Peter Greenaway on the Potential of Second Life Machinima

Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Peter Greenaway is a big advocate of Second Life machinima, and he's judging the University of Western Australia's machinima contest, the winners of which will be announced soon. (I've blogged some of the entries in recent weeks.) There's a long interview with Greenaway on the UWA Second Life blog now, and if you make machinima, you should probably read it. Sample:

I keep hoping to see a visionary machinima maker - someone who uses the medium as the message. At present we are only seeing other art forms rewrit - the short-form feature-film, the music video-clip, the catwalk presentation, the dance-movie, the documentary-fiction with commentary - it's related of course to a loop of what you want is what we can produce for you - but I am truly full of excited hope that it is coming - an increased demand for new and better tools by machinima makers will increase the soft-ware and even the hardware thinking.

Much more here.

Comments

[Rod Humble]

Wow that is an incredibly good interview. Thanks for the heads up.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

I so need to upgrade fraps and get new codecs that youtube supports. So much can be done with SL as a medium. Assuming you have a sim set and build skills for sets and costumes.

Dear Rod: Sim on a stick is free and I can pop open a 4 sim setup in seconds. Free. And can build and film away to my heart's content without any fear of griefers or LL putting a region on a rc channel and screwing it up with no warning.

And no AnnMarie Otoole/Oleander attack/griefing zombie tip jar vehicle showing up to shove me around.

Something to think about.

[Vecky Burdam]

"(...)someone who uses the medium as the message. At present we are only seeing other art forms rewrit" ...

oh wise words ... 98% of SL right now is just 'other art forms rewrit' ... rl fashion, rl design, rl architecture, rl clubs, rl freaking everything down to the pubic hair ...
probably Selavy Oh is the only person in SL who looks at the possibilities of this medium and develops out of it something new, unique, something that is not possible in any other context and thereby gets a value beyond its immediate context, beyond SL ...
from the previews right now, not a single Machinima comes even close to Greenaway's demands ... they all don't use SL in a way SL would become relevant outside of itself ... be of interest for anyone in RL.

[Vecky Burdam]

Maybe one more thing ... with all the technical restrictions we have in SL (which got a bit better with shadow and depth-of-field) I can highly recommend the Mobechinima/Submachinima idea that Prairie Kawashima developed together with Mescaline Tammas ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/mescalinetammas/4427128320/ probably the best example) which solves a lot of problems of filming in SL (group pool with other examples http://www.flickr.com/groups/1396934@N22/pool/ )

And the best Machinima I have seen in a long time is probably the latest ChouChou video 'anemone' ( http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/107154453 ) where they montage a basic SL particle effect into RL. Such a simple idea but with a bigger impact than every boring tracking shot in SL.

[cube]

"I keep hoping to see a "visionary machinima" maker - someone who uses the "medium as the message".
"

this is an oxymoronic analogy...

machinima is just linear animation recorded...video artifacts.

if its realtime 3d media and immersive, its now a different medium.

realtime digital experiences do have a new message via their medium...but video?...not so much.

the frame and edit are 2d medias king...not 3ds.

[Gabe]

Greenaway is wrong about the death of film which is the basis of his theories about machinima, and I disagree with him on nearly every other count. Machinima has presented amazing new opportunities for filmmakers. It's allowed us to experiment and "push the primacy of the image" (to quote Greenaway), but there will always a place for traditional storytelling with machinima as the medium.

Just because Greenaway proclaims that film is dead doesn't make it so. (Are books dead too? What about theater?)