The quantity and quality of SL machinima continues to grow by energetic bursts. BuhBuhCuh Fairchild has run his Take Five machinima festival for months now, but in the beginning, he was lucky to get half a handful of entries. His July competition, by contrast, brought in 16, many shot and edited on a professional level-- most especially the one pictured above: "Lip Flap", by Kronos Kirkorian, which took the grand prize. The witty story of a bickering couple preparing for a party-- until, that is, they make a shocking discovery-- it's not the most visually spectacular of movies, but Kirkorian's machinima is without question one of the most accomplished. Much of that may be because of his background-- in real life, Kirkorian is a member of the actual film industry, an accomplished actor with numerous roles in movies and TV shows like "Oz" and "Homicide".
And while they're not immediately obvious, several of the special effects and lighting techniques he used in "Lip Flap" are truly groundbreaking. To take the most obvious one: the Second Life graphic engine does not enable real-time mirror reflection, like you see in the frame above. Unlike the stars of his film, when Kirkorian explained how he did that, my jaw dropped.
But watch the movie first, and read on, for Kronos Kirkorian's guide to creating the most impressive elements in "Lip Flap".
On the title
"Lip flap" is jargon used to refer to the incorrect synchronization
of a soundtrack (usually spoken dialogue) with a corresponding movie as
a result of either unintentional technical inaccuracy or from poor
dubbing techniques. [An in-joke: in Second Life, avatar mouths do note move at all, when speaking. - HA]
On creating Anya's costume changes
We see Anya in eight different outfits in the film, most on the little preview screen on her wall. (Eleven if you count the pictures of her that hang in the room.) The change effect both in the room and on the little screen is a vertical wipe between two images that are identical except for the costume. Over this I animated a fuzzy white line that travels with the wipe and expands or contracts according to the outline of the avatar. I placed a blocking cube (like a poseball) so that Anya could change outfits and return to an exact position, to insure that the shots would match.
The first transformation in the room is a simple dissolve. I couldn't use the wipe because a lighting mismatch meant that we could clearly see the wipe line moving across the entire image.
On the foley work (i.e., matching post-production sound effects to onscreen action)
I thought about using a variety of foley sounds, but decided to keep it simple and just do the footsteps. I looked for male and female footsteps on wood, but found that the male walk speeded up a bit worked fine for the female.
On lighting the set and actors in "Lip Flap"
Usually when I want to take a picture of a character in Second Life I force the time to sunrise or sunset, whichever looks best. [In SL, it's possible to "force time", i.e. change the sun and/or moon's location to a desired degree of illumination, from a single avatar's point of view. - HA] This didn't work for the film. Using sunset or sunrise only lights up one side of the set and leaves the opposite side looking dull. When cross-shooting characters, this unbalanced lighting is very distracting.
Forcing the time to Noon lights the set evenly, and shows it off well, but leaves the actors' faces with shadows that are not at all flattering. The solution that I came up with would never work in real life but was perfect for SL.
The time was forced to Noon and the actors each wore an invisible light attached to their avatar. The light was placed at eye level about a foot or so in front of the face. The radius and intensity of the lights were adjusted so that they filled in the shadows, but didn't light up the surroundings. This technique lights the actors very effectively no matter where they are, and without being obvious to the viewer. Best of all, it only required two lights.
Anya loves the effect so much that she never goes anywhere without her personal light.
Creating the mirror shots
On the set, the mirror was blank white, so that I could use a luma key to replace the white with the image of the reflection. Take a look at the overhead diagram below:
If angles 1 and 2 are the samem then Lens A viewing our character in the mirror sees exactly the same image as Lens B would see, if the mirror was removed or made of clear glass (except that the image would be flopped left to right.) The camera was placed to view the scene as if there were a reflection present. The Lens A position. Anya executed the custom animation that caused her avatar to bend down to look into the mirror.
The camera was then rotated behind the mirror to the lens B position, the mirror was removed and Anya repeated the action. The shot from behind the mirror was flopped left to right and composited with the shot from the front. It is easier to execute than it is to explain.
On shooting "Lip Flap", and future machinima
"Lip Flap" was my first experience with machinim, and I have several other projects that I would like to do. The only problem is carving out the time to make it happen. Right now my real life commitments are preventing me from starting another SL project. But soon...
Something I didn't mention was the difficulty of scheduling the shoot. I'm in NYC, Dell is in California, and Anya is in Sidney. I love that three people so far apart were able to collaborate on a project like this, but the scheduling was not easy!
Very cool! As much as I like the artistic movies a lot of people are making lately, I love seeing a story with voice acting, sound effects, etc. I look forward to seeing more.
Posted by: Torrid | Friday, July 28, 2006 at 02:35 PM
Great to see the whole setup. Very exciting.
Posted by: bryan (cyrus huffhines) | Friday, July 28, 2006 at 06:04 PM
Indeed, an incredible movie! So start carving out that time for more :-)
Posted by: Tao Takashi | Friday, July 28, 2006 at 06:35 PM
Awesome to see so much machinima action, but scared out of my wits about rights issues since lots of folks put their content into Youtube's system... terms of service been read lately?
Posted by: Eric Rice | Friday, July 28, 2006 at 06:37 PM
As I understand it (and I could be wrong), YouTube's TOS isn't all that different from LL's: you own your movies, but YouTube retains a right to use it for promotion only. But if you pull your content from their servers, they can no longer use it for even that. Are you reading something different, Eric?
Posted by: Hamlet Au | Friday, July 28, 2006 at 08:08 PM
What a great post Hamlet; liked this little behind the scenes look a lot. Also really great with knowledge sharing this way and I'd love to see more of this kind of stuff. Thanks :)
Posted by: Henrik | Saturday, July 29, 2006 at 01:55 PM
Re YouTube's TOS: that's expected to change soon, for the worse. According to http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/20/youtubes_new_policy_.html, all your rights are belong to them (except you still retain them if you pull the video from their servers).
Posted by: Elle Pollack | Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 06:38 PM