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- /'il/ (adj.) 1: Not normal or sound - health) ; also : suffering poor
health : SICK. 2: BAD, UNLUCKY(~omen). 3: not meeting an accepted standard
(~manners). 4: BADLY, UNFRIENDLY, HOSTILE (~feeling). 5: HARSH, CRUEL.
6: The experience one has after playing CTF Quake against a certain BAD
Clan!
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Tra5hTa1k LIVE at UCB 
If you'll be in the New York area, you are invited to this rare
opportunity to see ILL Will and Mal Content perform for and interact
with a live audience. With guest, singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton
(Code Monkey.)
Thursday, June 29th
or call:
Hope to see you there. Second Life...It's a Better Life 
We got a
great response regarding the segment we did spoofing Second Life
in
Episode 08 of TrashTalk , including numereous requests for an
mp3 of the Second
Life Theme song Paul Jannicola wrote and performed for it (also
the voice of Mal Content). Your command is our wish master. See ILL Will and Mal Content at the NY Comic Convention 
We've been asked by the folks at NY/Tokyo Events to perform live at their gaming pavilion at this weeks New York Comic Convention (Javits Center, NYC, Feb 25). Specific times to be announced. ILL Bixby
Don't Send Us Your Weak and Weary, Just the Rag Dolls 
We're looking for videos of funny ragdoll death animation moments from various games for a segment on our upcoming show "TrashTalk." Here's what we're looking for:
ILL Bixby A
New Music Video and a Mini-tour 
Happy New Year. 2005 was a pretty exciting year for the ILL Clan and we're looking forward to what 2006 has in store for us. Thanks to all of you who have expressed interest in seeing new episodes of Trash Talk with ILL Will, we got a few emails along these lines: "Dear ILL Clan, When the hell are you planning on posting some episodes already!?" The answer is: Soon! We've had the great opportunity to perform the show live in front of audiences not only at the Machinima Film Festival, but also at two well respected universities: RPI and Stanford. We also expect to be performing live again right here in NYC this month or next, and we'll be sure to let you all know when. Then we'll be posting regularly scheduled episodes soon. Really! In the meantime, you can see the preview of Trash Talk, or head over to Machinima.com and check out our first foray into the world of The Movies with Frank Dellario's directorial debut, "Loving You and Drinking Beer," a music video featuring a song by our own Paul "ILL Spector" Jannicola, about a guy who just can't get over a girl, or away from her.
ILL Clinton MTV2 Video Mods to feature ILL Clan "sharts" 
What is a
shart? It's a short art piece, otherwise known as an interstitial
appearing on MTV2. We recently completed the first three of nine
sharts for the Video
Mods show, and they can be seen starting tonight at 9:00. The
show will be repeated again the next day at 2:00am and 10:00am.
Then it will continue to be shown for the rest of the month. Check their online schedule for showtimes.
This work has been a great opportunity for us to create some new Machinima from concept to completion. The style is a definite departure from our usually cartoony look, and we look forward to doing more. Great work by the entire team, especially Andy Grant and David Krikorian for their great looking models and environments, respectively.
ILL Clinton Matt
and Frank Interviewed in "This Spartan Life" Machinima Talk Show 
Posting a heads up about a new machinima show on the web by our good buddy Chris Burke. Chris is a sound designer and digital musician who, in addition to being a core member of the 8-bit music community, has been a part of the machinima community for awhile, producing music and sound effects for our films as well as Ethan Vogt's Game On project for Volvo.
Chris has wanted to create his own machinima film for sometime and now as a web talk show set in the various worlds of Halo called This Spartan Life. As host Damian, Chris interviews Matt (ILL Clinton) and I in his most recent installment, Episode 2: Module 2. Check it out.
ILL Bixby Some Great Press in the New York Times 
A wonderful
article has just come out about machinima that has interviews with
us and a few other machinima groups, and it's in the New York Times.
The author visited us in our Brooklyn digs and as he describes in
the article, was commandeered to puppeteer for us (as a violin stealing
thug).
The article, The Xbox Auteurs, was in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this past Aug 7th. Link requires a free registration to NY Times Online.
ILL Bixby A New Engine and some Gamer Gags We've been
pretty busy for the last few months, so we thought it's about time
we updated this news page. Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to call
it "news," and calling it "olds" would not only be silly, but could
lead to a lawsuit from the Oldsmobile corporation.
So here's what's been going on.
First, we finished up some new Machinima clips that you can
see over at Spike
TV's E3 website. They're called "Gamer Gags" and they are
a series of 10 - 15 second clips with (yes you guessed it) gags
about gaming. We had fun making them, and we hope you enjoy watching
them. We created them using Fountainhead Entertainments Machinimation 1
toolsets, using assets created by the Quake 3 model and map
community.
Another project we've been working on for a while is something
we can't really say much about, since the client prefers to keep
it tight lipped. But you can find out a little more about it at
the well known game developer, Virgil
Tatum's website.
As part of that project we're developing a new set of tools
using the Garage
Games Torque engine. Using this new engine allows us a lot
more control over the work we do, and so we're excited about what's
to come.
Oh, and if you haven't already seen it, take a look at "I'm
Still Seeing Breen," a music video created using Half Life
2, by our very own Paul Marino.
ILL Clinton A
Reason to Stay or Even Visit NYC During the Republican Convention
Yes, we're performing live once again in New York City, this time as part of the Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues & Ideas, a coalition of some of the city's finest artists, authors, producers, presenters, humorists and humanitarians. We're rubbing creative elbows with the likes of Margaret Cho, Lewis Black and E.L. Doctorow to help inspire, instigate and support civic engagement during the week of the Republican National Convention. For the first time, we'll be performing our newest show, "Larry & Lenny in Art Dealin'" as well as a special live Republican National Convention edition of "Six Minutes with Mike Whitely."
If you plan
to attend, make reservations via email in advance as there is
limited seating. Hope to see you there. Where: Cinema
Classics, 332 E. 11th St. Email reservations to illbixby@illclan.com. Please include full name, number of seats and phone number. Reservations will only be held five minutes prior to the start of the show. We will only contact you if the reservation is not available. ILL Bixby We're Performing Live at Lincoln Center Many of our
fans have been asking when our next live performance will be.
Well, we not only have a date for you but a real cool location
as well€-Lincoln Center. We just got word that we'll be performing
live at the New
York Video Festival in the Walter
Reade Theater on July 18th. The festival is put on by the
Film Society of Lincoln Center (same guys who produce the NY Film
Festival), who showed our work among a number of other machinima
films last year. This year, they asked us to close their show
with a live performance and we of course obliged. The program
that evening, "Game Engine 2," is from 9pm to 11pm with
a party afterwards. We'll be going on stage at 10:45pm. Tickets
can be purchased from Lincoln Center online or at the Walter Reade
Theater for a meager $10. Hope to see
you there. ILL Bixby
Buy Our Crap! Now you can buy stuff from us at our new store. Get yourself a cool T-Shirt or Bumper sticker supporting the only candidates worthy of your vote, while supporting us, your friends at the ILL Clan. And let me tell ya, we could really use the money. I'm getting sick of eating beans... and the other guys are getting sick of being around me when I eat beans.
We're continuing with new episodes of Lenny & Larry on the Campaign Trail, not quite on a regular basis, but often enough to keep it interesting without making us go completely insane with all the work.
Thanks for your continued support... Speaking of support, if you'd rather not be seen wearing an ILL Clan T-Shirt but you want to help us buy a meal or two, you can donate some cash using the links on the left, via PayPal, or anonymously at Amazon.com.
Thanks again!
ILL Clinton Episode 1 is up! Well, it's finally finished. Episode 1 of our new series, "On The Campaign Trail with Lenny & Larry" is available for download on our movies page.
When we set out to make this series of shorts, we all knew it would be a lot of work, but I don't think any of us (except maybe Frank) truly anticipated just how much work it would be to make a bunch of 3 minute cartoons. A nice job by everyone involved. For those of you who pay attention to the technical side of Machinima, you may notice that we're using a great new mod called QFusion which allows us to use Quake 2 and Quake 3 assets together. And if you've ever played the Urban Terror mod for Quake 3, you might recognize some of the environments in episode 1. By the way, we were able to get permission from most everyone who made the assets in the short, but if you made one of the maps or models, and didn't hear from us, please send me an email. Chances are we tried hard to find you but couldn't. Episode 2 has already begun shooting, and episodes 3 and 4 are being written. So if you haven't already, please sign up to receive update emails as each new episode is posted online.
ILL Clinton The
Hidden Dangers of Machinima We're pleased
to announce that production is well underway for our new series
of web shorts, "On The Campaign Trail with Lenny & Larry
Lumberjack." Unfortunately, due to a terrible accident on
the set, there's been a slight delay. You can see an outtake here
that shows the dangers of working in the Machinima medium. Fortunately
Larry's insurance policy covers accidental death.
Look for the new episodes later this month, and be sure to tell your friends. ILL Clinton
Florida Film Festival Wrapup We did it last year and did again this yearßspent March in sunny Florida instead of frigid New York. Oh, we also performed another live show, two actually, at the Florida Film Festival in Orlando. Thursday we
created an episode of our new show, "On the Campaign Trail with
Lenny & Larry" live as part of the festival's NextArt
program. Then, on Saturday evening, Larry & Lenny shared the stage
with a human MC, Peg O'Keefe, co-hosting the festival awards gala.
Very exciting experience that took a great deal of coordination
between us, the AV crew as well and the gala host. We'll let you
know as soon as we post videos.
varous camera views as well as our server camera output. 
way back, Patty Jenkins, who wrote and directed some film called "Monster." (l to r: Pat, Frank, Patty, Matt, Paul J) 
actually listening to me talk. Man were they bored. ILL Bixby
New Movie Available, and an interview Now you can see excerpts from our LIVE performance from the weekend of the Machinima Film Festival on our movies page. It took 20 minutes to perform, and only 3 months to upload. :)Plus there's a nice interview with Frank, Paul J, and myself over at Machinima.com. Check it out if you want to find out all about... our answers to their questions. Enjoy.
ILL Clinton
Animated Machinima Category Intros to Air Dec 4 on Spike TV's VGA's Set your eyes or your Tivos's to Spike TV this Thursday, Dec 4 at 9pm for their Video Game Awards hosted by David Spade. Will the show rock? I don't know, all I know is I'll be looking out for the 8 machinima vignettes we created. They're airing sometime during the show, not sure when, possibly as the actual award category intros. If you see jumping cows, battling clowns or impatient rabbits, that's us. Full Press Release
ILL Bixby
ILL Clan Image in Wired Magazine Machinima is in Wired Magazine's Calendar again. Last issue it listed the Machinima Film Festival, this issue, Dec 2003, pg. 81, it not only lists Paul "ILL Robinson" Marino's talk at the Digital Video Expo West on Dec 12, but illustrates it with an image from our very own Mom's Truck Stop Diner of "Hardly Workin'" fame. It also, though an indirect reference, lists the on-air broadcast date for Spike TV's VGA awards, Dec. 4th, which we made machinima promos for.
ILL Bixby
Spike TV Hires ILL Clan to Produce Machinima Vignettes We're gonna be on TV Mom. Yes, Spike TV, formally TNN, approached us a few months back to produce machinima vignettes for their website to promote their upcoming Video Game Awards. Kim Morgan, the head of Spike TV online, saw the Love/Death Video Paul co-produced for the NY Video Festival this past summer. She had been a fan of our work for awhile and had wanted to find a way to use us and machinima in some way.
With the co-directors of Love/Death, David Kaplan and Dan Torop, we produced twelve 10 to 15 second vignettes introducing their various voting categories, using Fountainhead Entertainment's Machinimation toolset and pre-existing assets: Quake III models found on Polycount and levels found on Planetquake LVL. Given the short turn around on the job, it made sense not to create new assets but instead pay the model/map makers whose content we could easily find online. Though finding some of them to get signed releases and checks to was another ballgame: with some guys hailing from Costa Rica, Germany, Russia and the UK. The great news is that a few of the vignettes: Best Fantasy, Game of the Year to name a few, are being shown on-air as we speak. They're short so you gotta catch 'em quick. But you can definitely see all of them on Spiketv.com. Thanks to: Anna and everyone at Fountainhead Ent for creating a great tool, Machinimation really rocks and we obviously couldn't have produced the job with out it. Chris Burke at Bong & Dern for doing a knock up job on creating music and sound effects. Additional thanks to Drew "rogue13" Risch from Polycount, Tig from Planetquake LVL and Paul Jaquays for helping us track down various map/model makers. The map/model makers themselves who've been great as well as excited about the project. Our co-directors David and Dan who were obviously pivotal to the job, cranking out some wonderful shorts in no time flat. And a big thanks to Kim who really fought against the odds to get this gig through at Spike, helping us prove that machinima can be cutting edge, attention getting media. ILL Bixby
New Movie Available! I am pleased to announce that our latest short (they seem to keep getting shorter) is available for download on our movies page. It's a teaser for our new episodic show, Larry & Lenny on the Campaign Trail.This piece was originally shown in front of the live audience at our performance here in NYC at a party the night before the Machinima Festival. We're glad to share it with those of you who couldn't make it that night. Enjoy.
ILL Clinton
Machinima Film Festival & Our Latest Performance The 2nd Annual Machinima Film Festival was a great time for all this past Saturday. Having the Machinima community in town here in NYC was a treat. I even got to spend the day touring around the sites of Manhattan & Brooklyn with the one and only Uwe Girlich, proverbial grandfather of the machinima movement.We're pleased to announce our gratitude to the judges for awarding "Best Virtual Performance" to our live performance of Common Sense Cooking with Carl the Cook. Especially considering the other nominees in that category, (I'm sure the rest of the clan would agree,) I truly feel honored. All the nominees were great, all the awards well-deserved. If you haven't seen the nominees and winners, be sure to stop by Machinima.org for links. On Saturday at the festival, The ILL Clan presented our latest cartoon, Larry & Lenny Lumberjack on the Campaign Trail live for the festival audience, which we'll be posting here as soon as we handle a few post-production tweaks. Nice work to the whole team for all their hard work, and talent. And thanks to Kerria Seabrooke and Diana Byer for handling the production and allowing us to focus on putting on a good show. Thanks also to Andrew Blevins of Vanson Studios for putting together two really great maps based on my bizarre specifications, on really short notice. Here's the first review of the show, hopefully there'll be more. (Although I don't see how any review could be as favorable as this one by Anthony Bailey over at machinima.com.) Thanks again to all those who helped make Common Sense Cooking with Carl the Cook possible... id Software And if there's anyone else I forgot, someone email me and remind me. :)
ILL Clinton - Out like a light.
2 Projects and a Magazine Some cool things to report. First, we're very involved with two projects. The new Apartment Zero is continuing production. Here's another model, Aletha Crumb, whom you might recognize from Hardly Workin'.
(You can also see another character posted in a previous news entry if you scroll down.) Larry & Lenny are also returning in another of their typical romps, only this one will be interactive. I can't say much about it since it's for a tight-lipped client. It's only a prototype for what could become a full fledged console title. That project is about halfway through production; We've already recorded half the dialogue, and animatics have begun. Loads of hard work on that one from the entire 8-Man team. (Yes, we are all men.) Both productions are a lot of fun to work on. Hopefully the finished products will also be a lot of fun. I feel like a blogger. But I only update every 3 months. :) As far as magazines. There's a very nice article in a $13 magazine that's only available in the UK (that's somewhere east of Brooklyn.) The Magazine, 3D World, has a mention of Machinima on the cover, and a very hyper explanation of what it means, including this opening statement. "Machinima: The very word speaks volumes..." Uh, it does? On their contents page they've got a nice colour shot of Larry & Lenny Lumberjack, with the subtitle, "The art of Machinima-Read all about the latest 3D movie-making craze." Whoa! They make it sound like people across America have turned off the telly, put down their 36 oz diet soda, and let the SUV idle out front while they make movies with their copy of The Sims. I didn't realize it was all that. It is a very nice article. Nicely designed, tons of great info and quotes from important folks in the Machinima community, and even a CD with Quake II and some other stuff I can't run 'cause I use a Mac. It explains Machinima nicely while also making it sound cool. Well worth the $13 you'll have to spend if you happen to be across the pond. I'm sure we'll have some scans on the site soon enough. All in all we're busy. Busy doing things we love to do. ILL Clinton - Out.
Machinima Performed Live Well, we just completed another short and in typical ILL Clan fashion: it's a hilarious comedy and we've pushed ourselves and machinima a step further.
We were invited down to the Florida Film Festival as part of their NextArt program. In addition to showing & speaking about Machinima, we created a Machinima production live in front of the festival audience. The film, "Common Sense Cooking with Carl the Cook," was an improvised short, created using a suggestion from the audience and then filmed in-engine while the characters were puppeteered by the improvisers, who also provided the dialogue. It was a thrilling experience to say the least and everyone seemed astounded by both the presentation and Machinima as a medium.
We also held a Q&A session afterwards with not only Paul Marino on the stage but also Lenny, Larry and Carl the Cookúon screen answering questions in character. It was an awesome experience and we would really like to the thank the Enzian Theater and the staff of the Florida Film Festival for having us. We taped the Q&A and will have it available online soon.
The show was produced at the Enzian Theater in Winter Park, Florida where the bulk of the films at the festival were shown. We were on one side of the stage where three machines ran each of the characters and a forth acted as the server, running the Beefquake mod. An additional machine produced sound effects and music which, along with the dialogue and audience reaction, was recorded onto a DAT. The show was projected by a 3-chip DLP digital projector, output to by an NVIDIA Ti 4600. We have since synched up the sound and have the short on our movies page. Check it out and listen for that wonderful audience response, it's a real trip. - Bixby
Breaking Quake II The last few weeks have been very busy for us here at ILL Clan central. We've been preparing for a Live Improvised performance at The Florida Film Festival, which you can read all about on our new press page! Thanks to ILL Bixby for teaching himself HTML and getting that page posted.
We also have started work on a new machinima cartoon, with all new characters and sets. Although we still love Larry & Lenny, we've come up with a whole bunch of new characters that we know people will enjoy. We're planning on submitting proposals for an episodic cartoon show VERY soon, as well as finalizing a contract with a VERY big company for an interactive game... so cross your fingers for us, maybe we'll actually be able to afford to eat.
Here's a little sample of what's to come. It's
nowhere near finished, but it still looks great!
Oh, and I must thank Pat O'Shaughnessey, and Jim Petropolous for their recent efforts. Pat for his excellent programmming, pushing Q2 to it's limits (and breaking it) so we can have highly articulate puppets for this Florida gig. And Jim for his excellent 3D modeling of the new characters. - Clinton
ILL Clan Shorts Inducted into the AMMI Collection Well, it seems we're more groundbreaking then we thought. We were inducted into the permanent collection of the American Museum of the Moving Image (AMMI) along with 14 other digital media artists as part of their exhibit '<'ALT'>' DigitalMedia. The AMMI, a NYC museum dedicated to educating the public about the art, history, technique and technology of film, television and digital media, is well known in the film business for housing the largest collection of moving image artifacts in the U.S. Now housed within that collection is our work, Hardly Workin' and Apartment Huntin'. - Bixby
Earth calling Bixby... Hello Bixby... Wow, CNN doesn't mess around. The two minute spot aired in the US @ 6:55am Monday morning, April 22. Mark that in your diaries friends because someday, you'll come across that blurb and go "huh?" But for now, it's great news because it seems, a lot of people wake up to CNN before heading out to corporate hamster wheels. And what did they wake up too but ILL Robinson's mug plastered on their tube! Dare you look at it as well? You should because it was too cool to see machinima discussed on the station that gives you the world 24/7. Clips are shown from "Apartment Huntin'" but not "Hardly Workin'" because they needed the Quake look of "AH" to convey their message. Fine with us, 'cause any exposure is good exposure. Head over to www.cnn.com/video/index.html and check it out. Requires a Realone or CNN News account, sorry. And who's
this you ask? This isn't ILL Robinson. No it is I, ILL Bixby,
awaken from the dead by, yes you guessed, rob's mug on CNN. - bixby |
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