Barbie Girls is a place for girls to connect with each other online in the Barbie Girls Virtual World. They can stimulate their fashion senses by styling their own Avatar, decorate their Virtual Room, and earn “B Bucks” for playing various games. Barbie Girls also allows you to walk around with your avatar and meet other members and chat with other girls in a controlled environment.

The site can be a bit slow to load, but the different areas are colorful and imaginative. The games are standard fare and girls can view videos featuring their favorite Barbie™ movies. She can also enjoy an enhanced Barbie Girls® experience with a V.I.P. membership, which would grant her access to exclusive areas, allow her to adopt virtual pets, “spend” B Bucks®, and play a number of great members-only games.

Did someone say fashion and boys all the same sentence? Two of the hottest subjects of most girls, so this Virtual World just may have some kind of special appeal to those girls between the ages of 8 – 15.

Cost: Free for basic membership, $5.99/month for VIP (multi-month discounts available)

As always, our kids safety is top priority. Please always remember to visit a site with your child to decide if it’s the best site for your family rules and values. Although the best of safety measures have been incorporat

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Charter. All opinions are 100% mine.

Although I love to spend a lot of time outdoors, there are times when I just like to kick back and catch a good movie or watch my favorite shows. This doesn’t happen often enough with my busy lifestyle. Since I don’t always have the time to run out and look for an entertaining flick, I like to be able to take advantage of the virtual options available to me. I also get pretty tired of missing my favorite programs when my life takes me out of the room during the best parts!

In comes the totally cool feature of On Demand. Since I am pretty picky, and like to take advantage of my best options, I have decided to hop on over to learn more at charter.net/ondemand to see what they have to offer. You may not know it, but if you have Charter digital, you have On Demand. And it’s totally free to access with your service.

If you are anywhere near as busy as I am, you will be happy to learn that there are over 6,000 movies and shows to watch anytime you want. This is especially convenient when the grands stop by for a visit, and are looking to me for their entertainment. No more waiting for Dora or Spongebob… just click and go!

From what I have learned, Charter also has hundreds of HD shows available. I mean, after all, HD is totally the new thing in our modern virtual world and I like to take advantage of a good thing when I find it.

So if you are tired of missing your favorites, like The Office, Heroes, or 30 Rock, well then perhaps it is time to check out what Charter On Demand has to offer. You can even get updates and fun extras on Charter’s Facebook page. This is definately worth taking a few minutes to take a look and see what all the buzz is about.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Moviestorm. All opinions are 100% mine.

As I teach my daughter her academics from home, I am always on the lookout for new ways to spice up our curriculum. She is really into writing stories, taking pictures, and putting slide shows together to share with family and friends. This is an art in itself, and when I showed her Moviestorm she got pretty excited! The timing is perfect, as we were looking for a cool movie maker that carries more features than our basic windows movie maker, and we decided to check this out.

My daughter has a project planned for our Artistic Expressions class, and I am interested to see what she can do with this software. She is totally into fantasy, so I imagine she can put her talents to the test with a great plot using her imagination, with colorful characters, animation, and totally cool sets to grab the viewers attention.

We were happy to discover that it is free to download the software, create avatars, and so much more. It sounds great, even for beginners, as it takes no experience to get started. The basic setup is free, yet we do have the option to pay for additional characters, animations, and props. This can definately serve to take a persons creativity to a whole new level!

Basic Features

~ Get going quickly with our library of ready-to-use stock sets, including interiors, exteriors, and even spaceships!
~ Customise the stock sets or build your own from scratch
~ Save your sets and re-use them in other movies
~ Buy more props and sets from the Moviestorm store

Customization Options

~ Use the customisable complete buildings or assemble your own
~ Tintable textures for walls, floors and ceilings
~ Fully animated doors and transparent windows
~ Add your own images to pictures, posters, etc.
~ Resize, modify and recolour props to create unique variants
~ Place props at any angle – no square grids!
~ Add videos to TV and computer screens
~ Animated textures bring props to life
~ Multiple skies give you night, day, sunset, etc
~ Add lens flare from the sun
~ Fully controllable ambient and directional lights
~ Add extra lighting with on-set lights, including streetlights, table lamps, moving spotlights, lasers, and concert lighting rigs
~ Switch shadows on or off for different effects
~ Add background sounds and sound effects
~ Quickly create unique sets by pasting photographic images onto backdrops
~ You can change your set, even in the middle of making a movie

Advanced Features

~ Greenscreen floors and backdrops make it easy to combine Moviestorm footage with other video sources
~ Share your stock sets with other Moviestorm users
~ Import items from Google Sketchup (requires Modder’s Workshop – currently in beta)
~ Create your own props and set dressing using standard 3D modelling tools (requires Modder’s Workshop – currently in beta)

This is a sponsored guest post written by Matt Kelland on behalf of Moviestorm. Post powered by Sponzai.

Moviestorm is enabling a new generation of amateur film-makers to realize their visions.  It offers easy, affordable animation tools that can produce sophisticated high-quality films on practically no budget. After several years in development, Moviestorm has demonstrated that home movie-making needn’t be limited to cheap hand-held cameras and clips of the kids goofing around. Its virtual movie studio allows users to break free of the limitations of the real world, and allows them to direct, film, edit and distribute 3D animated movies without any knowledge of animation techniques or 3D modelling. And best of all, it’s free, and comes without any copyright restrictions. 

Iain Friar, known as IceAxe, is one of Moviestorm’s many successful film-makers.  His short film, Clockwork, a dystopian vision of a totalitarian Britain after a Soviet invasion in the 1980s, is winning accolades and awards around the world, most recently the audience prize at the Atopic Festival in France and the Grand Prize at the Machinima Expo.  Clearly influenced by both 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, with a visual style that evokes both Communist era propaganda posters and more recent animated movies such as A Scanner Darkly, it is a stark, powerful film that belies its modest origins.

Iain, who’s 42, works in marketing, and started making movies just 18 months ago. “I’ve always been a hands-on person, in music, sport, and everything else,” he says. “I thought it would be fun to shoot a music video, but I’m not the most technical of people, and it seemed extraordinarily hard.  I remember when computer games started using in-game animation to tell the story instead of video clips, and this interested me, especially now that game technology has become so sophisticated. So I bought a book, Machinima for Dummies, which had Moviestorm on the CD, and I was hooked. I liked Moviestorm because it did what I was looking for, even though I didn’t really know what I was looking for at the time, and the Moviestorm community was very supportive.  I initially made comedies, but I could see that the movies people respected were more dramatic, so it seemed that was the direction to go in.”

He spent four months working on Clockwork, and then the same again on his next short, Cloud Angel, a steampunk thriller set on board an airship.  Apart from the voice acting, he made the entire film himself at his home in Basingstoke, England.  “I’m lucky that my friends are so willing to step up to the mike and read my silly scripts!” he laughs. His next film is Gridlock, a science fiction comedy which he is co-producing with another successful Moviestorm director, James Thorpe.  For this, they’ve stepped up the production costs a notch: they hired a recording studio and got the local amateur dramatic group to do the voice acting.

Iain is realistic about his future, though.  “Am I ambitious? Yes. Do I want to keep it as just a hobby? Well, probably yes, because I imagine that if it became a full time activity, the fun might go out of it. I make movies as escapism. That said, I think that this industry would be really interesting to work in, because it’s embryonic; I’m not sure what direction it will go in. It’s exciting!”

Moviestorm’s CEO, Jeff Zie, is hugely enthusiastic and supportive.  “Iain and the many other Moviestorm users are an inspiration to us all,” he says. “We’re really proud that we’re giving talented people like this the tools they need to unleash the creative potential they never knew they had, and to produce these wonderful films.”

Try it and see!

You can download Moviestorm for free: Windows and Mac versions are available. If you want, you can expand your virtual film studio and buy extra costumes, sets, props, and sounds in their marketplace. If you’ve ever wondered whether you might be the next Tarantino, Ang Lee, or J J Abrams, now’s the time to find out!

I wouldn’t want to spoil it for anyone who has not yet seen New Moon, by giving away everything, so I will just let it be known that my daughter and I saw the movie today and it was pretty good! While there was a lot of romantic vibes going on, and I think they could have thrown in just a wee bit more action, I really liked it. The intense scenes brought about a feeling of tragic loss for one poor soul, the one who would be left out of the ‘true love forever’ scenario. Now, if I did not already know the outcome of this Saga, I may have felt a bit differently… hmmmm.

Anyhow, I will say that there was a whole lot of eye candy, enough to set even my own heart beating just a bit faster than normal. This is definately NOT a family movie, and is really geared more towards the romantic types who crave a bit of excitement. Of course the girls will probably go a bit crazy over the shirtless scenes (and not a few males as well I suppose), yet it is tastefully presented in my own opinion.

I simply crave action at times, and I would have liked to see a bit more excitement going on in a world created to house vampires and werewolves, but that is just me. I can see the producers wanting to set the scene for romance, yet I feel this movie would have attracted a wider audience if it would have carried a bit more intigue and action. Although I liked this movie, I would still say the first movie in this Saga was just a bit better. Without having given too much away, I hope, I will just move on into a new moment in my life and hope others get as much enjoyment out of this vampire saga, as I have thus far.