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)

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)

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.

Some Related articles

• Why is it a green screen instead of a blue screen? (grand-alliance.com)
• Green Screen Effects In Latest Harry Potter Film (chromakeygreenscreen.wordpress.com)
• How to Make a Green Screen (brighthub.com)
• Selecting Digital Backgrounds for Green Screen Use (brighthub.com)

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

Related articles

• Machinima.com - Machinima.com (itunes.apple.com)
• Machinimas at the GAMERZ festival (we-make-money-not-art.com)