Watch: Sneak Preview of Stömol, Feature-Length Cyberpunk Thriller About the Triumph of "Fake News", Shot Entirely In Second Life -- Coming This July!

Last January I told you about Stömol, a feature-length machinima shot entirely in Second Life (the first of its kind in a long time). It's written, directed, and starring Huckleberry Hax, who just shared this incredibly stylish and visually rich scene -- and Stömol's clever premise:

"The main character - Epi Stömol - is looking for two coders," he tells me. "One is a deepfake scripter, the other is able to retrieve old media files. The woman in the scene - Istinito - used to be room mate to one of the missing coders. In the future the movie is set in, old media has been rendered unreadable through corporate software infrastructure, making it hard to work out actual history. It's an Orwellian sort of situation, where there is only official history. The movie as a whole is about truth and the triumph of 'fake news.'"

To shoot a Second Life-based machinima with such an in-depth story requires getting around Second Life's biggest technical impediment, as a machinima platform -- incredibly poor lip sync. As you'll see from this clip, Hax has been fairly successful at doing that by employing some pretty brilliant, well, hacks:

"I had to ask Boudicca [Amat], who plays the female character, to type short sequences to make her lips move for a bit, then stop, then do it again. And then I had to write dialogue that fit these moving lip moments by watching them again and again, and getting a sense of how many words would fit. And then I had to write dialogue that fit these moving lip moments by watching them again and again, and getting a sense of how many words would fit.

"I sent the final script to the voice actors a couple of weeks back, and Bou was gracious enough to record hers straight away... and I waited with baited breath to see it they would fit. Which, thankfully, they (more-or-less) did."

The final cut will be about 75 minutes, Hax tells me, and even has its own official poster (above). Premiering in July -- hopefully here!

Comments

[K.R.]

That's pretty cool. Nice job, Huckleberry :)

[Bock McMillan]

I'll definitely watch the full feature!

[Joey1058]

Excellent preview! I'm already into it! Looking forward to the final release!