For today’s Pier Screening finalists we chose a single machinima selection, Robbie Dingo’s Watch the World(s), a beautiful tribute to the process of artistic creation. (I wrote on my Second Life blog about how Robbie created it.) We actually received several other strong machinima entries that, while they didn’t fit the Screening format for various reasons, are also worth a watch. Here are my three favorites:

The Labyrinth (O Labirinto) by Hugo Almeida is a gorgeous and dreamlike music video about lost love. It includes smooth and sumptuous camera work movingly merged to a Radiohead-esque single, performed by Portuguese musician Rui Gaio. Read more of this story

As we reported last week, video-sharing site Vimeo will soon disallow uploads of game footage. Gamers, however, will still be looking to show off their latest Warcraft raid, Halo 2 headshot or machinima masterpiece, so which sites should they turn to instead? YouTube is the obvious option, but for gamers, it’s not always the most optimal one. Here’s an initial overview compiled with the help of readers and a couple of machinima creators, including Hugh Hancock, who literally co-wrote the book on the subject. With so many sites out there, this is by no means an exhaustive list, so please share your own tips and insights in the comments section.

The sites were ranked on the basis of four criterion, including video quality and total audience size; the robustness of gamer community tools (such as forums, social networks and browsing functions); and whether or not software for capturing game footage was included. Read more of this story

Vimeo got itself into serious hot water with some of its users this week. Citing concerns over copyright infringement, file size, and the fact that the service was intended as “a place to share video with friends and family,” company Community Director Blake Whitman announced that the video-sharing site would soon stop hosting “videos that simply depict individuals playing a video game.” (Only machinima, narrative movies using edited footage captured from a video game or virtual world, like this great Second Life machinima on Vimeo, is excepted from this ban.)

Unsurprisingly, furor over this ill-conceived announcement quickly followed. At last check, Whitman’s post had garnered nearly 900 comments, most of them negative, with the anger now overflowing across sites like Kotaku and Slashdot Games. Given the response, and the fact that the policy left a lot questions unanswered, I contacted Whitman last night to get his perspective. Read more of this story

Used to be when a show business luminary passed into the hereafter, we’d go and read their obituary in the New York Times. Now, we’re more likely to look for their clips on YouTube. You can see that in this Viral Video chart tracking a 1978 “Seven Words” performance by the recently deceased George Carlin (obviously not safe for work viewing, unless you work in a bar), which suddenly spiked 1.3 million+ views on the news of his death.

But that particular video isn’t Carlin’s most famous version of the routine. And that points to the larger problem. Read more of this story

It’s a Web 2.0 rule-of-thumb: Give users a chance to create content, and odds are pretty good they’ll start with sex. Last week I got a sneak peek of the standalone Creature Creator for Spore, Electronic Arts/Maxis’ long-anticipated upcoming computer game which not only encourages players to construct and customize their own species for the simulated evolution game, but also upload videos of them in action directly to YouTube.

“You know the moment this goes live,” I told a Maxis staffer, “you’re gonna get swamped with videos of monsters with giant penises, right?” He laughed nervously and changed the subject.

The Creature Creator has only been available since June 17, and according to EA, 250,000+ creatures have already been made. But how many of them are, uh, well-endowed? Read more of this story

It’s the dark side of Web 2.0: Now that everyone has the means to produce political videos, anyone can become Fox News. As we saw with the grating Yes We Can video, the irony is that these efforts are often counterproductive to the creators’ intentions. Worse, they’re viral in the word’s original sense: The more they spread, the sicker the country’s political discourse gets. So here’s a NewTeeVee disinfectant against three bogus videos that ranked among the highest on this month’s Viral Video Chart:

Hillary Clinton boasts of support from ‘white Americans’: The title would have you believe Hillary was caught speaking at a Klan rally, but the uploader just used YouTube’s labeling tools to deceptively contextualize the actual video. In this repackaging of a phone interview with USA Today’s Kathy Kiely, Senator Clinton merely points out that she has more support among working-class, white voters than Senator Obama — a factual statement. And then, in the very same sentence, she also claims stronger support among Democratic-leaning independent voters. So it’s clear she’s just analyzing her supporters’ demographic/ideological makeup — hardly engaging in racially “divisive crap,” as the video uploader would have it. Read more of this story