Machinimoo

Relay For Life is having a carnival this weekend, and as W-Hat team co-captain, I gathered the troops to make a build for our plot. We have a sky tower, gravitron, and our very own take on “It’s a Small World” with “It’s a Small Ham”. Enjoy the song and come to the carnival this weekend!

MP3 File

After the success of the Alt-Zoom Studios Take5 Machinima Festival, and discussion the following day, at SLCC 2006, I was asked to be in charge of planning my very own track for SLCC. SLCC is the Second Life Community Convention, which will be held in Chicago on August 24th-26th at the Hilton. Now in it’s third year, it’s hard to believe that the original one had just a day of content!

SLCC is divided into four tracks this year: Business, Education, Social, and Machinima. I am so honored to be overseeing the Machinima track in it’s entirety. I won’t be alone, though! I found a great helper in Sidra Stern, a fellow SL Machinima enthusiast. Much thought has gone into the type of topics that will be discussed. I noticed that my SLCC page for Machinima over on the official blog was looking a bit sparse, so I figured I’d better start sharing what I have in store!

Confirmed:

• Keynotes for both Saturday and Sunday. One will be BuhBuhCuh Fairchild, one of SL’s founding fathers of Machinima. The other will be the ILL Clan, seasoned Machinima veterans and makers of Trash Talk with Ill Will.
• Global Kids, led by Barry Joseph, will highlight some of what they do during their intern program, included teen made Machinima. We’ll even have some teens speaking!
• Reallusion, makers of Crazy Talk and iClone, will be on-hand to explain how their technology can help with Second Life Machinima.
• Michael Verdi, of freevlog, will highlight how Machinima can be used to vlog with Second Life avatars.
• A basic Machinima class on the big screen, plus a surprise guest that will show us proper editing techniques.

Tentative:

• Will be asking Campfire, a viral marketing company started by two of the people that made The Blair Witch Project, to explain how viral marketing can work with Machinima.
• Content companies will be on a panel about why they choose to use Machinima and why their clients now insist on it.

Do these sound like interesting sessions? I’d love some community feedback on what you’d like to see. If you’re interested in going to SLCC and involved in Machinima, please let me know!

On another note, Millions of Us is the lead sponsor, but the Machinima track still has a sponsorship slot open and it’s a great deal. Please contact me if you’re serious about sponsoring.

If you have general feedback, please leave a comment below this post, but if you’d like to leave a more serious note or interest in sponsoring, please email me.

The 14th and final episode of the machinima series* is being released tonight and Strange Company requests your attendance! After this, the series will be made into a feature-length movie.

Come hang out with Hugh Hancock, of Strange Company, and also one of the coiners of the word “machinima”, and your fellow machinimists on Lukanida. IM moo Money for a TP!

*There was some confusion so I’d like to clarify that this is machinima that is filmed in Neverwinter Nights.

From the Bloodspell website:

It is a story of a world where men and women carry magic in their blood, and spilling it can unleash terrible power.

Where these “Blooded” hide in fetid slums from the Church of the Angels, commanded by their divine masters to “cleanse” the Blood Magic.

Where choices are fraught, alliances rarely safe, and blood is all.

A young monk named Jered flees the Church when his own Blood Magic is released. Now he must survive the pursuit of the Church, the gladiatorial pits of the Blooded underground, and the hidden truths of the ancient struggle. The choices he makes will tip the balance of the war between Church and Blooded, and change his world forever.

Mixing a vivid world with fast-paced action and punk attitude, we think BloodSpell will be like no film you`ve ever seen.

As much as I love machinima, my computer personally hates it. Why? Well, it’s a 1.6ghz with 1gb of ram and a 64mb video card. It cries and begs to be put out of it’s misery. Soon it will be retired…and replaced with this!

22″ widescreen, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13ghz, 2gb ram, Geforce 7600 vid card with 256mb ram, 500gb hard drive.  It’s so hot!

The Machinimasia Festival took place yesterday.  Not sure what time because of the conversion, but they haven’t announced winners yet.  The sole Second Life entry that made it, as far as I can tell, is Pierce Portocarrero’s Game Over.  He’s a finalist in the Open Category.

Did anyone else submit to this?  Why hasn’t LL made a comment on who they sent to the Festival?  Is it because only one person was nominated?  Wouldn’t that mean that Pierce should have gone?

About two weeks ago, I got an interesting IM. It said, “Hey. Wanna go to LA for the Jay-Z concert?” As the week went by, it became very real. I was suddenly on a plane to Los Angeles to perform virtual camerawork for the Millions of Us/Campfire/Leo Burnett Detroit/Pontiac (whew!) project. They staged a mock concert to go alongside the Jay-Z Hollywood Blvd concert performance on the Jimmy Kimmel concert.

It was an intense two days, going from Tuesday, the 21st, and arriving home on Thursday afternoon, the 23rd. In that time, we went through many dry runs, setting up camera angles, trying things out. Many have criticized it as an overhyped event, but to me, it was very rewarding. What they don’t understand is that for some reason, the editing room guys cut most of what was to appear on the show.

I’ve included the video so that you can see that it was indeed on a screen. If you look not at the big screen on the stage, but the smaller screen on the right of the stage, there is the feed of what I was filming. Hopefully in the future I can get another opportunity to have my work appear on live tv. In the meantime, I’m quite proud of this.  Thanks for making it happen, Pontiac!

In the grand scheme of things, there are very few machinimists in Second Life that contract out for their work. Because I promote machinima, I am often the first line of contact when someone is looking for a machinimist. I rarely take on projects because I want to provide the best opportunity I can to promote machinima, therefore I’m always recommending other machinimists. Between promoting machinima for Alt-Zoom and signing on to work for The Grid Review, I’ve realized that I’m going to have to manage my time wisely now that I have less hours.

This is probably going to sound silly to most of you, but I’ve started to project manage my own life. I’m scrapbooking transcripts, saving notes, jotting down ideas, signing up for invoicing software, signing up for time-tracking software. I’m not even sure if I’d call myself a business, but I need to manage my time in a structured way. I’m obviously going to be hit for self-employment taxes, so I need to be prepared. Record expenses, save receipts, document everything.

Why am I telling you this? I’m not sure. Lack of sanity and hope for clarity? Is there anyone else out there in Second Life that is going through the same thing? I’d like to know that I’m not alone.

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve heard of the recent debate over the LibSL Copybot. I was privy to a demo of it some days ago and the first thing I said when it copied my prims was that people were going to flip out over it. I see it from both sides, but when machinima is attacked, it’s personal.

Goldie Goodman does a great job of defending machinimists:

WHOA! Let’s please slow down. There are already devices built into the system that can make a “copy” of anything and that’s the cameras. The fact that cameras exist in SL, however, doesn’t give anyone permission to take a snapshot or shoot machinima. The issues that machinimists and photogs face in SL need to be taken into account before any “solution” is enacted to the CopyBot problem. ALL copyright implications must be considered — those that affect the replication of objects in-world, AND those that affect the taking of photographs (which by nature entails reproducing images of user-created content). Under the “first use metadata” concept , for example, anyone taking a photo of anything in SL would need to get the permission of each and every “first use” creator for each and every object that appears in the photo. Think about it. When you buy clothes for your av, your av’s name is shown as the “owner”, even though the “creator” is someone else. It seems logical that the current “owner” of the clothes — the one who bought them legitimately –should be able to take the his/her own photo, and to give permission to others to photograph his/her av wearing those clothes. The “first use metadata” concept destroys that reasonable right. There could be numerous unintended consequences. Let’s PLEASE be careful here with whatever action is taken to protect content creator’s rights.

As for Cory Linden’s take on the issue, he states this in a separate blog entry:

Please recognize that using the Terms of Service is not a permanent solution. Nor is it shift in Linden Lab’s support of libsecondlife (who have removed CopyBot from their Subversion repository), machinima creators, or others who have explored Second Life beyond the features of the Second Life client. I continue to feel that libsecondlife is an incredibly important part of Second Life’s development and community.

I ask you PLEASE to keep a clear head when considering reporting people for using your content in their machinimas. There is a high probability that they have purchased what is being used in their scenes. I really hope that we can all come to some sort of harmonious agreement.

Questions? Comments? Thoughts?

Yes, that’s right! Pierce is selling the avatars that have made his machinimas a hit! These bad boys feature all the hand-drawn goodness that you can expect from an OddWadd creation.

Are you a girl brain-eating zombie that fancies a boy brain-eating zombie so you can become so happy that your head explodes? Are you trying to save the world from a mutating virus? Domo Arigato? These avatars are for you!  You can get them here.

Also, check out Pierce’s funny take on ageplayers in his new commercial:

Bebop Vox, of Natural Selection Studios, has released a tutorial on the Second Life camera controls. This is only the first part of their new series, Noob Be Gone. I look forward to seeing what else they come up with!