This machinima from Brigitte Kungler is easily among the coolest Second Life music videos I've seen, because it perfectly complements the song ("Chameleon", a great cut by hiphop artist Vandal) with SL's fluid Bebop Reality reality. "I mean," as Brigitte puts it, "wouldn't it be amazing if we could change our hair, color of our eyes, and actually everything about how we looked whenever we wanted?" An artist and documentary filmmaker for the last 14 years, she discovered Second Life last year, and promptly set about realizing ideas that can't readily be depicted in real life. She scouted out SL locations like Chakryn Forest and The Far Away to suit the song, along with some clever avatars by four Yip. The impressive "chameleon effect" you see in several cuts was created painstakingly on location and in post-production; after the break, she explains how she did it-- and what she wants to do with SL as a medium.
The work it took to achieve the effect is involved and frankly above my paygrade to comprehend, so I'm going to quote Brigitte verbatim, in the hopes it makes sense to SL machinima veterans:
"I made special effects videos that I output as single frames and then put them into Photoshop where I converted them into targa files which I then imported. I used one of the photos of the texture to make a skin to go with the texture animation. I then put the texture animation on a 10 meter cube that was hollow and phantom and then would put my avatar inside and shoot with the texture animation as the background or I would make it a bit transparent so you could see my avatar through the texture animation."
Brigitte Kungler is finishing a real life documentary, and when that's done, next plans to set one in the metaverse. "The cultural shifts that are taking place in Second Life have created an exciting new language for me as a filmmaker and an artist," she tells me. "I am now in the process of thinking how to make a film outside of the conventions that I am accustomed to. It is exciting to contemplate the notion of the impermanence of art, and of the fact that things created in the virtual realm are really just-- virtual."
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