Monday Memory: One of the Best Second Life Machinimas Ever Made

I mentioned this machinima last week in another post but it deserves a post of its own: "Watch the World" by Robbie Dingo (aka Rob Wright). Created in 2007, it remains one of the best machinimas in Second Life ever made, because it beautifully illustrates the dynamic content creation that remains unique to Second Life, and weaves it with a classic folk song about another, slightly more famous artistic innovator: 

What Robbie Dingo has done is something Akira Kurosawa only envisioned: brought Van Gogh's masterpiece to rich, three dimensional life, and for a brief moment, recast it as a living place. (Brief, for the construction was always intended as a temporary project, "so it's all been swept away now, leaving only the film behind.")  But for a breathtaking moment (this is my favorite shot, above) you get to the most iconic of starry nights recast under the rising sun.

"One of the challenges was to make it look fluid and simple," Robbie tells me. "If I have got it right, then it should look like something that was thrown together very quickly, but in reality I worked on this in dribs and drabs over a number of evenings."   He explains that painstaking process in further detail:

First thing was to set out a spot at the edge of the empty sim [island], a chair and semi-transparent copy of the original painting floating in the air to look through in [first person] mouselook. This was going to be the spot from where the original sketch of the painting was made. I disabled the camera constraint (in the debug menu) so I could sit my avatar down at this spot and wander the camera all over the sim when building. This allowed me to quickly switch back to mouselook to check the positioning of the various parts (very often) against the original painting. All of this moving back and forth has been edited out of the final video...

Firstly, using the clone tool in Photoshop, I removed the stars and mountains in a copy of the original painting - leaving only the swirling wind. This was then imported to SL as a single high rez image. I calculated the image size and the texture zoom/offset parameters so I could lay this image across the c.400 tiles forming each wall of the skybox.  Also, I used texture snippets from the original painting to texture some of the objects (stars, houses, etc.)

Much more about "Watch the World" here.

Comments

[Andromeda]

Lovely!

[Katien Erin]

This is amazing. I wish more people could dedicate some time in SL to create something artistic like this masterpiece.

[Valentina Kendal]

LL should have saved that sim, it was amazing to walk or fly around the painting. There have been other 3D recreations of famous works over the years (Van Gogh Bridge in the Rain, Bedroom) but none at that scale, that I know of.