Lights on_ from Carla Broek on Vimeo
At first glance, Carla Broek's hypnotic, pulsing "Lights on_" machinima may seem like a study in abstract animation created in post-production, but most of it was actually shot "native" in Second Life, as these locations actually exist in-world. "I prefer not to post-process a lot in order to obtain completely other results than what we actually see and feel," she tells me. She selected several prime, well-illuminated locations in SL, including the erstwhile Tunnel of Light, and shot them in optimized viewer settings. "Post-processing these parts would be a shame and kill the true nature of it," she says, "and in my honest opinion, it would also be disrespectful towards the creators."
"The Tunnel of Light and all the artforms using light were completely native, in Midnight setting (sometimes without stars)," she explains. "I only allowed color balance changes during post-processing to glue the video as one big colourful wave."
For the Black Swan sculpts and the shots in Bladerunner City, "I also used Second Life natively, but used advanced sky settings to frame them in the concept of the video (light color and haze/density settings) in order to focus on the main object."
The main goal of Ms. Broek's post-production work on this machinima is to link these shots together, as with the throbbing beat line. "Those are inventions outside of Second Life, using two alpha transparent textures: one line and one fat dot. I used those to stress the link between the visual part and music." Not to artificially enhance the Second Life works she shot, in other words, but to unify them into a single viewing experience.
"In my opinion," as Carla Broek puts it to me now, "techniques and software can be learned, but creativity like some artists show us in RL and SL is worth capturing as it is."
See more marvelous SL machinima here.
Update, 9/10: Via Ms. Broek by the way are SLurl teleport links to the places featured in her machinima (not counting Tunnel of Light):
It´s without surprise, that those who accompany and support all of Carla´s work, watch it grow better and better everyday. Keep up girl...apparently vacations were good...
Both the portuguese sun, and getting a tan in London.
:P
Posted by: Imso | Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 07:21 AM
An unsual and amazing work this machinima, one of the bests I've seen lately shot in SL. Creativity here is the word, Carla Borek is filming like she was painting in a frenetic movement of colors and light, linking images and sounds!
The locations fabulous too, very good choices.
Posted by: Tary Allen | Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 12:11 PM