Burning Man in SL

I bought a plot with my machinima buddy, Marc, on the playa for the SecondLife version of Burning Man. We're also in the lottery to win a couple of additional plots. You can check out their webpage at http://www.burn2.org. The image is from their blog to announce the theme...Rites of Passage.

Marc & I previously discussed studying memorials in SL - so one idea for our camp is to look at rites of passage involving death. This idea, of course, put new life in the machinima I was making about death of the human behind the avatar. If we can finish it, we hope to show it at our camp. It depends on how the plots are set up...we might not be able to control the media settings, especially on a little plot. It's a good idea tho.


For me, being in this event is kind of a rite of passage. I've been moving from content consumer to content creator in SL.

• I used to make sculptures for me; now I have a store where I put them up for sale along with houses that I build. I'm learning about communicating in different ways in world.
• I used to watch machinima, laughing at the Divas and marveling at the art. Now I'm acting in them, recording voices, and writing and directing. 
• Last year we visited the camps, watched them burn the man - we went as spectators. This year we will be part of the action. This camp will be something we create. We will make things to give away. We will share the "death machinima" , as we call it. 

It's still a long time till the event. We don't even get our plots assigned till the end of August! Arggghhh. We need to decide if we're going to volunteer for one of the departments to help during the event. It depends on our plot idea develops. One involves a lot of updating throughout the day and interacting with the people who walk by - that might cut down on the volunteering.

We also discussed making some machinima there at the SL Burning Man. It would be interesting to see what you could record in one take with no editing. Or play around with a news format and have "man on the street" interviews. There will be live performers and street theatre and avatars dressed in their best weird outfits. So a lot of opportunities to shoot and practice editing (for me...Marc is already experienced)

Cool location for a machinima

I have a sculpture garden on the mainland and while flying around the other day looking at my neighbors to see what was new or at least stuff I'd never noticed because I had my draw distance turned way down. I noticed an island off in the distance. I flew over and it was the cutest little coastal town with cobblestone streets and a wharf and a light house and a town square. It was built by the Linden Lab Department of Public Works. The build quality is very high. If you're looking for a machinima set..this might be something to check out. You'll have to watch your camera angles so you don't get the stuff on the next sim, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Here is the SLURL and some photos.

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Barneys%20Bay/142/216/29

Photos

Town square with wishing well and assorted small shop buildings, including Mole & Mole Travel Agency for your virtual vacation needs. (people who work with the Dept. of Public Works use avatars with the last name of Mole - hence the company name)

A view of the sim from the light house end. There's a little beach there too with a row boat pulled up. Notice from this high angle you can see the mainland sims behind Barney's bay.

A view from the wharf. From this angle you can't see any other land. There are other sims to the right side of this picture. Check out that sea wall and the row of little houses. It was cute. There are stairs to run up and down and alleyways to pop out of.
 

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Learning to make poses and Animations

We bought the Animare HUD the other day to play around with in SecondLife. Hopefully now when we need certain poses for our machinima, I can whip them out fairly quickly...well faster than I edit video since that seems to be taking me forever.

I spent some time today making poses and trying my hand at animations. The HUD is easy to use, tho not easy to understand sometimes. The HUD has a picture of the body with the joints. You click on a joint, then you can rotate it, move it forward or back, move it in or out...in a range of set increments that aren't always as small as you'd like for some tiny refinements. Here are pics of two static poses I made for a standing avatar and a lounge position that i'm pretty happy with.

Lounging poolside..that's me. The lounger is ugly as sin I know...it's 2 prims i pushed together quickly to put the pose into to test. I need to look for some modifiable full perm furniture I guess. I was actually thinking this would be good in a window seat. But now I really want to see it in a pool side beach chair. ANd I want to make it into an animation...with tapping foot, maybe an arm waving away a bug.

I called this one Whooops...since it looks like the avie is falling

I called this one Happy to See You...it kind of looked like someone jumping into the arms of another person they were happy to see.

A note added on Saturday evening
It is really tough to find info on animations and poses for SL. I'm trying to figure out the layout of the data in teh .bvh file that gets imported into SL. I found one source that said it starts with the hip..but not sure what is the order of the other joints. I want to be able to tweak the .bvh file in case i mess up the animare pose or in case i want a little finer movements.

A new version of the 2nd episode

We're having fun...in this episode you get to hear my voice! And we have a great fight scene




More action planned for the next episode..I hope to whack Percy the Pliers with a bottle (why..because it's int he wrestling HUD we're using and it just sounds like it would look cool)

Places to see some SL machinima

Image via WikipediaTHere are several "television networks" for programming made in SecondLife. All these networks have scheduled shows, live feeds, websites, and ways to talk about the shows. And many of them have ways for you to share your machinima with the world too.


Metaverse TV - http://metaversetv.com/
They have a variety of programming - news, fashion shows, comedy. They just started a new show called Claim the Fame that seems to be for fashion designers. You can watch on their web site or on YouTube and Blip.tv. I was watching an episode of the Stylist of the Year contest. The production values are really high on these shows, good sound, interesting visuals.  They have a news program, MBC News, about many virtual worlds that I am going to start watching regularly. I made a post with one of their programs embedded from YouTube.

Treet.tv - http://treet.tv/
They have 2 "channels" - entertainment and business, with a variety of programs on each channel. I go to the Metanomics presentations in world. Treet.tv shows those on the business channel along with tech news programming. On entertainment they have a variety of SL sports including giant snail races, dirt bike races, sailing and hockey. There are arts and literature programs as well as a weekly fashion program and a trivia program, The 1st Question, hosted by Pooky Amsterdam . You can watch on their website or in SecondLife using a special tv viewer they created. Their shows have ads.

Metamix TV - http://metamixtv.com/
THis group is new/old. They took over an existing network (rezzed.tv) and are building a new sim, putting together a new show lineup. It's headed up by Flimsey Freenote, Chantal Harvey, Toxic Menges, Kit2Kat, and Phaylen Fairchild. SL wrestling will be on this network as is coverage of Simball matches. They host "The Phoenix Hour" with developers of the Phoenix third party viewer. They have a variety of talk, opinion, and reality programming. They plan to broadcast in HD. They interrupt their programming with advertisements. Here is one of their shows.

spoton3d on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Virtual World Network VNW1 - http://www.virtualworldnetwork.tv/
This network has shows on fashion and art, and sports like automobile racing and wrestling.

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Sound Ideas

So I"m working on my machinima with Marc, my machinima buddy. I gave it a title..a working title, but one I like...It's called "Till Death Do Us Part"

It's not a comedy...duh!

Anyway..all machinima needs sound effects and voices and background music.

Here are some resources. Some I found, some Marc found, and some were suggested by the people at Machinima Monday. BTW, If you're making movies in SecondLIfe, you should join this group and come to the meetings on Mondays, usually at 2pm SLT and 7pm SLT.

Wikipedia page about copyleft and out of copyright music - mostly classical music. On the Mac, you ALT left click on the file name to download it. Not sure what you PC folks do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list

Freesound.org - database of Creative Commons licensed sounds/sound effects (not music). You enter keywords and get lists of sounds so tagged. You can see the other keywords used to help you find what you want. Then ALT left click to download
http://www.freesound.org/

ccmixter.org - database of Creative Commons licensed music remixes.
http://www.ccmixter.org/

Music Discovery Center - the search tool for ccmixter. I don't see keywords listed on selected songs like i did for freesound.org so it's a little tougher to find what ya want. Maybe just a matter of me playing with it some more.
http://dig.ccmixter.org/

Free Music Archive - you can sort by genre and then listen to selected tracks. Be sure to check the licenses but it seems that most are free to use for non-commercial projects
http://freemusicarchive.org/

Actors' Sandbox - voice actors hang out here. They're running a workshop for voice actors. If you need people to speak in your movie, this might be a group/place to check out. I just found out about this at today's Machinima Monday. As I find out more, I'll update this.
https://sites.google.com/a/schoolhouseearth.org/tutorial--sites/Home/actors-sandbox

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iMovie coolness

I just discovered I can crop clips. My machinima buddy, Marc, sent a clip with black bars on the side and of course I managed to ruin a few takes filming underlying window edges. Now I can maybe use all that footage! Thanks iMovie


and maybe I should read the documentation....nnnnnnaaaaaawwwwww

My turn as Director

We - my machinima buddy and I - started a new project today, one based on a story idea I had. This is the first time I"ve been the editor and director. I made a lot of mistakes but fortunately my buddy was patient while i got the software working. He was trying to be nice when he said my project was ambitious. I'm sure he was thinking...that girl is nuts...gonna crash and burn...but he didn't say it. Thanks!

Anyone in RL will tell you..i am a slow still photograph taker. I like to line things up just so and try different angles and amounts of zoom..all before I take a picture. Maybe why i take so few people pictures in RL...trees and rocks and the sky sit around and wait for me. I digress.

I laid out a list of the scenes I want in my video, in 2 column format. And we started shooting...and my well thought out scenes fell apart. I needed some transitions. Some scenes needed changes to be more logical in the flow of the movie.

I've been trying to pick out places to film. One  was a plaza with an awesome fountain. When I'm places normally, i don't notice things like advertisements and tip jars and store windows. It took time today to lay out the camera angles and think where the actor could move. At the Machinima Monday meeting the other day someone mentioned putting up transparent walls to keep the actors in the shot; now I see what they were saying. It's difficult to explain what you're seeing on your screen to the actors; walls would stop them before they got out of the shot.

Here's some footage i started editing. It's from an early scene. There's no audio yet. Just to give you an idea of what i did today




Mistakes I made today
- filming away..and then noticed i was in the shot in the background
- managed to make the filming window in Snapz not as big as the window of Secondlife
- managed to move the SecondLife window but not the edit window, so i filmed some windows that were under SecondLife...that is really irritating because I got a good shot..and don't think i can trim that line of garbage off the left edge
- filmed things before they were completely rezzed
- realized without an external mic, I can't do voice to give directions to my actors when i have the SecondLife interface turned off
- realized i need to think more about motion...moving the actors, moving the camera.

Poses for machinima

Working with avatars has some advantages over working with people...hair always looks good, avatars often have amazingly varied inventories to draw on for props, and they can stand without fidgeting (if you take off their AOs of course) while you set up your shot.

There is one drawback though that I've run into so far...you can't just tell your actor/avatar..oh move your hand higher..or grab them around the neck. Well, technically you CAN tell them..they just can't do it. Without poses and animations that is

The pose fair is going on now till the 15th of April on a sim called Postura. There must be a hundred stores here. You can buy loaded AOs, individual poses and pose packs for singles and couples, furniture with poses built in, and cool things to pose with for photos. For instance {what next} has a rowboat with poses in it - photographers must love those things. Here's their SLURL at the pose fair - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Postura/153/241/26  and a picture of their little space showing the rowboat.

Here's a pic of another cool prop..a brick wall to lean on. It's from Glitterati - they have a huge real world store with poses and props. Here's the slurl to their store at the fair - http://slurl.com/secondlife/Postura/125/242/26

As a new machinima maker, I"m trying to decide what kinds of poses I need. And looking hard for animations. Probably need to invest in some specialty HUDS.

Then there's the problem of getting your actors to have the right animations..because a lot of them are no transfer...grrrrr.

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Another Green Screen Attempt

Image via Wikipedia - not me or my avatar!The only thing i could find online about the sort of xray look some of my green screen videos had was that iMOvie didn't like perfectly flat green screens, which was exactly what i had in SecondLife. So I redid the green screen, changed the surface to be kind of a rough plaster look to add a little variation to the. And I"ve been shooting me walking. I used an animation that i had so i walked in place, that way i didn't have to worry about the edges of the green screen.

Now i have to figure out the whole size thing...how far away to shoot the avatar to make them look normal size in the video. And where to put the camera.  The hard part..but at least I think with experimentation I can figure this part out.

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A TIp picked up at the Machinima Monday meeting

Machinima Monday is a group in SecondLife tath meets most Mondays at 3pm SLT. Lots of folks there, all interested in making movies using platforms like SecondLife and World of Warcraft. People show off current projects and ask for help. Sometimes Chantal Harvey puts updates about the group on her blog - http://mamachinima.blogspot.com/

My machinima buddy asked yesterday and Fraps and screen size. We learned  that some software like Fraps and Xfire (both PC products that record the screen) record the whole screen. There's a preference you can set in SecondLife to make SL run in a window and hten you can set the size and resolution. You can pick one that's a 16:9 ratio when you're recording in HD.

On the Mac I use Snapz and i can draw a box with that software and it records only what's in that box. I haven't played around with that much. Not sure what it looks like in playback if you record just a little box recorded.

Continuity

As we start to edit the 2nd episode of our spy thriller we discovered we need to reshoot a scene (because we forgot to move the mouse out of the way...see the checklist I posted earlier).  The problem is I can't remember exactly what i was wearing.

In machinima, just as in RL video productions, continuity is important. There are at least three ways to deal with it. I'd say consider a combination of steps. I"m going to be doing steps one and two frm now on.

1. Take still photos. That gives you a sense of where things were in the shot, where th ecamera was. You can save them to the hard drive (costs nothing) and share them with the crew on flickr or in a google doc.
2. Save the outfit in your inventory. Give it a name like name of production, name of scene or location, maybe the date of the shoot. The new viewers just put links to the clothing into the outfit so it doens't increse the size of your inventory. Be sure to include any props or specialized HUDS you have attached to you in the shot.
3 Create a notecard and write down the names of things you were wearing and any notes about the scene. This is a good technique especilaly if you're using a viewer that doesn't use the new folder structure. This wil keep copies of clothing from cluttering up your inventory.

FIlming Checklist

Image via WikipediaThis is a post that will probably be edited many times as I learn more about making machinima in SecondLife - a checklist for things to do before you start the cameras rolling. Hopefully if I follow these steps I won't have to reshoot so many takes.

CheckList as of 3/17/11

• Check for other avatars on the radar - maybe warn them you're filming
• Turn off HUDs - ALT-SHIFT-H
• Turn off interface - CTRL-ALT-F1
• Move the mouse out of the shot

A Machinima Resource for the SecondLife Community

I found the machinima forum on the SecondLife Community page this morning. I have been around SL awhile but I admit I've never read the forums and blogs closely. So this is probably not a new-to-you resource, but it was to me.

URL: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Machinima/bd-p/Machinima

People advertise/announce their machinima projects on the site. There are some posts about tools to use. And users have some posts looking for cast and crew for their projects in case you want to get started by helping on other people's projects or you have the acting bug. So looks like it might be useful on a couple of different levels.

Some assorted links

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Green Screen

I decided to try to do some green screen clips...film my avatar in SL before a green screen and superimpose her on some real life footage. I filmed the beach when we were in Florida...waves rolling, seagulls squawking. It's nothing exciting but thought it was plain enough i could easily put my avie in there without worrying about walking over people in the RL footage.

I built a green screen studio in SecondLife. It's a big cylinder and floor *didn't put a roof but may need to because sometimes the camera moves up sometimes as you walk and the shot of blue sky messes up. Here are a couple of shots of the studio with my avatar in it. I"m the little tiny dot since my camera is pulled way up. I used a megaprim to make the studio and colored the cylinder and the floor prim *another megaprim* just basic green.

Here's a closeup of me in the studio. You can see the seam where the cylinder meets the floor.

I played around with the windlight settings and found that one called Nam Optimal Skin1 completely wiped out that line. I took a couple of pictures with that setting. No Seam! I gotta tell ya tho - makes walking hard because there's no clue where the walls are. And sometimes you'll run into the wall and your camera will go outside. Not sure how to deal with that yet.

Here's a bit of the footage i shot in the green screen. It's not very exciting. Remember I mentioned the fact that there are no clues to where the walls are? Well that means it kind of looks like my avatar is walking in place.

Why isn't there a clip of the final product? iMovie seems to make it very very easy to do green screen..there's an option in the menu for goodness sakes. I'm doing something wrong...and yes, I can boil water and I can walk and chew gum. But. at this point i keep getting xray looking results for my avatar.  The two clips individually look just fine. I drop the avatar footage on the real life footage, pick green screen..and wham...xray. Not what I wanted at all. So hopefully I'll figure it out and add a paragraph and a clip..very soon..*fingers crossed*

Here's a clip with problems..that xray issue I mentioned and fuzzy footage. Not sure what happened.

ANd here's a clip that worked..strange content I realize but I got these great wrestling action figures from my machinima buddy and wanted to play with them. No I wouldn't play with them on the beach normally. But I haven't found any good old school wrestling footage yet.

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New focus for a bit

Since I"m not teaching this year...I haven't been doing anything in SL with students. So I haven't been posting much. However, I am starting to get into making machinima...movies in SecondLife. I always hoped the students would get into making machinima as a way to use their media making skills combined with what htey learned in SL, but no one ever took me up on it. So, now I"m going to give it a shot. A friend and I have started making an episodic spy movie. We're not filming in order *laughs*...we filmed a bit that was fun, then decided we needed some back story and we'll need some kind of ending. So we're filming around our initial bit. Kind of like writing a research paper...we'll probably need to go back and reshoot the first bit to take advantage of what we've learned along the way.

We're also talking about shooting a video for the machinima contest sponsored by the University of We
Image via Wikipediastern Australia, a college that is really active in SL. We're still kicking around ideas for the story for this video, but probably it will be a drama. You have to start or end your movie at the SL recreation of their famous clocktower, seen in the picture over there (somewhere...look around..you'll find it in this post) We know we're up against very stiff competition. We'll learn a lot about moving making and have fun, both of which are our main goals for the project.

I'm going to play around with green screen so I can put my avatar into RL footage. I took some shots at the beach in florida; I think my avatar will look cool walking on the beach in some boardie shorts and shades. Look for a link to that in the near future.

Here are a couple of links:

• the initial version of our spy video mentioned in the first paragraph..no, the woman's voice is not me - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqAz6I8EhN8
• the official SecondLife channel on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/Secondlife
• videos by Toxic Menges on YouTube (she's an active machinima maker in SL) - http://www.youtube.com/user/toxicmenges
• videos by Chantal Harvey on YouTube (another active machinima maker who organizes annual machinima festivals in SL) - http://www.youtube.com/user/ChantalHarvey

We're playing around with some different toys - camera HUDs, fight systems, animations for holding guns. In the next few posts, I"ll talk about some of them.

Here are some links to other assorted sites and news

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Some other stuff I did today in SL

I went to a couple of events that visually were very cool -

The first was an exhibit at an art gallery I like. the exhibit was about machinima. It wasn't a how to exhibit or here are examples kind of exhibit. They had video tetures all over hte gallery - walls, ceiling, floor - so that when you starting playing the machinima, it was everywhere. They even had a big ball in the sky theatre. It was like being inside a video kaleidoscope. Here are a couple of pictures. The machinima was filmed at a performance of Chicago at the Moulin Rouge. I tried to grab a pic with bright colors. Here the curtains are shutting at the end of an act. You can see the video on the wall in front of you on the small screen, on the right side of hte picture covering the whole wall, and on the rug.

Here's a picture from the top floor of the exhibit. The video is on the blanket on the floor, on the screen on the wall, and on the bedspread.

Here's a couple of pictures of the videoball in the sky. The machima plays all over the outside of the sphere and then is all over inside like being inside a giant kaleidoscope.

 

 

 

Then tonight I went dancing (again - no pictures of me dancing, I promise). The person hosting the dance was Tuna OddFellow. The music was...strange, irritating..The real reason we were all there was for the light show. Spinning graphics, particle effects, floating spheres

 

 

A video that shows off many gorgeous sites in SecondLife

Dusan Writer has a link to this video on his blog

It's worth checking out. And if you want to how someone the possibilities in SL, show them this video. The creators used a lot of the Windlight settings for sky and water (no final cut magic) so it looks gorgeous. It shows some creative builds and amazing scenery. And it has music by Maximillian Kleene




Life is Wonderful: SecondLife 2009 - - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g-NLnMxSyQ