WATCH: “RLForever”, A Powerful Virtual World Tribute to Real World Loss

“RLForever” by William Weaver is among the most beautiful machinimas I’ve ever seen, a melancholy tribute to someone now gone that weaves together smooth tracking shots and 3D text to create a visual poem, scored to Max Richter’s achingly moving “Love Songs”. Weaver uploaded it to YouTube some years ago, but somehow it went little noticed at the time. And then Weaver himself, who was once an active and much-admired artist working in Second Life, seemed to fade from his social media channels. The description on the video itself only added to that mystery:

I didn't know, until I had fished this movie, that a loved one died while I was making it... so now... he is gone... hold on to the ones you love dearly and tell them you love them always.

And so this masterpiece sat unseen like this for months and many months more. I sent William a message, and heard nothing back, then sent another, and finally got a reply. He had been traveling for some time, but now was back, and so he told me about making it, and the real life pain that inspired it:

It’s a memorial to several friends he once knew from a coffee shop he frequented years ago as a young man, people with all variety of things to teach:

“I lost touch with them many many many years ago,” William tells me, “and I think they are gone. So the piece, for me, was about trying to find a why to say goodbye, I love you and I will miss you forever... thank you for helping me be the man I am today. “

He shot the machinima in a virtual world rendition of the coffee shop from his memories: “This cafe space in SL ‘felt’ like the space I remembered in my mind from my own life. The lighting, the details, the textures, the colors, the paintings, the chairs. So, I suppose, I was remembering how they felt to look at, and moving through them before they fade away. Looking back now I see many shots are moving away from things, the way time and people move away from us.”

He wrote the words featured at the end of “RLForever”, and then read them in his own voice: “You know life is tragic in that is always contains loss. These words are about that loss. Perhaps, it was just my heart needed to remind me that, we are more than sum of our days, we are the collection of so many other peoples thoughts and passions.”

You’ll not be surprised to learn that William Weaver once worked in the film industry, though no longer.

“Life does what it does, and it took me away from that joy of filmmaking for other things. Years later I found Second Life, and I saw I could use it to tell stories, to make beautiful images, and try and understand, just... understand.”

Creating machinima and images in Second Life became, as he puts it, “a type of therapy to be honest. I needed to find a way to balance the emotions and fires in my heart with the realities and tragic nature of real life... We are all full of madness inside, we hide it from others and ourselves, yet it remains. I use my creative work to explore this madness, to embrace it, cherish it and value it and in the process, hopefully, understand those around me better and love them more.”

But as I said, he’s pulled away from the platform in recent years, at least in social media. “This is in part because I lost of lot of it on Flickr through a silly fluke and afterwards I felt it was time to move on,” he tells me. But Weaver still creates, and shares his work with those he knows -- just not as publicly. “I need to feel I have something to share, some emotion or thought or idea that other people might benefit from. Right now, in my own life, I want to listen, and I have less words to say.”

As he was putting the final touches to “RLForever”, William Weaver went to the telephone to take a call, and real life added a tragic coda to what he’d created:

“Unbeknownst to me, during the time I was making the video over the course of a few days, my stepfather was dying. A man I loved, and never knew enough. In fact, he died the day I finished the video. Perhaps life is greater than we believe in our mechanistic world. Perhaps souls do speak in a language greater than time and space. Perhaps he said goodbye. Perhaps this is the source of the tears. I do so hope this true.”

Comments

[Cybele Moon]

brilliant piece and so poetic and poignant. I think we can all relate. Thank you for sharing it.

[Natsuki Morigi]

Thank you William and thank you too Hamlet for sharing and letting us understand just a little.

[YsabelleStewart]

What a wonderful film. So great you found it and were able to track William down and do an interview. Such a poignant film.

[David Cartier]

There are so few machinima ten or five or even two years old, that we can still honestly appreciate. This is a lovely piece of work. That music is Richter's "On the nature of daylight" by the way. It's been used in two major films, but William used it first. Kudos.

[Pepa Cometa]

This is also one of my favorite machinima ever. I'm a big fan of William Weaver, who is for me the best photographer of second life. He is very kind and generous sharing with all of us his knowledge with his tutorials. :)