Filed under: Machinima

It's no secret that we love Laura Shigihara, the composer for Pop Cap's amazing Plants vs. Zombies and now the voice of Cataclysm's singing sunflower pet. Shigihara has stepped into the WoW machinima world with her own original song and video, Blood Elf Druids, an adorable song making a plea to Blizzard for the inclusion of blood elf druids. Shout-outs to Tooga the turtle are pretty obscure, which makes it even more fun.

It's adorable, catchy and a great first shot at machinima. There's even a behind-the-scenes video posted here. If this is the quality of song we're getting for the first video, I cannot wait to see what's coming next. An orc ballad, perhaps? I can only hope.

Have you been interested in learning how people like Olibith create the amazing visual pieces that they do? Well, Olibith is now working on a series that will give you a guided tour on operating WoW Model Viewer and creating your own machinima. You can find it over at GameCreds. If you don't know Olibith, he's the guy who did Beware of Baby B. He knows what he's talking about.

You'll find this series enlightening on the ways of the mysterious machinimator, especially if you haven't fired up WoW Model Viewer before. It's a fascinating look into how Olibith creates his characters and animates them. I'm looking forward to later entries into the series and am already planning on creating a video using only the techniques Olibith describes.

I hope between Olibith's guides and Wowcrendor's Wowdirectors.com, we get to see a new wave of machinimators creating WoW films. It's a unique method of telling fan stories, and it's always been one of my favorite things about the WoW community. Good luck to everyone who takes this opportunity to learn!

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at machinima@wow.com.

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If you've been living under a rock where you could never, ever see machinima or fan videos about the World of Warcraft, you might not know the name Wowcrendor. For those machinima-less folks, I'll quickly explain. Wowcrendor is what he calls a "WoW director." These are the devoted fans who take the time to create movies and machinima based on our hobby. (We have a column about it here on WoW Insider. I'm just saying.) Wowcrendor's work is usually especially well received because he consistently manages to nail a funny but loving tone in his videos. He clearly loves both the game and the game's community, even though they drive him up the wall. I've always secretly thought his videos were his way of releasing that anxiety without its blowing his head off via internal combustion.

Well, Wowcrendor also loves machinima. In order to help encourage new directors to join the scene, he's recently launched WoWdirectors. His basic idea is to provide a place for brand new machinimators to go and learn his craft. While community sites like Myndflame have existed for a while, Wowcrendor is hoping to bring his same sense of basics and story to the scene. He's building some how-to guides, critiques, and generally trying to get folks together to talk publicly about the machinima hobby.

Check out WoWdirectors and let them know what you think. Knowing the man as I do, I'm sure he'd be thrilled to have your feedback.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at machinima@wow.com.

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We featured the beginning of ROFLBear on Monday's Moviewatch. The ROFLBear show is a daily series of machinima videos created by the folks behind Myndflame. You can think of it as a daily WoW cartoon. They're finishing up this week's first run with the Anthem of the Crusader, a musical piece.

The reviews of ROFLBear have been somewhat mixed but mostly positive. I think as the series has been expanding its mythos, more folks are finding accessible comedy in the videos. There is an obvious variety of humor in the series, so I think most people will find something to their tastes over time.

One of the most interesting things about ROFLBear, though, is the sheer persistence and dedication devoted to the series by its creators. A daily machinima is not something that anyone should consider easy or simple. Myndflame has been working on these videos throughout 2010 to make sure they have enough material to maintain the schedule going forward.

This kind of daily content is a huge undertaking, as your intrepid WoW.com staff will tell you. I tip my hat to Myndflame and congratulate it on its first week. ROFLBear has been fun so far, and I look forward to what it is going in the future.

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself by emailing lisa (at) wow (dot) com with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

You're bound to have seen the ebullient Welcome to the Deadmines here already, in WoW Moviewatch, spicing up a WoW Rookie article or linked in an enthusiastic reader comment. What you haven't had yet is the chance to meet its talented 17-year-old creator, Swedish machinimist X-Cross, a.k.a. Adrian Drott, or Tìnkle of EU Argent Dawn-A. We spoke with the young winner of Blizzard's World of Warcraft Movie Contest: Rise to Power to learn more about his creative process, his collaborators and where we might see him pop up in the future.

World of WarCrafts: Winner of Blizzard's Rise to Power contest -- and you've only just turned 17! How long have you been making machinima, Adrian?

X-Cross: I started with machinima in the early summer of 2008, and back then I was 15 years old. The first machinima I did was made together with my cousin and a friend of mine. It was a horrible WoW parody of Pokémon that for some reason a lot of people found quite entertaining and funny. After that, we decided to continue making the episodes but stopped after the third, since I wanted to go over to a bit more "serious" machinima making after all the great feedback.

Today's video comes from long time machinima fan, first time machinima maker Bridin. His first story uses the most classic of action tropes. The main character is just your average guy, the bad guys show up, things get bad, and your average guy is driven to become not-so-average. It's simple, but it works. Come on, who doesn't like Die Hard?

Overall, Hero is very good as a first outing. The soundtrack is appropriate, as is the foley. The animation is as close to natural as WoW gets, though the moving characters set on a stationary backdrop is always a little jarring. That just comes with the territory though and will just get better with time.

If I were to give one piece of advice, I would suggest practicing with a less epic tale for the next go around. It's understandably hard to include intense action sequences and things of that sort when it's your very first go at machinima, but some of the events seem to happen a bit randomly because of it. Any resistance the Alliance put up was off screen, except for our hero being punted off of a seemingly abandoned ship. Deus ex Diabolus keeps our hero from eating dirt. Making these sequences a bit more smooth and sensical would add a lot to these stories. I look forward to Bridin's future work, and considering Hero comes with the prefix Warcraft Stories, I'm hoping that there's a whole lot more coming our way.

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Oxhorn has released a very special Christmas album focused on his WoW-themed music, called Oxhorn's Christmas for Geeks. The album is available both on Amazon and iTunes. Heck, you can even pick it up on Rhapsody and Napster. Oxhorn was pretty thorough to make sure that you could get the album by whichever route you like.

The album has a lot of classic favorites, as well as a boatload of new skits. My favorite is his new version of Hark! Hear the Wails. That has always been one of my very favorite songs by Oxhorn. It does, however, show the signs of being created much, much early in Oxhorn's career. It shows some of the rustiness and coarseness of an artist's early work, and really needed some tuning up. The new version did that fantastically.

Oxhorn's Christmas for Geeks has a resounding 18 tracks. It's split about evenly between skits and songs. I was actually quite impressed by the wide array of musical styles explored by this album. While the lyrics are obvious parodies of popular holiday songs, interpreted in a World of Warcraft style, I think Oxhorn has really done a great job of matching his lyrics to the Christmas theme.

Even if you're not going to rock out to Oxhorn's tunes, it's one hell of a gift for a fellow WoW player.

Blizzard has finally released the official trailer for Patch 3.3: Fall of the Lich King. You can view it over on their site right now, or just enjoy it via the YouTube video embedded above. The Blizzard site is extremely slow right now, so we recommend just watching it here.

The trailer sends chills down your spine, especially if you've been paying attention to the lore of Warcraft since the RTS games back in the 90's and early 2000's. It shows a certain very important figure in Arthas' life, letting him know the Fall of the Lich King is bound to take place.

For additional information about the lore in this patch, check out our article on the Lore of Patch 3.3. To see more of the dungeons and have a bit more of the story explained to you, check out vodka's trailer.

We understand that the YouTube trailer might be taking some time to load. There's a lot of people trying to access everything at once, and most internet services are getting bogged down. WoW.com is on AOL webservers, so we should be fine, but other sites, include Blizzard's sites, are not able to handle the load as well.

More Cataclysm footage is trickling onto the internet from IgroMir 2009, Russia's huge gaming convention, and there was a beautifully clear (well, compared to what we usually see) video of early Goblin gameplay that merited some attention here. I have to confess; I wasn't initially enthusiastic about Blizzard's choice for a new Horde race, even if Goblins do make sense from a lore perspective. But after trawling through so many videos of their early questing experience in the Lost Isles, I'm sold. Female Goblins still aren't playable yet, but their male counterparts have some awesome casting animations and an incredibly endearing sort of waddly run. They just look so interesting and dynamic doing anything that now I'm torn over which class to roll, although I can't really take their 2H special attack seriously, so it'll probably be a caster-class of some sort. I enjoyed Necrolord_Bob's answer to our poll on which Goblin class to roll: "Priest! Priest of the Holy Temple of BOOM!"

We didn't think that Blizzard would tolerate any Cataclysm footage floating around YouTube for long, but it looks like the earlier Worgen video we posted is still up. That said, don't bank on these (or the related videos) being around for long.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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Not only is the Mohawk Grenade real and in-game, but Mr. T put it there. That's what we learn in this new commercial, a sequel of sorts to the old "Night Elf Mohawk" joke a long while back. Not only is T (not The T, just T) decked out in a Murloco's Taco's T-shirt, but he shows the in-game item in action. It's how he makes the World of Warcraft look good.

I love it -- well done, Blizzard. Great kickoff to the holiday marketing season, and it's awesome that they've got the commercial (which we assume you'll soon see on television) promoting the actual in-game item in a quality way. Sure, The Old Republic and a few other MMOs might be knocking on WoW's door, but who wouldn't want to play a game where you can throw a grenade and make people look like Mr. T? Maybe this is where all those newbies will be coming from.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it. Nothing will be the same. In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion. From Goblins and Worgens to Mastery and Guild changes, it's all there for your cataclysmic enjoyment.

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Uber-popular (and uber-cool) WoW machinima The Craft of War: BLIND has spurred more tipline emails than we can count, even after posting about it a second time, and rightfully so. Percula's work on the video was incredibly impressive and it was a joy to watch.

The bad news is that Percula recently updated the video's YouTube description to let everyone know that no, a sequel is not planned for the video. He says that he was laid off earlier in the year and had to quit WoW to focus on finding a job, and in the time since, his interest in the game has waned. That's the bad news!

The good news is that he still plans on making other animated videos, just likely not WoW-based ones. And for those interested in seeing what he's come up with between the release of BLIND and now, he says to look for upcoming Id Software releases, which he had a hand in.

Too bad about the discontinuation of the series, but at least this means that we won't get a hojillion tipline emails for BLIND II, right? A boy can dream.

World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

In the wake of the torrential magnificence of the cosplayers at BlizzCon and Dragon*Con in recent weeks, we're going to dial back the sheer creative force this week. Let's catch up with more humble creative efforts with a new take on an old favorite (yes, it's another take on fabric painting) plus a playlist of WoW machinima and songs designed especially as an accompaniment to your playtime.

Flickpainting

Serthida of US Bloodhoof-H sent us yet another fresh take on Sugarrat's wildly popular bleach shirt. Serthida has created a bandana, but the approach works equally well on tees and other fabric.

To go along with their recently created Twitter accounts, Blizzard has now started up an official YouTube channel as well. Right now, the channel just contains animations and cinematics that we've mostly seen before (not that we mind watching that Burning Crusade cinematic for the umpteenth time), but we presume that in the future, we might see newly released videos, including possibly interviews with Blizzard staff, and maybe even some (gasp!) gameplay videos as well.

Whoever's in charge of social media over at Blizzard has really been working it lately -- we can't wait to see their Last.fm account (Most Played: the artists formerly known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain) or their OkCupid account (Adam Holisky & Alex Ziebart would be at least 87% friends with Ghostcrawler, no question). Definitely fun to see Blizzard, historically a very closed-door company, opening up a little bit to the various outlets where they can correspond with fans.

It's been a little while since we've heard from Nyhm and Summergale, especially as a duo act. That made the tip that they've released a new video an incredibly exciting bit of news. The bonus to this news is that the video isn't just a song, but also includes a brief mock-commercial as the opening to the video.

The opening commercial is a parody of the Real Men of Genius spots by Budweiser. In the short segment, Nyhm and Summergale poke a bit of fun at the immense shoulder armor design favored by World of Warcraft. I wish I could say some of Nyhm's hypothesized designs were so far-fetched as to be laughable. But based only on a quick, visual scan, I could almost see Arthas dropping some of it.

The song itself is called Grind. It's a WoW-themed parody of Busta Rhyme's Break Ya Neck. I have to admit that Grind didn't appeal to me quite as much as other work from Nyhm or Summergale, but the video introduced a technique that I thought was a lot of fun. The chibi-like portrayal of the singers really lightened up the video, and made the entire production much more engaging. It was a cool thing to do, and I'd like to see Nyhm grow that technique more in future videos.

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Well I grabbed my own video of the new Feed Pet animation, but it turns out that Lougara on YouTube did it much better, so that's their video you can watch above. Yes, as hunters everywhere have noticed, Blizzard has added a brand new animation to the feeding of a hunter pet -- you can actually see your hunter toss a piece of grub to the pet, who then catches it and noms away.

It would be cool to see it go a little further -- maybe have the pet claw and chew away at it for a moment -- but then again with so many different types of pets out there, it's probably tough for Blizzard to make them all look good. Still, it's a nice little touch for immersion, and it has the added bonus of showing other players when you're tossing food to your pet as well. Of course, with Bloodthirsty as a pet talent or the Glyph of Mend Pet going, you may not even need to feed your pet any more, but if you do, that's what you'll see.