the Holiday pack yet, you should. It's still free, so go get it now!

There are more great features in this release and you can read all about all of them in the Release Notes.

Moviestorm at the UK National Youth Disability Film Awards

Moviestorm’s Johnnie Ingram will be at the National Youth Disability Film Awards this coming Monday, to present an award and to discuss Moviestorm, machinima and budget film-making. We’re delighted to say that our friends at Funky Flamingo TV have entered a film into the competition, and will be streaming the entire event live!

Funky Flamingo TV is the world’s first internet TV station by and for people with disabilities. For the past few months, they’ve been experimenting with Moviestorm, and have now made it a permanent addition to their toolset.

Good luck on Monday guys - we’re routing for you!

Tune in to FFTV if you’d like to watch the awards as they happen.

Moviestorm on CA Covermount

This issue focusses on motion graphics and animation, including broadcast graphics, character animation, music videos, advertising, and the rest. We're very excited to be on the DVD and hope that readers of CA Projects will find Moviestorm an invaluable addition to their motion graphics toolkit or just a lot of fun.

Favourite Movies and QA’s pick

It's brand new Featured and Favourite Movies time again and this time we've picked a mix (no offence to Woolworths) of new, old and not-so-old favourites.

Our Featured movie is a funny take on family life from newcomer act3scene24 called Christmas with Uncle Nicholas. For our Favourites, we've chosen some standouts from the blog last week, Medieval Dating by Geiiga and Run, Luther Run by tkd27. We've also selected a spooky and surprising holiday movie from Melopee called Christmas Eve.

And last, but certainly not least, the Moviestorm QA guys have pulled up an old favourite from their vaults called, Here's Your Pizza by Armandoxthegreat. This video may contain mature content, by the way, depending on your definition of "mature". And we should remind you that our QA department is composed of rather interesting individuals.

You have been warned. Twice.

Happy Holiday Greeting Competition

Come all ye faithful Moviestormers! Our latest competition has been announced and challenges you to come up with an animated Holiday Greeting using our free Happy Holidays content pack. The greeting needs to use Moviestorm as the primary production tool (although you are free to use other post tools and resources - it just needs to be recognisably Moviestorm) and you must use at least one asset from the Holidays pack. Here’s the challenging bit: the card has to be less than 2 minutes long (including credits if you use them) and you have only 2 weeks to submit your entry! We’ll accept entries until midnight GMT on Tuesday, the 16th of December.

Winning submission will receive 1000 Moviestorm points and the two runners up will receive 500 points each.

Get your jingle bell on and show us the season’s greatest Holiday Greeting!

Matt Kelland interviewed on Alterati podcast

Matt was interviewed recently by Joseph Matheny from the Alterati podcast The G-Spot. They discussed Moviestorm, and machinima in general, and Matt supplied an exhaustive list of machinima resources. See them all, and listen to the podcast for free, over at alterati.com.