New World Notes

Watch: Machinima Artist Shows How Hand-Made Visuals Are Better Than AI

Remember Teal Aurelia's Second Life-based machinima promoting real life pop singer SEMINA, which led to a radio station picking up the song? Here's Teal's behind-the-scenes video, showing how she manually, painstakingly integrates SL footage with her post-production editing and artistry.  

On her social media, Teal's bio reads: "I make videos. I don't use any AI."

This production video visually expresses that statement:

"I just prefer transparency in art," she tells me. "Especially in a community where people are trying to learn from each other. I post editing videos so people can see how much work is involved in what I do. I'm never going to believe that AI is more valuable than actual skill."

You can not only see that technical skill here, but the personal artistic touches she brings to the task, giving the video a hand-made feel.  (For instance, how the butterfly and shooting star travel between paintings, or the blink-and-you'll-miss-it rotating stars in the diorama.) While it's heavily post-processed machinima, flourishes like these make it distinctly recognizable as a Teal Aurelia production. 

Saying "I don't use any AI" is now also necessary to distinguish what she's doing here from the torrent of flashy but mediocre AI slop now choking our social media feeds:

Watch: Amazing Second Life Machinima Promotes New Song -- And Helps It Get Real Life Radio Airplay!

This is a beautiful new machinima from auteur Teal Aurelia, but with a special new twist: It's also a promotion for a track from real life pop singer SEMINA, who's had several hits in her home country in the EU, but had her music career undone by the recent pandemic.

"[I] was preparing for a tour when COVID hit and it all went to hell," as she puts it to me. "The tour was cancelled and I thought I'd never do this again."

That led her to performing in Second Life ("it filled somewhat of a emotional void... it was enough for me not to lose my mind during the lockdown") -- and led her to discovering Teal:

Watch a Second Life Screenshot Transformed Into a High Definition Video Location Through Gen AI Platforms Midjourney & Hailuo

Last time I was talking with indie filmmaker Tim Hannan, he was feeding raw footage of Second Life dinosaurs into a gen AI platform to create pretty cool low budget clips. That early attempt was rudimentary, but this new segment he just showed me (watch above) is several steps improved.

"Midjourney has a new feature where it will re-texture an image and it's pretty good at going from lower graphics to realistic," he tells me. 

He then feeds the resultant footage into Hailuo, a gen AI video platform.

"Reoccurring locations / backgrounds are tough with AI," he allows.

Hence using multiple platforms:

Watch: How to Upscale Second Life Machinima with AI Program Stable Diffusion

Problem: Machinima is an amazing use case for metaverse platforms, enabling people to create high quality narrative videos on a low budget -- if only, that is, the "high quality" part wasn't so challenging. Because any time you capture video in a multiplayer virtual world, you inevitably encounter lag, frame rate drop, and onscreen mesh files that don't fully display. That problem is especially acute with Second Life, where everything in the virtual world (including other people's avatars, logging in from around the world) is streamed to the machinima maker's computer in real time.

Solution: Generative AI! Specifically Stable Diffusion from Stability AI.

Watch this tutorial from Pryda Parx (above) to see what I mean. Using Stable Diffusion and Comfy UI (a graphic user interface for Stable Diffusion), Parx is able to convert footage captured from Second Life with a low frame rate and poor image quality into something approaching professional quality -- upscaling it from 15 frames per second  to 60 FPS with a 4K display.

Parx tells me the conversion process is not especially difficult:

How an Art School Grad Became a Viral Ad Creator for Second Life Brands

This spectacular montage machinima may seem like a big budget commercial for Second Life (and it's definitely more dazzling than the actual ad Linden Lab paid for in 2021), but it's actually more interesting than that:

It's a showreel of ads for top metaverse brands inside the Second Life economy, created by Teal Aurelia, a recent art school grad whose machinima tribute to SL artists last year went low key viral across the community. 

Since then, she's crafted herself into a creator of video ads for Second Life brands that align with her own aesthetic focus:

"Really I'm here to film monsters and magic and defiant women," as Teal tells me. "I usually only accept commissions from brands that suit those cinematic visuals, so it's just a process of weaving their work with mine rather than trying to film what I hope a brand represents."

To put it another way: The most watched Second Life machinima now are Second Life brand ads by Teal. While live "let's play" type videos can garner many more views, self-contained narrative SL machinima shorts typically earn a several hundred/a few thousand views.

But by my rough count across her main social media channels (Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, etc.) Teal Aurelia's ads have attracted well over 350,000 views. While her clients haven't shared subsequent sales figures, "most clients have come back to me to request multiple commissions," she says. "So I take that as a good sign?"

Some of Second Life's top brands -- i.e. those grossing over $1 million USD a year -- have even offered to hire her exclusively as their full time ad director. "It's amazing anyone would ask me that, but I really think my videos have only been successful so far because I work alone and make what I love."

I actually think if any company hires her full-time, it should probably be Linden Lab itself, but that's just me. In any case, the success of her video ads illustrates the importance of advertising metaverse platform-based content outside the platform, across the asynchronous social media ecosystem.

Here's a look at some recent favorite ads, along with some more Teal insights on her creative approach:

The Gnome is Home: Helium-Headed YouTuber Soda Gnome Wackily Returns to Second Life

It's a Friday miracle! After an absence of some six years, legendary YouTuber Soda Gnome is back with a new Second Life machinima to utterly wreck some "Take on Me" karaoke. First sighted by Redditor u/GeoffreyLannister, we've been missing his wryly goofy humor, a gnome-shaped light amid the sea of fashion and trolling videos. Though watch now: For whatever reason, his classic SL videos seem to be no longer on YouTube. 

Past Soda Gnome appearances on NWN below, though it's mainly readers and I talking about how funny as fuck he is. I've reached out to Monsieur Gnome so he knows we're watching -- say hello in Comments in hopes he makes more videos!

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:

Watch: This Sexy Platform Game is Actually an Ad for a Steampunk Brand in Second Life

In the platform game of Love, you only win when the final boss gets hugged. And while this looks like a fun iPhone game, it's actually an ad for Sky Pirates steampunk decor by D-LAB. Though come to think of it, this also shows how Second Life machinima is a great tool for pre-visualizing games and movies. 

It's by Teal Aurelia, who also created the acclaimed tribute to SL artists we watched recently. (More on her process here.) There was some debate on documentary versus green screen SL machinima (Teal's technique), and this is another demonstration of how green screen creates the opportunity to showcase great Second Life content in a new, high quality context.

WATCH: Amazing Machinima Tribute to Second Life's Artist Community Is Also Among the Best SL Machinimas Ever Made

This jaw-droppingly awesome machinima, "Artists in SL", is a tribute to Second Life Flickr artists who inspired its creator, Teal Aurelia, and is in turn a tribute to Second Life as an artist's digital toolchest and community. I don't say this often, but it's also one of the best SL-based machinimas ever made in the metaverse platform's near-20 year history.  But please watch and judge for yourself.

Teal is a recent art school grad, and I sort of suspect we'll be seeing much more of her work for a growing fanbase. Her art degree was inspired by creating in Second Life:

"Making machinima in SL was one of the things that led me to my degree in animation," she tells me. "I started out learning real life wildlife documentary [filmmaking], but it didn’t really let me tell stories, so I tried filming in Second Life for fun. I was still limited by the animations I could find in-world.

"Obviously," she adds grinning, "the only solution was to get into ridiculous amounts of student debt and go study how to make things move myself."

Here's how she discovered Second Life and a glimpse behind her creative process: 

This Amazing Machinima of a Tiny Cosmic Void Was Made With No VFX -- Because You Can Actually Get a Tiny Cosmic Void in Second Life

This short experimental but seriously cool machinima by rising star creator Vrutega (read his SL spotlight profile here) looks like it was made in After Effects or some other post-production platform, but it was actually recorded entirely in Second Life.

"Everything was shot in-world," he tells me. "No VFX was used for this. I used an interactive skybox and changed the WindLight to match the hue of the DarkStar Pocket item I was holding."

And yes, you can get a copy of your own DarkStar Pocket this weekend at the Tokyo Zero event in SL - [click here to teleport].

Self-taught, Vrutega did later add the sharp audio effects: