If you can be in Denver this weekend, you can attend this year's Supernova Digital Animation festival, a showcase of 15 short movies made across many platforms. In a sign that there's still some artistic life in SL-based machinima, here's the sole festival entry made in Second Life: "Repeat Hikari" by Tess "Tizzy Canucci" Baxter, a rhythmically hypnotic dreamscape mood piece.
"Can't describe how pleased I am to be included in that category," Tess tells me. "I think it also shows that machinima is no longer a helpful name -- most machinima is now game play, and artistic work in Second Life is better thought of alongside other art forms, whether that's called 'digital animation', artists moving image, or video art (the old name!)"
That's a very good point. Since raw video capture of 3D gameplay is now among the most watched category of videos on YouTube and beyond, it may be time to shelve the "machinima" term.
Tess wrote this in-depth blog post describing her artistic vision for the work, which emerged out of the limitations of the medium, i.e. Second Life. For instance:
[I] took the looping repetition and hesitations of the installation, and reworked them with the hesitations and jumps of video editing. Apart from being a deliberate choice, short loops reflect to the technical limitations of Second Life. Looping textures get round the difficulty of streaming video into Second Life. Short animation loops for objects, including avatars, are less demanding on memory.
The same goes for selecting the subject matter -- that emerged from exploring the virtual world:
"I spend quite a bit of time looking for locations that are interesting, then create something out of them," as she puts it to me. "That’s more significant than having an idea and going in-world to fit it. I tend to get video shots, start editing, at which point aesthetic ideas emerge -- which often means going back for more video.
"The editing process (I use Lightworks) is very important. I always try to add something to the place where I’m working, and not just do a record of what’s there... It’s about being in the spaces of virtual worlds and video editing and immersing in them over time -- and that’ll be several days. 'Repeat Hikari' came together quite quickly not because it was easier, but because the ideas gelled."
And if you do go to Denver for the festival, keep an eye out for Tess herself, who last I heard, is planning to travel from England for the show -- which happens to coincide with her 60th birthday.
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