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.

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)