Second Life Machinima making strides
During last year's State of Play conference, I had the chance to catch up with Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale. We spoke a bit about the things we were focused on, and at one point Philip asked a very straight-forward question about Machinima and Second Life - specifically, why isn't more Machinima being made in Second Life? My reply was a bit simplistic, if not blunt; for the beginning machinimator, there wasn't enough incentive. Off-the-shelf games are built from the world up. Thus, a machinimator will have lots of context to start with, and that breeds ideas. On the other hand, Second Life requires the users to bring the world to it, and thus that context requires more effort (as well as the seeds for those ideas).
Since that conversation, Second Life (SL, hereafter) has matured quite a bit and is slowly providing that missing incentive I spoke of (this became much clearer to me during last month's Future Salon: Machinima). I believe this is in part due to SL advancing into extremely active virtual space (previously just an active virtual space) with a bustling economy, which means a machinimator can either buy or build assets for his/her work. Add to this, that Linden Lab allows the end user to retain the IP right of works created with and within SL and the deal is sweetened even more.
Of course, all this talk of Machinima possibilities would fall flat if there weren't great examples to show off what can be done.
My first experience with SL-made Machinima was early last year with Brad Henderson's (aka Pierce Portocarrero) Machinima work. Brad's pieces include Bloody Mary and the soon-to-be-released Machinima/RL documentary, Ideal World. His work has a very professional polish - anyone who has seen the Ideal World trailer and knows a thing or two about traditional Machinima production methods would probably come away as I did - very impressed. Pierce continues to push the Machinima envelope in SL, stay tuned to his site as he posts more.
My next experience with SL Machinima was Eric Call's showcase work(aka Eric Linden) Silver Bells and Golden Spurs. An extremely ambitious project supported by Linden Lab themselves, I had the pleasure of meeting Eric at the Machinima Film Festival last year, where he presented his up-to-the-minute work on the film (Linden Lab was also a sponsor at last years fest). While I didn't have a chance to sit in on his presentation, I did manage to catch up with Eric during a visit to Linden Lab late last year, There, Eric described the production process behind his film (documented here)--how he developed the characters, how extras were recruited from the SL community, and set designers were hired from in-world as well. It was pretty fascinating for my ears, and yet one more example of how close Machinima can be to real-world filmmaking--both in production and its collaborative process. Eric finally completed the work in February, and has developed one of SL's finest Machinima works. Silver Bells went on to a screening at South-by-Southwest this past March, a great place to showcase all the hard work put into this prodution.
Another person's work who I recently came across is an artist by the name of Robbie Wright (aka Robbie Dingo). Wright speaks of how he's new to Machinima, but his out-of-the-gate piece, "Better Life," has become one of my favorite Machinima music videos, SL or otherwise. Wright used music by Angry Man, a band he has a close relationship - once again, showing how Machinima can benefit both lesser-known artists (though the band has a logo that is eerily close to the SL logo). Wright continued to build upon this portfolio with another simple, yet moving work called "Stage," which recently took the Best Film award at the June Take5 Festival in SL. Robbie has also gone the extra step and documented some of his production techniques on his blog (there's several postings regarding this - page through them on the right).
Beyond the Machinima works themselves, support for SL Machinima is expanding as well. One group who's helping to facilitate this is Alt-Zoom Studios. Alt-Zoom is the work of the tireless volunteers BuhBuhCuh Fairchild (real name unknown) and Sasha Rudie (Moo Money) - both people who not only produce machinima of their own (BuhBuhCuh was the cameraperson for Silver Bells and Sasha is a beginning machinimator mixing Machinima with vlogging), but also promote Machinima in world through monthly classes, as well as their monthly fest, Take5.
In less than a year's time, Second Life is showing that it offers quite a bit for the Machinima community. The visuals might not hold up to the latest game engines, and issues with server lag and framerate still factor in quite significantly, but as a few artists have already shown, much is possible for those with the ideas and initiative.
Since that conversation, Second Life (SL, hereafter) has matured quite a bit and is slowly providing that missing incentive I spoke of (this became much clearer to me during last month's Future Salon: Machinima). I believe this is in part due to SL advancing into extremely active virtual space (previously just an active virtual space) with a bustling economy, which means a machinimator can either buy or build assets for his/her work. Add to this, that Linden Lab allows the end user to retain the IP right of works created with and within SL and the deal is sweetened even more.
Of course, all this talk of Machinima possibilities would fall flat if there weren't great examples to show off what can be done.
My first experience with SL-made Machinima was early last year with Brad Henderson's (aka Pierce Portocarrero) Machinima work. Brad's pieces include Bloody Mary and the soon-to-be-released Machinima/RL documentary, Ideal World. His work has a very professional polish - anyone who has seen the Ideal World trailer and knows a thing or two about traditional Machinima production methods would probably come away as I did - very impressed. Pierce continues to push the Machinima envelope in SL, stay tuned to his site as he posts more.
My next experience with SL Machinima was Eric Call's showcase work(aka Eric Linden) Silver Bells and Golden Spurs. An extremely ambitious project supported by Linden Lab themselves, I had the pleasure of meeting Eric at the Machinima Film Festival last year, where he presented his up-to-the-minute work on the film (Linden Lab was also a sponsor at last years fest). While I didn't have a chance to sit in on his presentation, I did manage to catch up with Eric during a visit to Linden Lab late last year, There, Eric described the production process behind his film (documented here)--how he developed the characters, how extras were recruited from the SL community, and set designers were hired from in-world as well. It was pretty fascinating for my ears, and yet one more example of how close Machinima can be to real-world filmmaking--both in production and its collaborative process. Eric finally completed the work in February, and has developed one of SL's finest Machinima works. Silver Bells went on to a screening at South-by-Southwest this past March, a great place to showcase all the hard work put into this prodution.
Another person's work who I recently came across is an artist by the name of Robbie Wright (aka Robbie Dingo). Wright speaks of how he's new to Machinima, but his out-of-the-gate piece, "Better Life," has become one of my favorite Machinima music videos, SL or otherwise. Wright used music by Angry Man, a band he has a close relationship - once again, showing how Machinima can benefit both lesser-known artists (though the band has a logo that is eerily close to the SL logo). Wright continued to build upon this portfolio with another simple, yet moving work called "Stage," which recently took the Best Film award at the June Take5 Festival in SL. Robbie has also gone the extra step and documented some of his production techniques on his blog (there's several postings regarding this - page through them on the right).
Beyond the Machinima works themselves, support for SL Machinima is expanding as well. One group who's helping to facilitate this is Alt-Zoom Studios. Alt-Zoom is the work of the tireless volunteers BuhBuhCuh Fairchild (real name unknown) and Sasha Rudie (Moo Money) - both people who not only produce machinima of their own (BuhBuhCuh was the cameraperson for Silver Bells and Sasha is a beginning machinimator mixing Machinima with vlogging), but also promote Machinima in world through monthly classes, as well as their monthly fest, Take5.
In less than a year's time, Second Life is showing that it offers quite a bit for the Machinima community. The visuals might not hold up to the latest game engines, and issues with server lag and framerate still factor in quite significantly, but as a few artists have already shown, much is possible for those with the ideas and initiative.
1 Comments:
Lemme ask you a question. Why aren't people making Machinima-oriented game mods? For example, an UT2k4 multiplayer mod that would allow the "director" to save the state of the world and then restore everything to that point; handy custom animation menus for "actors"; the ability to set up "cameras" during "filming"; easy editing of camera paths and re-camming; the list goes on... Why aren't there such userfriendly mods?
It's like the 70s where home videos meant shooting 8mm film, having it developed and then splicing it together manually. We need to get into the digital generation faster :)
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