In this week's YouTube-powered Second Life machinima highlight, an innocent hiker explores the virtual wilderness, and comes across a truly horrific discovery. Watch it here.
Created by multimedia artist AngryBeth Shortbread, the short movie (Shortbread's short?) is distinguished by crisp editing, chiaroscuro black and white video capture, and an element rare to SL machinima: foley effects, adding dimension and atmosphere to the production. Some further production notes from Ms. Shortbread after the break.
"[D]idn't really employ any major changes from general machinima filming," AngryBeth Shortbread tells me via IM. "The black and white effect is achieved in post-production with desaturate and brightness/ contrast (to crush the blacks a little.) Plus on the client side, I turned down nighttime brightness in the Graphics preferences, as this makes the new dynamic lighting a bit more like the low key lighting of noir (this is something I want to play with more in the future).
"[O]n top of that," she continues, "[I] used an alt account on a second computer, to help shoot some tricky shots. Spec-wise, it was done on an Intel Mac G5 and an Emac, using SL's in-built movie output, and then edited in IMovie."
Angrybeth, by the way, has an excellent SL blog here, largely tracking her productions in many virtual world mediums-- not just machinima, but, for example, weather-related mood icons, and most fascinating to me, sculptures that convey avatar identity as 3D sculpture or musical notes.
Very nicely done, I like the lighting/color effect a lot. Good eye (and ear) for detail AngryBeth.
Posted by: Robbie D | Friday, June 23, 2006 at 12:49 AM