Watch: Teal Aurelia Wonderfully Wields Twin Pride-Themed Lightsabers -- Then Reveals How She First Created This in Second Life!

Wednesday was exhausting for ridiculous reasons, but there's still time to look at this beautifully rendered Pride-themed laser sword machina by the master, Teal Aurelia. Fairly unique among SL machinima creators, Teal lovingly (and painstakingly) captures raw footage shot in Second Life, then heavily post-processes it, usually to great effect and transformation. (I particularly love how we also see the after glow of the blades, conveying a real sense of heft and substance.)

I profiled Teal last year, who gave me a glimpse of her background, and her impressive process:

Sequences like the spinning light saber, I had to animate by hand, frame by frame, so 3 seconds of video took an entire day to edit. But I'm used to working on that timescale, because I come from an animation background, and making a few seconds of film in a day as an animator is a success.

It’s pretty heavily edited. I use AfterEffects to add shadows and rim-lighting and do color grading. It’s a lot quicker to do it all in post rather than fussing with lights in a viewer. I've managed to get a few blogger friends to open After Effects instead of Photoshop sometimes. There are a lot of things it does so much quicker.

And yes, the swords started as old school katanas in Second Life!

Are there other machinimas not to be missed?

Comments

[t]

Wonderful.

And I feel the Pride is more and more needed these years, as there is a systematic anti-LGBT+ disiformation campaign on the Net and not only. As you can see from the EU parliament website, they discovered that the campaign is organized and founded by several foreign entities, including the Kremlin.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/653644/EXPO_BRI(2021)653644_EN.pdf

Pride festival organizers in real life are facing increased obstacles and even threats.
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20230611-us-pride-celebrations-forced-to-scale-back-amid-growing-backlash

You would think SL is a safe space, but it's not. Despite being generally pro LGBT+, in SL, as you know, there is anybody, also pro-Trump supporters and homophobe and transphobes. Also in the SL forums, there is often someone trying to derail pride, LGBT+, women topics. Example:
https://community.secondlife.com/forums/topic/499919-pride-in-second-life-2023/?do=findComment&comment=2598691
Some transphobes also infiltrate into SL LGBT+ spaces to harass the visitors, so much that even adult LGBT+ places such has "shemales that prefer men" had to put a sign against political discussions. The trolls try to circumvent that, for example by starting with a seemly reasonable talk, but then, atop their high horses, they manipulate and twist it all to belittle their interlocutor up to insulting them, while slipping in far-right arguments. The usual stuff they constantly do.