The winners and finalists of University of Western Australia's annual Second Life-based machinima contest have just been announced, and here's my favorite above: "Serendipity", from machinima master Tutsy Navarantha, a frequent winner in SL machinima contests like these, a montage of gorgeous metaverse imagery and quotes from masters of the imagination. (Here's another Tutsy classic.)
Top winner is the one below - Glasz Decuir's Adaptive ResonanceTheory (ART) and Intrusion Detection System(IDS):
Update, 3:00PM: Erik explains his technical and artistic process for creating these after the break.
Shot by longtime SLer Erik Mondrian, it's The Centaurs' Hall, a Second Life build by Haveit Neox. (Direct teleport here.) Erik's been using his SpaceNavigator to document SL's most beautiful places like this in a way that's rarely seen in person. Here's a couple more favorites:
No update to today's DDoS attack on Second Life as yet, so why not watch this super-stylish machinima music video by Tyus Deonn. Bonus points for the gorgeous lighting effects, the clever meta shot (you'll see what I mean when you see it), and, of course, featuring Drake and PartyNextDoor at their vibey best.
With an angel avatar appropriately called "HowBigisTheMap", my man starts at one edge of Sansarra, sets his map arrow to the other side, and Just Starts Walking. Unfortunately this guy's PC performance isn't super optimized so Second Life looks like it did maybe 8 years ago, but I appreciate his fortitude.
I love videos like this and would love to see many more (hint hint). I'd especially love to see some with running commentary, vehicles, wackiness, and most of all, with the graphics settings turned up to full. Back when SL had a streaming service, I tried doing one on a motorcycle which ended in disaster:
Just in time for Valentine's, here's a pretty impressive Second Life machinima adaptation of "Annabel Lee", the tragically romantic (or romantically tragic) poem by Edgar Allan Poe. (Shot entirely in the Bella Pace sim.)
Created in 2007 and still among the very best Second Life machinimas ever made, you should definitely watch it now if you've never seen it before -- and if you did a decade ago, absolutely worth watching again, and passing along to others. I first wrote about "Watch the World" here, and was just wondering if it was still online -- thankfully, Erik Mondrian recently found a copy I just had to share. Created by a UK filmmaker who went by the SL name Robbie Dingo, he told me what inspired it, and how he put it together:
Created, starring, and voiced by Ayla Pants, “Down to Earth” has funny dialog, crisp pacing, and stylish cyberpunk atmospherics. Just as impressive, the machinima was largely improvised on the spot in the SL roleplay game Cocoon. Ayla roleplayed with the game's NPCs and fellow players, recorded the action, and then in post-production, dubbed in her own dialog for each character, using different voices for each-- a really fun and clever technique I’ve not seen before.
“[T]he style of roleplay I prefer is one with no goal in mind,” she explains to me. “Just people knocking their characters together and enjoying the interaction that plays out. The role of bartender had played into this perfectly, as it gave people a chance to exercise their character’s personality a bit without the lag of a big event weighing everything down; both with the number of people waiting to contribute to the dialogue and trying to push a narrative forward, and the literal SL lag that comes with too many avatars in one place.”
The most pre-planning she did was finding a time for another player to log into SL so they could roleplay a scene. She also worked NPCs into the machinima:
From surreal comedy to moody sci-fi to eerie art installations, here's my favorite Second Life-based machinimas from 2017 -- starting with this one from January, reflecting this year's trend of YouTubers recording SL broadcasts "live", a departure from traditional narratives of past machinima. But as real life opera singer Cassie Middles demonstrates, there's something fresh and exciting about recording SL experiences as they happen, without editing:
You know in the Winter how people without actual fireplaces sometimes stream video recordings of fireplaces on their screens? This is a bit like that, except for virtual world fans who aren't living in actual snow (including, fortunately, me.)
