New World Notes

Watch: STÖMOL Sneak Peak, Epic Full-Length SL Machinima With Brilliant Premise Premiering in July

Turns out Christopher Nolan's Tenet won't be playing in theaters in July after all, so your best bet for a cerebral sci-fi action thriller could be STÖMOL, the feature-length SL machinima from Huckleberry Hax and crew.  Mr. Hax just shared with me this teaser scene, redolent of cyberpunk noir.

Here's Hax to explain the scene:

"The scene features the film's protagonist, Epi Stömol (Huckleberry Hax), picking up a case from wealthy socialite Verity Certain (Ylva). Certain hires Stömol to track down her adopted son, a gifted coder able to retrieve and decode old media files rendered unreadable by the ruling government's 'digital hygiene' policy."

(Yes Hax is both the writer, director, and star of STÖMOL, which seems a bit much, but then again that's what they told Orson Welles. So, you know.)

The premise of feature, as Huckleberry puts it, is pretty Nolan-worthy:

Watch "Hand", Bryn Oh's Latest, Bitterly Beautiful Machinima Shot in Both Second Life & Sansar

Here's the latest machinima from beloved metaverse artist Bryn Oh, who now has a Patreon page which you should definitely consider supporting if you're among the hundreds of thousands who've loved her artworks over the years. This new piece, called "Hand", was shot in both Second Life and Sansar, and as with some of her other works, was sponsored in part by an Ontario Arts Council grant. (Yes, the Canadian government will pay you to make virtual world art.)

"I decided to use footage from both Sansar and Second life because each has their strengths for machinima," Bryn tells me.  "Sansar can actually have really wonderful graphics.  Unfortunately their filming tools were quite limited.  Second Life on the other hand is great for filming in.  Also my machinima are a catalogue of my artwork so I wanted to capture a bit of both."

The locations for "Hand" are both still virtually explorable in Sansar here and in Second Life here.

Her inspirations for "Hand", as she tells me, include smartphone addiction, and the culturally corrosive power of advertising:

How YouTube Star Mr. Moon Made His Hilarious Second Life Video

"Ticket to Hell" from popular gaming YouTuber Mr. Moon. like I said last week, is the best and raunchily funniest Second Life "outsider" video in a long while. What’s also amazing, as Moon told me recently, is how he made it. While Mr. Moon has produced epic videos in other online games/MMO like Dayz Z and Ark, this was his first foray into the 17 year old virtual world.

“I always thought [Second Life] would be the perfect place to create some content,” he says. “I had no idea going in what I was going to create, it really all came together in an interesting way.”

I was surprised myself how he created it. Here’s some behind the scenes secrets from Mr. Moon -- spoilers if you haven’t yet seen “Ticket to Hell” (and you should already, it's right up there):

Watch: YouTube Star Mr. Moon Visits Second Life, Makes Hilariously Crude, Occasionally Perceptive Feature Epic

Update, 4/16: Bumped up for weekend viewing!

Got 70 minutes to spare? What am I saying, of course we all do. Fire up some popcorn and your favorite adult beverage and watch "Ticket to Hell" from popular YouTube gaming star Mr. Moon. Content warning: Occasionally veers from hilariously crude to just crude, and is definitely not worksafe viewing if you're actually working in an office, but then again who is. And it is hilarious as hell.

Unlike Second Life trolling videos which were in vogue for awhile (and more lazy than funny), Mr. Moon and VERTiiGO, his collaborator/partner in crime, go all out, creating a feature-length stoner comedy that combines staged sequences with what looks to be actual gameplay footage with random SLers spontaneously reacting to their a-hole roleplay hi-jinx.

Their goal: Earn enough Linden Dollars to afford mesh avatars, so they can then hook up with SL's hottest hotties in the world's best clubs. It does not go as planned.

And notwithstanding Moom's foul-mouthed, cynical film noir narration, he even finds times for some perceptive scenes:

Watch "Pretty", Bryn Oh's SL Machinima Ode to Humanism & Obsolescence

Bryn Oh is among the few artists in the world with a government grant to create art in virtual worlds, and this new project, an eerie and beautifully ugly machinima shot in Second Life, called Pretty, is a powerful watch.

"Pretty is about technology, humanism and obsolescence," Bryn tells me. "The poem is a symbolic imaginary encounter between two versions of a manufactured woman."

Their strange proportions are like for a reason: " They are both 'designed' and in some cases the new upgrades are not based on reality such as the 1/9 body ratio," she explains.  "That refers to ratio of a persons head to their full body.  The average person has a 1/5 to 1/7 ratio depending the location in the world they come from but, much like a photoshopped model on a magazine cover, these realities can be warped."

While Bryn's most recent previous work was featured in Sansar, Bryn shot Pretty in Second Life. Because ironically, the older platform has the features she needed to pull it off:

Watch: Trailer to Stömol, a Feature-Length Machinima Shot Completely in Second Life

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:

Watch: Fantastic Tribute to Avatar Artist Tralala Loordes

Simon Sonnenblume created this dazzling montage video tribute to the SL images of the avatar artist known as Tralala Loordes, every single one of them jaw-dropping. As it happens, Cajsa profiled Tralala for New World Notes a couple years ago, and her SL/RL background is just as fascinating:

Watch: A Halloween Visit to Cetatea Poenari, Home to an SL Vampire Family

Dark, foreboding, and full of shredding metal, here's Erik Mondrian making a fly through visit of  Cetatea Poenari, a devilishly detailed Second Life sim owned by a "family" of roleplaying vampires. From Erik's description/dedication:

Built by Vlad Drakul-Dragonash & Nazaire Dragonash and named after a ruined Romanian castle that was once occupied by the real-life Vlad III Dracula (also known as Vlad the Impaler), Cetatea Poenari defies description and seems to stretch far beyond the limits imposed by its virtual borders. From the Valley of Horses and Arefu Prison to The Slaughtered Lamb pub and Snagov Monastery—and with the magnificent castle itself keeping watch over all from above—this is a region with many different paths and hidden places for the curious traveler to find. Thanks again to Vlad, Nazaire, Rain, and the entire Drakul family for asking me to film here!

More on it here, and click here to visit in SL. A recent arts school graduate whose thesis was created in Second Life, Mondrian had some incisive thoughts on the social group based within this sim:

Watch: "Repeat Hikari", Sole Second Life-Based Entry in this Year's Supernova Digital Animation Festival

If you can be in Denver this weekend, you can attend this year's Supernova Digital Animation festival, a showcase of 15 short movies made across many platforms. In a sign that there's still some artistic life in SL-based machinima, here's the sole festival entry made in Second Life: "Repeat Hikari" by Tess "Tizzy Canucci" Baxter, a rhythmically hypnotic dreamscape mood piece.

"Can't describe how pleased I am to be included in that category," Tess tells me. "I think it also shows that machinima is no longer a helpful name -- most machinima is now game play, and artistic work in Second Life is better thought of alongside other art forms, whether that's called 'digital animation', artists moving image, or video art (the old name!)"

That's a very good point. Since raw video capture of 3D gameplay is now among the most watched category of videos on YouTube and beyond, it may be time to shelve the "machinima" term.

Tess wrote this in-depth blog post describing her artistic vision for the work, which emerged out of the limitations of the medium, i.e. Second Life. For instance:

Visit in SL: A Tropical Post-Apocalypse City Called Drune IV - Aftermath

Here's a walkthrough of a quite amazing Second Life sim: Drune IV - Aftermath (SLurl teleport here), a rusted-over city on a small, tropical island, which somehow survived after an unspecified calamity. (Hey, maybe a new kind of twist on cyberpunk: Tropicalypse!)

Your host in this video above is Ayla Pants, a fun and chatty guide accompanied by a friendly drone, who is immediately greeted by an incredible avatar, who compliments Ayla on her fashion choices. The sim comes with great ambient sound (crashing waves and seabird song, to contrast with the rusting skyscrapers), and, Ayla tells me, looks great throughout the day cycle: