Submit your machinima to 4mations

4mations, an animation company based in Bristol, UK and backed by Channel 4, Aardman Animations and Lupus Films, will start offering cash prizes next month for animations uploaded to its Web site.

I've checked with them and machinima made in Second Life (or other MUVEs for that matter) are eligible for the prizes.

So, if you're feeling creative, why not give it a go?

Dorkbot

The Dorkbot session that has been arranged for 6 July 1:00 pm PDT / 22:00 CET at the Odyssey Simulator sounds good, particularly to people with an interest in machinima:

JJ Ventrella (a.k.a. Ventrella Linden) will present the avatar puppeteering project. A project motivated to bring more expression to the avatar, by enabling a more fluid and direct way to manipulate the ‘physical avatar’. This is a Linden Lab project that unfortunetely was ‘put to sleep’ as Linden Lab decided to focus on the stability of Second Life and internal opinions differed over how compelling the feature really is. Last month however, Linden Lab released the client source code of this project, to allow other people to build on it (and convince them otherwise).

Apart from anything else, the name is great!

SCREENBURN_

Via a tweet from Peregrine Juneau I found SCREENBURN_, latest offering from Robbie Dingo (who is always worth watching). SCREENBURN_ is a short story being told thru the medium of machinima podcasts.

WeGame, machinima and sheep

Torley Linden has written a useful review of WeGame - effectively a YouTube for gamers but with a free, lightweight, downloadable tool for creating machinima. Looks pretty neat so I thought I'd try it out.

As Torley says, it's very easy to register, install and configure the software and get going. 10 minutes and you'll have uploaded your first machinima. Looks useful for quickly recording events and the like, where you want more than just an image. Quality looks pretty good also - though the embedded version below doesn't look to have coped with my widescreen format (the version on the WeGame site is OK)..

Here's my first attempt showing firstly, the Machinima Commons stuff that I've added to Eduserv Island and secondly, some jet powered sheep (which I originally built so that Second Friends could throw them at each other, but which since seem to have gained a more animated life of their own).

MC in-world object

I've added a simple in-world rotating Machinima Commons sign to the welcome area on Eduserv Island. The sign hands out a notecard indicating that the land is ok to film on. Feel free to use - buy a copy of the object for L$0 and tweak the 'Give notecard' script to hand out the correct notecard.

Machinima Commons

There's been a thread of discussion recently on the SL Machinima list about whether it is necessary to ask permission before filming on someone else's SL land. There doesn't seem to be a clear answer on this... which tends to make me think that it is probably best to ask when in doubt.

Some of that doubt could be removed by agreeing a mechanism for Second Life land-owners to explicitly state whether it is OK for machinima-making to take place within a given region and, if so, what conditions apply (non-profit only, attribution must be given, etc.). Hey, it sounds a bit like Creative Commons doesn't it??

I wonder whether what we need is a set of simple Machinima Commons 'licences' (MC) which could be added to the in-world description of a region. I suspect that we only need two:

MC BY - This region may be used in machinima provided attribution is given.

MC BY-NC - This region may be used in machinima provided attribution is given and the resulting work is used only for non-commercial purposes.

My attempt at an MC icon is shown above. This is available in various sizes from Flickr.

MC licences (if they existed) would indicate an allowable use of a region of land. They are not intended to be used as the licence under which the resulting machinima is made available - Creative Commons or some other content licence would be used for that.

There is now a machinima-friendly page in the SL Wiki which can be used to indicate that you allow filming on your sim. My suspicion is that this approach will not work very well - it will only ever have partial coverage and, like many registries, will probably go out of date fairly quickly. In general, it is better to keep this kind of information as close to the content as possible.

Machinima multiplex

Alan Levine at NMC has created a nice multiplex of machinima on Youtube.

Dunno what the collective noun is for machinima... but multiplex kinda captures it?! :-)

Watch the World(s)

Watch the World(s) is a great example of the kind of machinima that can be created using the SL client and a bunch of artistic skill. I wish I had the patience and skill to do this kind of thing.

Bollox...

I've realised why the quality of the SL videos I've uploaded to YouTube is a bit naff. I have a widescreen laptop, which is where I've tended to do the initial capture (using FRAPS). I then edit and mix down using Audacity (for the audio) and Windows Movie Maker for the video. I save the resulting video in 4:3 aspect ratio 640x480 resolution movie file, which is what gets uploaded to YouTube.

The change in aspect ratio compresses things sideways and reduces the quality enough to make text unreadable.

I'll do better in future... by capturing on my other screen which has a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Sorry.

My first YouTube video

I've just uploaded my first video to YouTube. Nothing very exciting I'm afraid, just an explanation of how to see and hear streaming media. The soundtrack is also rather bizarre, but I felt it needed something to cover up my voice(!) and this was the first public domain MP3 track I found.



You'll also note that YouTube uses the opening frame as the static shot of the video. In this case, the opening frame is blank... so in future I need to work on getting a sensible opening shot to make the video content more obvious to potential viewers. Also, my laptop tends to create videos in wide screen format by default, which then get squished in 4:3 aspect ratio at some point in the uploading to YouTube process.

Still, it was fun to put together. For those with a technical interest, I captured the video using FRAPS, the soundtrack using Audacity and edited it all together using Windows Movie Maker.

SJSU SLIS machinima

Eight letters... quite a mouthful! But the machinima that summarises the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science island (OK, I see why they shortened it to eight letters now!) is very nice. I'm secretly wanting to play with creating a movie about Eduserv Island, but there's not quite enough there yet and I don't have enough free time :-(.

Camera controls

I just came across this video tutorial by Torley Linden about how to use your camera controls.

This isn't particularly new or anything, but well worth watching if you haven't done so already. Although I've been aware of these kinds of videos for some time, I've never bothered sitting down and watching them.



Lots of neat SL client tips and tricks in this.