ZOMG!ing - Making machinima in Second Life

Yes, I realise that I'm a little behind the times here but I'm catching up. For the last two days I've been up in Sydney at The Virtual Story - Machinima and Virtual Worlds seminar/workshop put on by LAMP(Laboratory of Advanced Media Production) at the AFTRS (Australian Film TV and Radio school).

Suffice to say it's been extraordinarily cool and my head is still swimming with the information and ideas that I've been exposed to.

In case you're wondering, machinima is the art of creating animation using computer games. It's possible to capture the action on the screen (controlled by one or more players), add your own vocals and other sounds and export it as a finished video.

Red Vs Blue, based on the Halo series of games, is one of the most well known examples.



The beauty of machinima is that it allows anyone with a basic understanding of games and movie making to create their own films, free of the restraints of budget and the limitations of reality (gravity etc).

There's way too much to cover right now but if you have an interest in a particular game, the odds are pretty good that you can toddle over to YouTube (or your video sharing site of choice) and run a quick search for machinima + that game and find something interesting. (You might find something shiteful as well but that's the chance you take)

We spent a fair chunk of time working in Second Life(SL), a massive online virtual world community and the possibilities of this place are still rocking my world. I've had a brief look around there before but got a little overwhelmed by the controls - having a bit of face to face support made a big difference.

One of the main speakers was an amazing guy, Gary Wisniewski, who runs a Second Life tv station called Second Life Cable Network. They stream multicam shoots of events and regular programmes in the game - everything from Ice Hockey matches and Giant Snail races to concerts, movie launches (e.g Transformers and Bruce Willis launching Die Hard 4.0) and educational conferences. I had a chance to talk to this guy for a few hours at the airport on the way back (in the Qantas club lounge - thanks for that champ) and the things people are doing in this world are astounding me.

I even worked on a short SL machinima with a cool girl from Canberra - who funnily enough is friends with the woman I work next to. (This is a very Canberra thing - if you bump into someone new, the odds are fair that they'll know someone that you do)

I couldn't fit all of the shots that we did onto my 2GB thumbdrive (time for an upgrade) but here are a couple of them - featuring my avatar Figjam Tomorrow and her (and her partner's) Ford Frederiksson.



This is a rough cut of part of Episode 2 of Quest for Mokador - a machinima I'm making in Second Life with the highly talented Katie H. The guy (Figjam) is a noob who's trying to get the attention of the peacefully meditating Ford to ask her about the mythical SL land of Mokador. It isn't until he bends over and shouts that he gets her attention.
(Figjam still has a thing or two to learn about in-world manners)

There's no sound but the live voicing we did during the screening was pretty funny - stay tuned for that one.

A few lessons to learn - don't leave the cursor on the movie while you are capturing. :)

This was cut together in Windows Movie Maker in about 10 minutes.

I'll bang on a little more about this later I'm sure.

Attending: the virtual story machinima seminar

Pretty interesting so far. More info soon.

Making: the second lamest first person shooter ever

Previously on Couch Media: Making the lamest first person shooter ever




Well I've returned to the game making software again for another uni project - this time I'm creating a slightly more open environment that gives the player a few more choices. It's all about finding out what services and knowledge people can access from my team, Flexible Learning Solutions.

This is all for my subject Instructional Strategies and Authoring and it's about creating a democratic learning environment - one where the learner can control what they learn, what form this takes and what order they access the material.

If you're super keen to find out more you can read the full design statement over on my edublog.

I'm using FPS Creator again because it's package I'm most familiar with- it occurs to me that I could (and possibly should) try to move over to Second Life or similar 3D gamespace (such as Multiverse or Croquet) but I like that I don't have to create any 3D objects in FPSC, so I'll stick with that for now. (Although I am going to need to get some created failry soon for this game - lucky we have a hot shot 3D modeller on the team and this is work related and all. Have I mentioned how much I love my job sometimes :)

Anyway, I'll keep you posted - I could probably stand to tighten up the video a little, there are a few irrelevant parts but overall it's on track.

Here are a couple of screenshots as well that illustrate what it might look like when I've colour coded the room. (This is done to make navigation a little easier and to more closely like learning/multimedia resources with particular topics)

Wearing: Silence is golden, tape is silver tshirt

Growing up in a shiftworker house, where quiet time during the day is a must, I'm a quiet person. I've also always been a relatively curious person I think, with a broad interest in a lot of things that go on around me and a desire to understand the hows and whys behind them.

It's for this reason that it's my personal conviction that many people talk too much and don't listen anywhere near enough. (When I say listen, I mean genuinely listen as well, not just plan what you are going to say next while you wait for the other person to stop talking)

So here's my crackpot theory #56 - our ears/mouth ratio should reflect the listening/talking that we do. In a conversation between 2 people then, you spend a 1/3 of the time speaking and 2/3s of the time listening. Obviously this means that 1/3 of this time would be in silence where you can both reflect on what you've both been saying - what it means, how they feel about it, how you feel about it, why you said it and whether the other person wanted to hear it in the first place.

Then again, sometimes I just get like this when I've been earbashed by someone when all I wanted to do was read the paper in peace. :)

Anyway, this is why I like the tshirt that the PC got me a while back - while it might seem to have a slightly sinister tinge to it, I think there's a lot to be said for quiet reflection and just stfu'ing.

(I'm not sure how this applies to blogging though)