Sigh. Spammers. The plague of the Internet. We’ve seen a marked increase in spam recently, some of it for some pretty unpleasant stuff.
If you’re posting spam in your comments to this blog, don’t bother. We moderate them out and your ads will never get seen.
If you post spam on the forums, you will be banned with no further warning.
End of story.
We’ve just released a small update. You’ll get it as soon as you start Moviestorm. Most of it’s just minor bug fixes, but there’s one key change.
You can now try any content pack, absolutely free, for seven days. You can then buy it or rent it for a month if you want to continue using it. Day rentals of packs are no longer available.
This means you can experiment with all sorts of different movies, from music to science fiction, romance or crime. If you like, try the whole lot at once and see which packs work together. You can come up with some surprising combinations of costumes, animations and sets. Skeletons playing guitars? Cops in love? Cartoon animal gangsters? The President doing karaoke? A zombie talk show? Why not?
Then, when you know what’s available, pick the packs that work for you. You can get content packs via the Marketplace or inside Moviestorm, just as before.
Most of the changes in Moviestorm 1.4.1.1 affect the launcher and content pack installation. The launcher is now much quicker, so you can start making movies sooner. It will also download new content packs in the background, so you can carry on with what you were doing instead of having to wait for the packs to come down. When all downloads are complete, you can restart Moviestorm and install them when it’s convenient for you.
Also on the launcher, you’ll see a notification if you have any messages waiting for you. Click on the icon to read them in your Web browser.
Back in March, one of our French-speaking users, Alutt, organised a contest to encourage non-English speakers to make Moviestorm movies.
The results are now in, and we congratulate the five winners, who each receive a load of Moviestorm points:
1 : Red - Reggie MetalFox (French, no subs)
2 : L’Intrus - Luxaeternam (French, English subs)
3 : Alliance - Darkmoal (French, no subs)
4 : Looking for the Truth - Ed (English, French subs)
5 : AGTS mes débuts - baba1711 (French, no subs)
Thanks to Alutt for organising this!
RED (version courte) from Reggie MetalFox on Vimeo.
Jack and Holly is a new DVD series for pre-school children which launched this week. The first one is Jack and Holly’s Christmas Countdown, which includes ten short episodes and some extras. They’re educational and entertaining, blending live action segments with animation. And some of that animation, we’re proud to say, was done in Moviestorm.
Jack and Holly was created by Blockhouse TV, a tiny studio based in Norwich, England. They worked closely with parents and teachers to create Jack and Holly, and it’s proving to be a success with kids aged 2 to 5. All the voices, including the songs were performed by local school children. “Every child loves Christmas, once they fully understand what it’s all about,” says series producer Julianne Martin. “It’s not necessarily going to make your child a genius, but with careful guidance and interaction from a parent, this DVD series will surely engage inquisitive minds.”
We’re very pleased to see how Moviestorm is enabling companies like Blockhouse to create content of this quality. They’re a small start-up company. Husband and wife Jezz and Julianne have 15 years experience of TV production at senior level, but have recently had to step back in order to care for their own young children. They wanted to keep going creatively, but needed something that they could do on a limited budget with minimal staff.
They chose Moviestorm because it was a fast, cheap development tool. “The beauty of using machinima as a form of animation is its simplicity and ease of use,” said Development Director Jezz Wright. “The problem historically has always been getting a high enough quality product from the use of this technology to broadcast or replicate on DVD. But we processed the output using our unique filters and came up with a look that was both exciting and original.”
You can get it via Amazon price £9.99 / $16.99 (though US customers please note that it’s a PAL version only at the moment, the NTSC version is on its way). Blockhouse are also aiming to get it onto Netflix and other streaming services.
In 2011, Jack and Holly’s next adventures will take them into space - we’re looking forward to seeing how that turns out. In addition, there are books, CDs, colouring pages, and more in the pipeline.
We wish them every success!
More info
Jack and Holly Web site
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
It’s that time of year again. In front yards and windows everywhere, skeletons and tombstones are appearing. It’s no different at Moviestorm. Our annual Halloween pack this year is The Graveyard, perfect for those spooky scenes. Now the dead can rise from the grave to terrorise the living - or make them laugh. It’s your call - you’re the director!
As you’d expect, the Graveyard pack includes a selection of gravestones, a church, and a gatehouse. including Graveyard Grass, some tree silhouettes, and a backdrop, as well as customisable skeletons and stock characters. There are animations for getting your characters to start in the grave so they can rise, and a set of suitably terrified responses for your humans. And, as a finishing touch, we’ve included a neat little raven, with all the animations required to fly, squawk, and peck at things.
If you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating your own graveyard, there’s a ready-made diorama so you can get filming in moments. The graveyard pack includes all the content from the old Photostorm Bones pack, slightly updated so it works better with Moviestorm 1.4.
Get it now for just 500 points - or rent it for a month for only 50 points. Visit the marketplace, or hit Get More Content when you start Moviestorm.
For the ultimate Halloween thriller, combine the Graveyard with our previous Halloween packs: our 2008 pack includes traditional trick or treat items and spooky furniture, and our 2009 packs featured a huge selection of customisable male and female monster heads.
Halloween 2010: The Graveyard
Halloween 2008: Trick or Treat
Halloween 2009: Monster Heads
Halloween 2009: Female Monster Heads
More Moviestorm packs
