OK this is impressive and is among the most ambitious Second Life-related projects I've seen in years: A feature-length machinima shot in SL. The brainchild and director is the avatar known as Huckleberry Hax, who's also written a full-length novel set in the virtual world, and is among Second Life's best photographers.
"The final movie will be about 1 hr 10 mins long (give or take)," Hax tells me. "I'm keeping the finer plot details about the movie secret for now. It's essentially a story about truth set at some unspecified point in the future, following climate collapse."
Production is almost complete, with a handful more scenes to be shot/reshot, then onto adding dialog and special effects. It's already been nearly a year in the making, he tells me, with many SL creators collaborating in the production:
"Filming started in February 2019. Since then I've shot in 12 different sims as well as a couple of stand-alone sets, one of which I built... a mixture of animations and static poses were used, from over 40 different content creators."
As you can imagine, making this machinima means overcoming some SL-specific barriers:
"One of the most challenging aspects of creating the movie was the short lifespan of many sims - often as brief as a month," as Hax explains. "For example, I was filming at 'Kun-Tei-Ner' (by Lotus Mastroianni and Fred Hamilton) right up until the hour before they started dismantling it. It's a huge barrier to the creation of longer, story-telling machinima in SL. Of course I understand why sim creators do this -- they have money for one sim and they want to move on and do something different.
"Another barrier is the dearth of quality animations that are not dance animations or adult animations. This surprised me - I imagined that, over the lifespan of SL, there would be pretty much any animation I could think of somewhere on the Marketplace, but actually sourcing animations became one of the most time consuming aspects of the movie."
I'm surprised by that too, but judging by the trailer, the final product should be pretty amazing. Follow Hax on Twitter for updates.
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