How to convert an online world into your own private Sergio Leone movie...
Guided (as always) by Torley, I recently got my hands on a cool, free little HUD created by Charles Fauna, which, when worn on your avatar, converts your display into a letterbox aspect ratio. He's been generously giving them away to anyone who asks for them and essentially, it transforms the experience of Second Life into a widescreen movie.
"I'd remembered how in many video games," Fauna tells me about its inspiration, "the cutscenes are done in 'widescreen', where they pretty much just threw black bars on the bottom of the screen." But that's done in post-production; here, you not only have a real-time panaromic view, you interact within it, too. The effect is not only visual, because Fauna added a listen script which displays conversations along the bottom bar, just like the subtitles in a foreign film.
Of course, the applications for Mr. Fauna's HUD are pretty obvious for Residents interested in creating screenshot-based comics and graphic novels, and even moreso, SL-based machinima. The lack of basic speaking animations for avatars' mouths continues to be the biggest creative challenge for SL machinima. There's been a few pretty successful workarounds, as featured in Eric Linden's excellent Silver Bells and Golden Spurs film, and Pierce Portacerrero's "Benny" , but really, we're still far from ideal. (Then again, even the lip synching in Half Life 2 slipped occasionally.) But with Charles Fauna's letterbox HUD, you can just create machinima dubbed in another language, and run the dialog below. (And when it's a subtitled foreign language film, who really watches the actor's lips moving, anyway?)
That may just be my crazy theory, but to try it out, I whipped up an impromptu demonstration with Fauna and a robot called Caleb Moreau, who happened to by flying by. After the break, pretend we're all speaking Italian, we're armed with sixguns, and Ennio Morricone music is twanging in the background. (Click the screenshots for the full effect.)
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