New World Notes

If you like J-Pop, you'll love this aggressively cute video featuring Piatto, a Japanese girl group that exists only in Second Life. (As William Gibson might call them, "Idoru".) Even if you don't, you'll still admire the great production values and editing:

Piatto's machinima video comes recommended from NWN style columnist Iris Ophelia, who's also a ravenous consumer of Japanese pop culture. "They're dead on as an SL mirror of what real life Japanese girl groups are like," she tells me, "that's why the video really stands out to me. If it wasn't Second Life avatars it could EASILY be a RL J-Pop video."

To make this machinima he calls "Metamorphosis", Spyvsspy Aeon translated a Portuguese poem into English, put the verses into beautifully rendered subtitles, then complemented them with sweeping, gorgeously rendered shots from famous virtual landscapes created AM Radio. Watch:

The link to this machinima by Japanese Second Life Resident Porcorosso Ackmann has sat in my inbox for a couple months, probably because after I saw it one night at 3am, I woke the next morning thinking it had been part of my own fever dreams. But no, there apparently was a dance party for someone named DJ Yaz Rocket...

... which somehow devolved into a battle royale between King Kong and the Battleship Yamato, an X-Wing, a corvette convertible, an ornithopter, a miniature solar system, a purple elephant with karate skills, a dragon, a battle ostrich, and maybe a dozen more combatants I can't quite qualify. I guess. All to the score of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain", of course, and beautifully photographed.

This year's Sundance Film Festival opened late last week, and one of the very first movies to launch the event was "Life 2.0", the feature length documentary on Second Life by Jason Spingarn-Koff (known in SL as Jay Spire). Here's an excellent article on the making of the movie on Sundance's site. I've been exchanging brief text messages with Jason, who presumably is sending them while trudging through the Park City snow and jostling into James Franco and other stars with movies also screening there. The premiere, he told me, was "amazing", and sent along this recap of the screening he wrote for the Independent Filmmaker Project blog. Sample:

The crowd was lively -- more laughs than I expected -- and responded as I hoped to the dramatic ups and downs... As I take shuttles around snowy Park City, I'm running into a surprising number of people who have seen or heard of the film and want to chat about virtual worlds and the implications for society.

He also tipped me to three new clips on the movie's homepage, two featuring the deep if troubled romance of Amie Goode and Bluntly Berblinger, and one featuring the impressible content creator Ms. Asri Falcone, matching machinima footage taken from within SL to video and/or audio interviews of their real life owners. Stay tuned: If all goes well for Jason, a film/TV/Internet distribution deal may be in the offing.

"Decay" by Toxic Menges is a lovely two minute montage of rich and luminous visuals, perfectly matched to an audio track that gives it all a surreal, dream-like hue. (Contains artistic nudity.) Ms. Menges is also ace with straight-ahead narrative machinima, like this retelling of "The Princess and the Peak", and journalistic virtual videography, as with this performance video of Charles Bristol she generously shot for New World Notes.

Total War is a new Second Life combat game system from Tokuno Wind, an SL developer run a Resident named Teclo Flow. It's billed as being compatible with weapons made for most of the other major SL combat systems, such as DCS2 and CCS, and comes with a very elegant HUD display. Here's a demo video:

Worth a deeper look if you're looking for a game system. Read more about it here.

"the fool in the JunkYard" is a wonderful marriage of Second Life dynamic shadows and setting -- in this case, the junkyard of the Wasteland, a popular post-apocalyptic roleplaying zone in SL. An ideal setting to re-imagine the Beatles' masterpiece "Fool on the Hill" for the metaverse:

Shot last year but only just coming to my attention recently, the machinima is by aston Leisen, who in real life is a new media art professor living near Shanghai. (And consequently, he reports difficulty getting through The Great Firewall to upload it to YouTube.) "[I] found [the Wasteland] years ago when I first came to Second Life," he tells me. Those sims amazed me, how beautiful it was, and how far the 'user generated content' could go."

The sepia tone was achieved with Mescaline Tammas' WindLight settings. To capture the dizzying footage, Mr. Leisen used a 3Dconnexion to control SL's flycam, while using his free hand to keep his avatar (the rusty robot star of the machinima) running. "Took a little practice," he notes with classic understatement, "Then I was able to enjoy those movements." Update, 5:35pm: As readers have already surmised, Leisen tells me in another message, "The video was captured from Kirsten's Shadow viewer with a Gforce8800 card, had to sacrificed some frame rate for those shadows."

Thanks to Ms. Bettina Tizzy for the find!

Here's a warm but melancholy machinima for a cold Tuesday morning, brought to you by expressionist master Lyric Lundquist, who I profiled last year. In "trix", she combines Second Life footage with real video of herself and her girlfriend, Kelly, and blends that together into a heavily post-processed flurry of deep texture and color. She says the song that accompanies it, "You Don't Know Me," by Apparat, is deeply personal, and so is the inspiration for making the machinima in the first place. "[I]t was an outrageously cathartic process making it after I went through something emotionally tragic in real life," Lyric writes in her director's notes, and when I ask what she means by that, only offers this opaque reply: "Monogamy is a tricky thing, isn't it?"

So it is. And so is making something that's so visually hypnotic, it seems like neither machinima nor real life video. Lyric shares some post-production secrets and credits after the break:

This atmospheric machinima from Loki Eliot is the teaser for a murder mystery adventure game set in New Babbage, the steampunk town. Called "Shadow of the 13" (official website here), which nicely integrates a web experience with SL interaction. If it's half as god as the machinima, it must be capital entertainment indeed. "New Babbage is a town built on Mystery," as Loki puts it to me inscrutably. "This January an old name shall once again be whispered... and a hidden truth shall be rediscovered. It all starts with a small box."

And no, Master Eliot insists, the fact that this is a murder mystery set in a fantastic Victorian England has nothing to do with a suspiciously familiar certain popular Robert Downey Jr. movie. "The Sherlock Holmes thing is complete coincidence since I had planned to do this roleplay back in October but got side tracked by Burning Life." If you do brave this mystery, dear reader, be sure to report your findings back here!

Here's two recently uploaded Second Life machinima worth watching, both of them narrative. The first, "The Joy Of Music" by Chantal Harvey, is a weirdly whimsical child's fable, evoking a Dr. Seuss story rendered in 3D, with the wonderful musical instrument avatars of Madcow Cosmos and Lorin Tone, and resonant vocal narration by Lauren Weyland, who eerily sounds like George Clooney with a New York accent:

The pacing is perhaps a touch too slow, and the lead character too inexpressive, but overall a very accomplished production. Next up is some kickass action from Lowe Runo, part one (!) of a series appropriately dubbed "Action Flick". Very slick photography, foley work, and post-processing effects, including the obligatory (and nicely done) "bullet time" shot:

Some of the vocal acting seems a bit flat or off (not sure if the beleaguered niece is supposed to be 12 or 24), as is some of the action scene continuity. (Then again, that never hurt Michael Bay.)

Narrative machinima is generally a more challenging format to than non-linear montage, and these are both fairly solid attempts. I'd definitely love to see more storytelling in SL machinima.

Hat tip for Chantal's video: Bettina!