The Films (all require Quicktime 6.5):

On August 5th, 2004 the first annual SummerTech Children's Film Festival successfully happened on the campus of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. This year's festival focused on Machinima. According to Machinima.com, Machinima is: "In short, a film made using Machinima (Ma-sheen-EH-ma) is a film made with computer-generated graphics, similar to those you can see on the television or on film in titles like "Antz" and "Toy Story". However, unlike those features, Machinima uses graphical techniques originally developed for computer games to generate its visuals, meaning that a film-maker with a home PC can create feature-length epics that would require millions of dollars to make using traditional CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) techniques, thanks to the fact that the Machinima film-maker can make his or her film in real time, rather than painstakingly animating frame by frame."

So that's what some of our campers were doing this summer. Broken into two, three-week sessions, we created groups of filmmaking teams who learned about character design, script writing, storyboarding, acting, voice recording, and of course using character and level editors from popular 3D gaming engines. Above you'll see their finished work as well as a few films from the course's teacher, Jim Mortensen.

The evening, however, was also about celebrating another amazing summer. Entertainment was provided by two great bands, Franny and The Mathematicians. They'll be back!

Thank you to: Manhattanville College, Brett Larson of CBS TV New York, Paul Marino, Ben Grussi, nVidia, Franny, The Mathematicians, Jim Mortensen and Keshav Rajagopalan for making this evening happen.

Next year the 2005 SummerTech Children's Film Festival will be held on August 4th on the campus of Manhattanville College. For reservations and information please email tickets@summertech.net.