New CSI:NY thread

aaannnnd we're now back to the topic of the thread ... did people notice that the title of the episode was "Down the Rabbit Hole"?

Go ask Alice, I think she'll know.

I was wondering how long it would take someone to catch the reference. You win a cookie!!

And no one commented on the "follow the white rabbit" matrix reference
(which was of course a Lewis Carol reference)

That makes CSI:NY what, 4th generation fiction?

postmodern *shudder*

I finally got to watch some of the episode. Note: I said some. Oddly enough, the scenes with Second Life did remind me exactly of Second Life.. my connection would start lagging and so to did the video Did I mention that I want their poseball-less form of Second Life?

Here is what really surprises me about the comments about the show and the feature of Secondlife on CSI-NY. With all the talk about how many new residents are comeing in and how we now have corprate companies popping up, we should be more conserned with our little SL lives being turned upsidedown and be aware of the implications of our legidimat works being taken over and stolen.
If you dont think it will happen, then your fooling yourselves. All you have to do is open your eyes.
Does any one remember the scene in CSI-NY of the so called virus tword the end? hate to say it but if not recognise the item used it was banned by LL and is a bannable offence to use by us users.
YES! Im talking COPYBOT!!!! but LL allowed CBS and its staff acsess to the item, as well as entery into Secondlife with the item.
Gess when comes to makeing money anything goes. So yes Im not to amused by the hole thing and for good reason.

just think it over and deside for yourselves whether your best intrests are within the above or are the Corprates.

Newsflash.. corporations have been in SL for years. We've already had this whole "ZOMG, the sky is falling!!1!" discussion. I do guess it was probably time for another one, but not in this thread, k?

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen's "Off with her head!"
Remember what the dormouse said

I thought copybot was the thing that analysed a build and replicated it.

as far as the "cloning virus" used in the "notecard" (don't get me started)

The same effect could have been done with:
a) CGI
b) several dozen identical avatars
c) an alpha textured prim with a command script to change to an animation of the Avie
d) about a million other ways.

Before going off on a conspiracy hunt, try using occam's razor once in a while.

"Go ask Alice?"

I wish it wasn't necessary to actually have to spell this out, but no, Copybot (nor any other SL hack) was not used for the replication scene.

Not only that but Gary Sinese's character specifically stated the virus WAS NOT coming from SL. It was a quick line but it was there.

Hey!

You are ruining a perfectly good conspiracy theory.

I lettered in ruining conspiracy theories in high school, what can I say


One thing I found was hard to explain to a couple people is how all the Second Life parts of the episodes are machinima - as opposed to live gameplay. Sure most people that already use SL figured that out on their own, but for others (like my mom, who I watched the ep with) who only have heard about SL, its probably not so obvious. But of course that explains a lot of things like the colleseum build, the duplicating avatars, etc.

When you're filming a scene for machinima, just like you would for a tv show or movie, since you know everything about what you want to shoot down to the angle of the shots, you can prepare ahead of time and have the final result look like it really did happen. There are dozens of people and a huge amount of designers, coders, animators and extras that go into creating just one quick flash of a scene. What probably took up a total of 15-20 minutes of SL clips on the show took months and months of work and a massive amount of manpower.

Yes. I think she'll know.

Can't underscore this point enough.

I'm sure most people simply can't imagine how much work went into preparing and filming those shots in SL. That two-minute arena scene alone took many weeks of incredibly long and difficult days. The amount of creative problem-solving it took to make SL appear to do all that was stagarring.

That's what great machinima is all about, using a real-time platform to do things visually that most users of the platform would never have believed were possible with it. The fact that people are now throwing out accusations of CGI and hacks and all manner of other "cheats" (which I knew was going to happen) is perhaps the best compliment the machinima team could possibly get. The entire team are true artists, and it couldn't be more wonderful that they were given this well deserved opportunity to show off to a national TV audience.

Chosen and Cory, I do have a production question: if one were to do the equivalent SL sequences in pure animation, no SL, from scratch - assuming you had the same completed storyboards (or whatever, anyway the entire design!) to work from ... do you have any guesses as to what the costs would have been relative to using machinima?

And btw, thanks for your presence on this thread.

But will she tell us?

When she's ten feet tall, she will.

What is "cheating" though? Even if they _had_ used CopyBot (which, by the way, _could_ duplicate avatars) I don't see it'd be grounds to complain, since they would used it in a controlled situation where the target would have consented, and the textures they copied were their own anyway.

I have a little worried that we're going to have a huge number of users come in and wind up disappointed and disillusioned that they can't do what they saw on TV, not even in the CSI sims. Yes, of course, you can't believe anything you see on TV, but isn't the public perception that that's what virtual worlds are about? The problem is that although some people might adjust, those people who _do_ quit will then continue to distrust any publicity or examples they see regarding Second Life.

Wow, that's an excellent question. I'm not sure I can answer it, but if I can find one of the machinima guys (probably taking a well deserved 2 month nap at this point) I can ask. My half-educated guess would be "a hell of a lot more". One of SL's hidden shining points is the ability to quickly design just about anything you need - and what you can't design, a nation of content creators probably is selling what you're looking for already. Fast real time building collaboration and a huge library of purchasable goods to choose from drastically reduces the amount of prep time needed to build out a set, which is a large portion of the budget you're talking about.

I'll poke around and see if I can get a better estimate from one of the guys who would know better than me.

Yumi: After the show was over my mom said "well, they probably showed Second Life about as realistically as they portray New York detectives, and trust me, they don't portray NY detectives that realistically either". You gotta take into account the medium. CSI isn't NPR or even 60 Minutes - hopefully the people that take their cold hard facts from a show with MTV cuts and rock music montages are in a minority. Its entertainment, liberties are taken with a lot of things, not just SL. Even for that I think they got the jist of it right.

Good question. I can't pretend to know any exact figures, but I'm certain it would have been considerably more expensive to have done all that from scratch with CGI instead of machinima. While the comparison of course will vary from project to project, generally speaking, CGI animation is way more time consuming to create than machinima, so it costs a lot more money. There's some pretty good info on how machinima saves time over CGI animation here: http://www.machinima.org/machinima-faq.html

In my mind though, machinima and CGI are really two different art forms. The only thing they have in common is that they both involve computers. What separates them goes a lot deeper than just which one is faster or cheaper.

You might as well ask a metal sculptor what it would cost use clay instead of metal, or ask a painter if it would cost more or less to use pencils instead of paints. The answer depends as much on the result you're trying to achieve as on the medium itself.

Oh sure. I don't think they were doing anything _wrong_ by doing it.

The replicating virus thing at the end made me think Snowcrash. Been a few years since I read it, but that's what it reminded me of.

Edit to add.. I enjoyed the show very much!