Burnie Burns, one of the lead people behind the Halo machinima Red vs Blue, and co-founder of Rooster Teeth Productions, will be coming out next month for this year's Sydney Film Festival.

If you'd like to talk to Burns about his work, or machinima in general, he's scheduled to host a Q&A session on June 18 at 7:30PM at the Telstra Experience Lab. The lab can be found at Level 2, 400 George St, Sydney.

The SFF 2008 is host to two other machinima-related talks - one on June 18 at 5:30PM with Frank Dellario (Electric Sheep) and another on June 19 at 5:30PM with Chris Burke (This Spartan Life). These sessions will also take place at the Telstra Experience Lab, and all three are free of charge.

Be sure to hit up the SFF website for more info.

Digital Innovators [Sydney Film Festival]

Now, clearly, these are production values in the upper 1 percentile, and we'd expect no less of Rooster Teeth, and I'm not gonna hate on it. But can I ask a question? How come any elected-office character in a military-genre movie has to have a condescending Southern accent?

It's like a British friend of mine once said about the stereotype of his accent: "If I am in a Star Wars movie, then I command the Death Star."

That said, I can't wait to see (and hear) where this is headed.

RVB: Reconstruction [Rooster Teeth, embedded video courtesy of Slackerchan at Gametrailers]

The Red Versus Blue guys bring their cheeky, dare I saw whimsical, sense of humour to this preview of the upcoming Halo 3 map pack. On second thought, strike the whimsical, anything that involves shooting a huge set of balls at someone's face could probably use a better adjective.

With a name inspired no doubt by the antics of Rooster Teeth's popular machinima, Microsoft has joined forces with charities Make-A-Wish Australia and Mission Australia to run a fundraising competition. According to Microsoft, it's all off the back of the launch of Halo 3.

Mission Australia will be represented by the colour red, while Make-A-Wish are to be attired in blue. As you can see from the website snap here, Mission are owning Make-A-Wish something severe. We can only pray they do better in the weeks to come.

Except you can do more than pray. MS has 30 custom-painted Xbox 360s (half red, half blue), signed by a swag of both local and international celebs, to auction off, with the proceeds going to the appropriately-coloured charity.

The full press release after the jump.

Halo 3 presents Red v Blue [Official site]

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