YOUR TUBE, YOUR IMAGINATION (Updated)

Truthiness becomes machinima!  When Martin Luther King had a dream, it was of a world living in brotherhood and racial harmony.  Steven Colbert also has a dream, but it's vaguely kinky and somewhat less reputable.  And after 48 hours of work, the SL machinima team of Silver and Goldie Goodman had made that deranged dream come true.  At least in Second Life.

"'Battle for Truth: The Birth of Stephen EagleMan' does not conform to the standard green screen Jedi challenge that Colbert has set up," Silver tells me. "We just weren't inspired to do the typical space monster thing."  Instead of submitting yet another variation of Colbert swatting aliens with a light saber, they spun off Colbert's closing words on a recent episode of "The Colbert Report" into a bizarre mini-epic.  Silver and Goldie recently won Linden Lab's official trailer contest with a professional-if-generic action montage (see it here), but by my lights, ironically, their Colbert video is far truer to the SL spirit in every respect.

Watch "Battle for Truth" here, then after the break, read Goldie's play-by-play on bringing Colbert's Fox News-worthy pipe dream to Second Life.

Update, 3/21/2007:   In Comments, an anonymous reader just alerted me that Viacom had YouTube pull the video from its system.  However, it's still viewable at the official Second Life machinima page.

"I can understand Viacom's position as it regards the intact clips from the show that people would upload for no other purpose than to replay that part of the show," Silver tells me.   "Our position is that the short clip that intros our Battle for Truth machinima falls under fair use as parody. I think you called it a bizarre parody of a parody, or something like that; and that's precisely what it was intended (obviously) to be. Colbert INVITED fans to parody him in Jedi challenge videos and he described the 'dream' immediately after uring viewers to continue to submit their best work.  So we only did what he invited and urged us to do.  If Stephen's reciting of the dream were removed from our piece, the rest of it would make no sense.  We used only the amount of content that was necessary to establish the parody, and no more.  Clearly this falls within fair use exceptions to copyrights."

Anyway, read on for Silver's making-of account.

Pre-Production

Silver and I worked separately at first while creating the set and avatars, then worked together on filming and postproduction.

We created the avatars by looking at photographs and using the standard avatar customization tools to fashion the likenesses. I created Nancy Pelosi, Soledad O'Brien and Karl Rove, while Silver created Stephen and the sail barge. He also terraformed the land and designed and created the battle arena. Credit is due Selkit Diller for the fireball and explosion effects. [Colbert's] eagle head and wings are from the gryphon created by Whinge Languish.

Capturing the Dream

All filming was done at our production island, Studio Shores, where we can control the prim count to assure a high frame rate for video capture. We used only our two avatars in the production,becoming the various characters as needed to film each scene.   

The Dream in Post-Production

The Pelosi clone sequences were enacted before a huge greenscreen then layered in the edit suite.  The movement of the sail barge was also created with greenscreen techniques.  We put a lot of work into the soundtrack, which layers voices and sound effects with an amalgamation of four different music themes (licensed from The Music Bakery).  The lip synching was done with Crazy Talk.

On Notice?

We haven't heard anything from the Colbert people-- not yet, anyway.  But when we heard him tell his dream, we knew we could create it in SL, and that was much more interesting and challenging.  We'd been saying that we can film anything within the bounds of imagination in Second Life, so we put ourselves to the test with Stephen's dream.  Regardless of whether he airs it or not, we've had fun, learned a lot, made some people laugh, and proven that with Second Life we can, indeed, make dreams come true. 

Comments

[Ashley Lunan]

Love your site...and am suitably frightened by its ramifications...

[rikomatic]

Ok, that's freakin brilliant. There's no reason why that shouldn't be on Colbert. Good work, lver and Goldie Goodman!

[Baba]

AHAHHA I seriously love this video.. ;0

[Jerry Paffendorf/SNOOPYbrown Zamboni]

Colbert + Warner in SL!

[Jerry Paffendorf/SNOOPYbrown Zamboni]

And dude, the part that really kills me is the close up of Rove saying "Sole-mama!" lolol I watched it like ten times :). Great stuff, Silver and Goldie.

[Torley]

I too dig the "SOLE-MAMA!" part, I crack up so much. :D

Related: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/second-life-and-the-peoples-house/

[screw viacom]

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Viacom International Inc.

this is all i get when i goto watch the video :(

[rikomatic]

Ok, that just really pisses me off. So shortsighted of Viacom.