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)