The Millions of Us Challenge: Create a Play in Second Life!

So I’ve issued a Challenge ( http://millionsofus.com/blog/archives/21 )to the residents of Second Life to create plays that they can perform live at the the New Globe Theatre on August 24th.

Here’s the back story. When we created our company, the New Globe was our first project. We chose it because we loved the project ( http://www.newglobe.org) for its own merits and also because it represented such a powerful metaphor for what virtual worlds are all about: the ability to try on different identities with groups of other people.


Then we ran into a problem. We wanted to perform a play there, so we started looking into it and realized it was several orders of magnitude harder than we expected. We wanted to use classically trained actors for the voice parts and sync those to animations, but soon discovered that the delay from “live” voice was about 30 seconds. This made the coordination of action and voice really tricky. And this was just the start.

It would have died on the vine, till we realized that “doing it ourselves” was the wrong call — the right move was to let people smarter and more talented give it a shot and collectively endeavor to do this thing. And why? Because it’s hard. And cool.

So here’s the deal. We’d rather people tried to create really great live performance instead of getting bogged down in technical difficulties. Therefore, there will be very few “rules” for submissions, but here they are in no particular order:

1. Plays must be less than 5 minutes long.

2. Plays can be any material you like (not just Shakespeare)

2. There will be 3 Prizes, each worth $L42300 (We chose this number because William Shakespeare was born AND died on 4/23. We thought it was an appropriate number to commemorate his re-birth in Second Life). Prizes will be given for each of the following categories.
BEST DRAMA

BEST COMEDY

AUDIENCE CHOICE

In addition, winners will receive a Golden Prim Virtual Trophy to put on the mantle and show the grandkids.

We will also be filming the event and will produce a polished video which will be distributed to the news media and uploaded to Youtube.com

Email your questions/comments to [email]reuben@millionsofus.com[/email]

See you on the 24th!

haha wow.. the play is on my birthday! good luck to those who win! this is a really nifty idea

I've tinkered with the live theater in SL idea for a long time now, and to do it really right, there are indeed some major obstacles, voice being the most obvious.

However, folks on SL are an imaginative bunch, and I think a good, well-written play can be enjoyable even without voice.

By using animations, gestures, well typed lines with accompanying emotional emotes or descriptions, then using chat could work. The big drawback here is the fact that even if the crowd turns off titles, and every performer wears a scripted titler to identify their character, you still get the actor/SL resident's name in the chat instead of the characters name.

Still, if certain things could be overcome, I'd love to write and produce plays. I've had one half-written for SL fotr a long time, and built three theaters, but I am just not savy enough to overcome a few frustrating hurdles.

i was just thinking about the whole typing thing myself.. and David brings up a good point about the names coming up in chat.

so..

first of all, it's easy to get rid of the typing anim with an over-ride.

but more importantly, how can we see what's being said by character name instead of SLer name? here's a possible idea..

you know when you go to a 3D movie and they hand out those glasses as you come in? how about a similar idea, but instead of glasses, it would be a HUD that's scripted to translate what people are saying as being said by a particular name per performer? along with this, have everyone turn off chat.

perhaps a donation box could be set out alongside the HUD dispenser with profits going to the real New Globe and thus also getting a few people in on the contributors list on the New Globe site, thus bringing recognition of SL to that huge list of those invloved with the RL project.

This is a great idea. Also with the HUD, it could have a "Theater Program" button that brings up a program listing the Actors, writers, etc, like the type you would recieve when attending a play.

Of course, being unable to script my way out of a wet paper bag, I have no idea how such a thing could be accomplished and how much work it would be. But it could certainly go a long way toward making Live Theater in SL a reality.

How about the actors talking on a non zero channel... there are prims with names of the various characters that relay the chat of the actors on channel 0 to the audience. This solves the typing animation and the name issue. Remembering to type "/1" before anything said could be tricky though.