Machinima

I'm nurturing a new passion for Machinima. Since I know less than nothing about it, I'm here to ask the collective wisdom for resources, and especially for outstanding examples of it to study.

Thank you, you *clever* people!

/me listens with interest to coming replies, knowing less than the OP about it

imogen

You may get more information if you post your request in the Machinima forum.

Good luck

I put a small blurb in my "how I dance in secondlife" expanded tutorial on wiki:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Phoenixa_Sol#The_program_I_use_to_create_the_videos

but I'm no expert either, just had to figure out a way to present my art so that everyone could see what I see when I create it, regardless of lag, connection etc.

My experience of posting in 'other' forums tells me..you may not..well not unless you're prepared to wait a week or two..possibly three. There..I've now succeeded in insulting every user of every other forum..probably time to log out.

I do however look forward to reading the replies for I too harbour a desire to direct a SL movie epic.

Good Luck

Perre..

Here is one I worked on recently.

http://blip.tv/file/835879/

I have a project in development now and will be looking for crew at some point; good way to learn the ropes. I'll put a notice in the machinima forum when we are ready to move from development to production though I'm always happy to answer questions if people IM me.

I also recommend doing a search for Osprey Therian's work on YouTube. She has done some amazing stuff.

Visit AWM Mar's place in SL...he is one of the hardest working folks in SL machinima and tho he's busy, he's kind if you can catch him. He does a lot of fashion shows as well as other commercial machinima.

Otherwise the machinima forum is a good idea.

It's conceivable that there might be some information on machinima to be found without even having to ask by reading the existing posts in the Machinima forum.

The wiki might have some information at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Machinima .

http://secondlife.com/showcase/machinima.php, found by putting "second life machinima" into Google, might have some useful info or links on it.

Second Life.com's community/media page has some links at http://secondlife.com/community/media.php .

One can find some secondlife machinima examples by going to youtube.com, entering "second life machinima" in as the search terms, and sort them by rating to get some idea of their perceived merit.

Torley Linden writes on the process he uses to make his video tutorials at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Torley_Linden/Vidtut_process .

Going to machinima.com and putting in sec ond life as the search term produes a big list of links of possible interest. http://www.machinima.com/channel/view&id=10 appears to be the LL machinima channel there.

One might try searching for inworld groups related to machinima or movie making.

You know, that's been my experience too. The people on the subforums check in there intermittently, but everyone reads RA everyday!

Thanks everybody for all the great resources!

Here are some tips...

Are you going to be the person doing the filming and the editing? If so, make sure you have a good powerful system with *lots* of hard drive space open. Second, you'll need a video editing program and a screen capture program. SL has screen capture capability, but some people have issues with it, so the best solution is a specialized third party program. There are open source versions, but commercial versions are preferable. Then you'll need something to edit audio in order to properly mix in music and dialog and sound effects. You'll also need some image editing (Photoshop or Gimp), and a way to create storyboards.


The best option *if* you are in the market for a new system is to consider a Mac, which has most of the software you need to start included, except for the screen capture software. For that you'd want to look at SnapzProX.

Inside SL, filming is an interesting experience, and you have to experiment with camera angles, camera movement, and such. If you are using dialog, there are lip synch animation capabilities, but these tend to be cumbersome to use at the present time (although they are improving).

Make sure you turn off the SL options for name tags, friends logging notifications, and minimize the IM and local chat windows so that the only thing showing on your screen is the action you are intending to film.

IM me in world if you have questions. Have fun!