Weekend Machinima: Poe Tribute "NeverMore"

Here's some great Midnight machinima to darken your Second Life Summer: "NeverMore", from Pyewacket Bellman and Niten Altamura. It's a loose riff on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and the movies he inspired; it also happens to be one of the first full narrative machinimas I've seen using Second Life's dynamic shadows feature. (In this case, they employed the Shadowdraft viewer of KirstenLee Cinquetti.) It began as an adaptation of "The Raven", the classic poem of lost love and the madness it inspires, but evolved to encompass more of Poe.

As Niten puts it, smiling, "There are already way too many birds on YouTube."

Instead, he continues, "It's more like Roger Corman's take on Poe, all in Technicolor... The main character is kinda like a cross between Johnny Depp, Vincent Price, and of course the narrator in the poem." The finished work is a gothic and lustrous mood piece, a fever dream after a night of absinthe, spiked with shafts of moonlit terror.

Technically, Niten Altamura tells me the trickiest part was using the Shadowdraft viewer, "Because shadows are glitchy as hell. It gives eye candy, but at the same time, you really have to be careful where to point the cam at -- 'cause some textures are constantly popping on and off."  Post-processing was done in Photoshop and Premiere Pro, captured with Fraps in Second Life. "Second Life isn't meant for telling stories as in movies," Niten argues. "So we had to bend the rules (as in tricking around with lights and shadow maps) to tell this story. But it's very rewarding once all the pieces come together." See more great SL machinima here.

Comments

[Nebulosus Severine]

Amazing machinima - very well done. Thanks for sharing this!

[Iggy O]

Thanks for the inspiration by sharing this.

We are in the midst of Poe's bicentennial here in Richmond, and soon we'll be building an interactive House of Usher on our SL campus for lit classes in 2010-2011. It would not be a museum but a RP area for students.

If we can even APPROACH 1/10 of Niten's level of quality (without any post-processing) I'd be one happy man, "dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."