How Lyric Lundquist Makes Her Expressionist Machinima

Lyric Lundquist first conceived her latest Second Life machinima somewhere on a Summer train ride between Italy and France, listening to a track by Saltillo. "One of my favorite creative activities to do is what I call 'mindscaping'," she tells me, "where I listen to music and basically conjure up images to move with the music in my mind."

The final result, "cradle and trap", is Ms. Lundquist's most sophisticated machinima yet, honing her expressionistic approach to the medium, in which video captured in Second Life is heavily re-processed into a kaleidoscopic whole. (In this she's a creative sister to ColeMarie Soleil in that regard.) Bettina Tizzy, my de facto tag team partner in Lyric love, has some more background on her creative inspiration, but I asked Lyric to tell me more about how she turned her emotions into imagery. Read this post as if it were the director's commentary track of a Lyric Lundquist DVD:

VIDEO CAPTURE AND POST-PRODUCTION

She employed new WindLight settings in Skills Hak's custom Second Life viewer, Emerald, and Final Cut Express for editing, and visual effects. "For example, in order to create the illusion of a reflection in the video camera lens I layered the two clips and changed the scale, shape, and rotation of the reflection clip, added noise, and feathered the edges so that it fit nicely inside the camera lens."

GETTING PSYCHEDELIC

"To create some of the more psychedelic effects (which kick in around 1:30 during the abstract battle inside the TV between the two personas), I had to get a little more creative. I added a Compound Arithmetic Filter (Operator:Add, Channel: Alpha+RGB), a Bloom Filter (Amount:0, Brightness:81, Threshold:0), and finally a Noise Filter (Amount:.33, Type: White Noise). The result is the granular, pixelated image, that was an attempt to simulate what it might look like inside a TV world."

LYRIC'S SIGNATURE DISTORTION

"I tend to favor twitchy, abnormal, and distorted motion. In order to make the avatars move in an off-kilter style, I kind of improvise and have made up my own technique. First, I render the desired clip normally in my timeline (in this case, the clip mentioned above.) Then, by moving the cursor rapidly back and forth in the timeline it makes the avatar jerk back and forth in the Canvas, which is normally used as a way to preview a clip. While doing this, I use iSHOWU HD to film the clip in the Canvas inside Final Cut Express to form a new clip.

"It sort of reminds me of scratching with vinyl as a DJ, but instead, you're doing it with an image."

THE JOY OF SL MACHINIMA, AND CREDIT WHERE IT'S DUE

"Although there are limitations with creating machinima inside Second Life (namely, animations), one of the things I adore about using it as a way to create videos is that I can obtain mind-trippingly beautiful footage with virtually no resources...

"Also, I'd like to start giving more credit for content that I feature in my films (sims, outfits, animations, WindLight settings, etc.) I don't create content inside of Second Life, so I feel very lucky that we have such totally groundbreaking and innovative content creators in the community... I am thrilled to be a part of it and feature their work in my machinima."

Lyric's acknowledgements for "cradle and trap":

• Song is by :: Saltillo - "Backyard Pond" (I am truly obsessed with this band, and their other project - Sunday Munich. Menton J. Matthews is brilliant.
• Sims :: I mostly filmed this in Chouchou but i also filmed bits and pieces in Hern Worsley's soon-to- be unveiled sim - Le Requiem (thanks Hern!)
• Clothes :: Because the outfits are so goddamn fabulous I felt like I needed to give a shout out to two of my favorite visionary designers in Second Life - Cora Lu, who is the creator of "paper couture", and Triangle Cauldron, the creator of "ghost!" Also, thank you Bark Aabye for the BjD "Hades Horns" which I adore.
• WindLight :: THANK YOU  Skills Hak for creating the Emerald viewer, it injected my SL with a whole new kind of magic. After playing endlessly with the myriad of settings, it was what originally inspired me to make this lil' film.
• Animations :: I wanted to give a shout out to Surrealia Anatine, an animator who thinks outside of the box and the creator of Jabberwocky, for probably my favorite animation to date (but I do have a thing for twitchy, abnormal motion in SL) - ANA_Ghost_s5 animation.

Comments

[Ann Otoole]

Anytime anyone ever asks about Second Life Lyric's youtube page is one of the first places I send them. I feel it is better people see the mind art aspect of Second Life before being confronted with any other interpretations.

Lyric is teh mind candies that you can't figure out why you want more.

[Pond Kits]

The costumes are so god-damn good I felt the need to give shout of two of my favorite designers of Second Life visionary - Cora Lu, who is the creator of the paper couture, and cauldron Triangle creator of a ghost!