Former GSW editor TonyW has put a most informative post on the 2006 Machinima Festival up on his Clickable Culture blog, noting that "the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS) has announced that the 2006 Machinima Festival and the 2006 Machinima Awards will take place on November 4 and 5, 2006."

What's more: "According to AMAS, the two-day event "will include screenings of Machinima films, Q&A with machinimators, special presentations, and seminars about Machinima production techniques... The hosting venue, the Museum of the Moving Image (www.movingimage.us), will provide an excellent location once again, with its diverse collection and exhibitions of motion picture, television, and digital arts."

Tony then goes on the mention: "I'm personally rooting for BloodSpell, a feature-length machinima project made in 3 years using BioWare's Aurora Toolset (used for the game Neverwinter Nights)."

Well, from our point of view, the favorite machinima we've seen in the past 12 months is maybe the oddest and funniest all at once - PANICS from the guys at Rooster Teeth Productions (Red Vs. Blue), which "is a comic science fiction mini-series created by Rooster Teeth Productions... produced at the request of Monolith Productions as apart of a tie-in with the Director's Edition of the video game F.E.A.R." Hope it wins big.

[EDIT: Nuts, apparently commenter FritzMeaning notes: "PANICS took the Mackie for Machinima Screenwriting last year. Not sure if they would be in contention this year." So they actually already won in 2005, thereby either vindicating me or making me look uninformed - take your pick!]