Dusting off the HTML and CSS

My apologies for the unanticipated moratorium of postings here. I've been swamped with a number of projects which have been taking up quite a bit of my schedule. Thankfully, some light is at the end of the tunnel for these, and I can get back to focusing some time here.

In that, I've been plowing through my inbox and there's been quite a bit happening in the Machinima world since January 25th. Nearly a month a half later (that's about a year in Internet time), we've seen the announcements of the Blizzard/XFire WoW Machinima contest winners, the first Second Life Machinima to premiere at SxSW (this past weekend in fact), a call for entries for HD Machinima, as well as pornographic Machinima, and the launch of a new Machinima site. Yow - I will have to spread out some of this over the next couple of days, so that this March 11th posting doesn't turn that horizontal scrollbar of yours into a barely visible sliver.

This week, XFire announced the winners to their World of Warcraft Machinima contest, which spun out a few highly-produced entries. The categories were diverse and glad to see some pretty specific awards in there. However, I highly doubt the Academy will ever hand out a "Best Pun Award", but, hey - you never know.

Best Comedy Category:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Atkins - Switcher 2
- 3rd Place: The Brothers Tauren
- 4th Place: WoW Action News
- 5th Place: The Chalice of Silvermoon

Best Dance Category:
- 1st Place: Billy Maclure
- 2nd Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 3rd Place: Purple
- 4th Place: The Man Who Can
- 5th Place: Anyway You Play

Best Drama Category:
- 1st Place: Served Cold
- 2nd Place VC
- 3rd Place: Aria Part IV: Retribution
- 4th Place: Redshift
- 5th Place: Yoshio and Masaru

Best Editing:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Billy Maclure

Best Pun/Line:
- 1st Place: Chalice of Silvermoon
- 2nd Place: WoW Action News

Best Original Music:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Billy Maclure

Best Dialogue:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: The Brothers Tauren

Best Action Scene:
- 1st Place: Illegal Danish Super Snacks
- 2nd Place: Served Cold

I haven't had the chance to view them all, but it looks like the contest was a resounding success. Given the response, and with the WoW player base surpassing the six million mark (!), I would expect XFire to turn this into a somewhat regular event.

Congrats to all of the winners and we look forward to your next productions (hint, hint - the Mackies later this year (c: ) .

More in a bit....