SkyView Home Rentals

Here is our latest commercial. Enjoy:

http://blip.tv/file/2250811

skribe

Nicely shot, Skribe.

Good to see the use of voice and lip sync as well. I do agree with http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2009/06/sl-lip-sync.html observation on this.

I would love to see more dialogue in SL Machinima, it's what good story telling needs, but we need to work around the very basic beta lip sync that SL has.

Thank you.

Good storytelling needs great characters which may benefit from great dialogue but the main hurdle is generating realistic (and appropriate) facial expressions. Without the capacity to convey emotion there will always be a challenge in creating believable and compelling characters.

Totally agree. There are some creative ways to get around the problem, as here, but for more films that are rich in storytelling to come out of SL it is one of the two main hurdles.

The second hurdle being the avatar animations, another of my pet peeves on using SL for machinma. At least the animations can be customised or camera angles can be chosen to avoid the "hand sticking through your ribs" hug animation, takes some effort though.

On facial expressions, you can also use CrazyTalk, but again it's a lot of work.

CrazyTalk also limits you to static shots or elaborate compositing to generate moving cameras and backgrounds during dialogue and in doing so removes SL machinima's biggest advantage: flycam. I love dynamic cameras - maybe I was Michael Bay in a past life =) - because they help generate great energy and make movies more visually attractive. Eye candy is an important part of the current film-making styles and especially when 'competing' to attract the attention on the web. You have about 30seconds before you lose half your audience with web video so you want to keep it short and to the point whether you're telling a story or selling a product. Part of that involves making it look as interesting as possible. Dynamic cameras help achieve that.