GenCon's tag line is, "The Best Four Days in Gaming". They have earned every right to that tagline. GenCon celebrated its 45th convention this year and has plans to keep going another 45 and more. I'm here for three of the four days and I am having incredible fun time gaming, seeing great films, learning new techniques and tips, and meeting people.
Roleplaying games as visual media just took a step closer to reality with the launch today of a new website for hobby game players around the world. Now roleplayers have the opportunity to experience a Dungeons & Dragons® campaign in a whole new way: through a Web series hosted exclusively at www.thefirstpaladin.com. Viewers can watch The First Paladin™, a campaign being played with D&D Next rules, and see the game evolve dynamically as game master Peter D. Adkison and the players make their own choices. This new series is produced by Hostile Work Environment™, a new multimedia company owned by Adkison, the former CEO of Wizards of the Coast and owner of Gen Con®, LLC.
After Effects is a pretty essential tool for most filmmakers who are incorporating any type of graphic treatment to their work, and this latest update is a major one specifically designed to increase the speed at which you can create, without waiting on your computer. This alone makes this update more or less essential for anyone who relies on After Effects as part of their normal work-flow, but the addition of the camera tracking feature and extruded text are also HUGE.
A modern twist on classic mixing, Alloy 2 takes the traditional channel strip and brings it into the future with powerful sound-shaping tools, exceptional sound quality, and a streamlined workflow. Thoughtfully designed for mixing purposes across the music, audio, post and broadcast industries, Alloy 2 is perfect for engineers, musicians, and producers looking to sculpt their sound while addressing common mix issues.
Huge improvements are being made on the side of motion capture. Some not very affordable but necessary steps to increasing our knowledge base for producing high fidelity capture and playback. Today, I had a chance to catch up with the guys at Reallusion who do have a motion capture solution that is financially more in reach with our readership than most other products on the market.
Well, finally back from another day of strolling the aisles and perusing the booths looking for anything that I think will interest the Microfilmmaker community. There is great deal to get excited about for the future of film making and the developers that are creating the tech to make it happen. Here are the hits from today.