Watch Here: STÖMOL, The First Feature-Length Cyberpunk Thriller Shot Entirely in Second Life!

Update: Bumped up for weekend viewing!

As promised, New World Notes is very proud to debut the feature-length machinima by Huckleberry Hax. Put your headphones on, dim the lights, and press play. And join me below for director's comments (with potential spoilers) and running comments from the audience in the aisle!

"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."

"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."

More here, and:

"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.'"

More here. Audience feedback welcome below!

Comments

[Wagner James Au]

Pro-tip: It starts off a little slow and some of the animations (especially lip sync) is a bit distracting but stick with it! Story is interesting and the visuals are *amazing*.

[Joey1058]

NOT the ending I was expecting! Bravo!! If there is any kind of award that the default world film industry gives out for machinima, This is a perfect candidate!

[Wagner James Au]

What a twist eh?! I could see the Sci-Fi channel picking this up, giving it one last spit and polish, and putting it out there!

[Alicia]

It was not that great to be honest.

If the creator of that machinima intended that to be Blade Runner-esqe, then he failed at every turn. There was hardly any day/night changes to begin with that should have given many of those scenes better overall depth, and perhaps even adding weather changes such as cloudy or even rain.

Second, the soundtrack. It did not fit the machinima at all, and caused the whole picture to be off. Again, I have to refer to Blade Runner because of the fact that when I watched this, I had to picture the Blade Runner soundtrack going on at the right moments of this movie as opposed to using full-out electronic music (which would only have worked during club scenes).

Third, and I had half-hoped it would be more fisticuffs than martial arts, but why did he have to choose martial arts over fisticuffs? The fight scene was wasted by adding in upbeat music. The music for that scene should have been more subtle, or none at all but sound effects when they're blocking or actually landing a blow.

Overall, this should have been more of a mystery, but in then end, the attempt fell flat. Not only that, but the voice acting felt forced and too serious like most movies of today.

I'm sorry to say, but the movie as a whole literally fell flat.

[Amberson]

But but the reporter said it was made by the Orson Welles of Secondlife!

How can it possibly suck?