"the fool in the JunkYard": Excellent SL Machinima by Chinese Prof. Showcasing Dynamic Shadow & the Wasteland

"the fool in the JunkYard" is a wonderful marriage of Second Life dynamic shadows and setting -- in this case, the junkyard of the Wasteland, a popular post-apocalyptic roleplaying zone in SL. An ideal setting to re-imagine the Beatles' masterpiece "Fool on the Hill" for the metaverse:

Shot last year but only just coming to my attention recently, the machinima is by aston Leisen, who in real life is a new media art professor living near Shanghai. (And consequently, he reports difficulty getting through The Great Firewall to upload it to YouTube.) "[I] found [the Wasteland] years ago when I first came to Second Life," he tells me. Those sims amazed me, how beautiful it was, and how far the 'user generated content' could go."

The sepia tone was achieved with Mescaline Tammas' WindLight settings. To capture the dizzying footage, Mr. Leisen used a 3Dconnexion to control SL's flycam, while using his free hand to keep his avatar (the rusty robot star of the machinima) running. "Took a little practice," he notes with classic understatement, "Then I was able to enjoy those movements." Update, 5:35pm: As readers have already surmised, Leisen tells me in another message, "The video was captured from Kirsten's Shadow viewer with a Gforce8800 card, had to sacrificed some frame rate for those shadows."

Thanks to Ms. Bettina Tizzy for the find!

Comments

[Sidney Smalls]

Very cool.

[Dawny Daviau]

Great work with Kirstens viewer!

[Mick]

I always wondered what drives people to start their name without capital letter first :)