Over the last week, I’ve spent approximately 24 hours in Second Life, about 3-4 hours a night, exploring the sights and chatting with various inhabitants.  Once word got out about the first article in this ongoing series, I was inundated with compliments, requests, and information from around the world.  One thing you quickly notice is that while everyone tends to look “similar”, their backgrounds are anything but.  People in SecondLife are all slender, attractive, with long flowing air and ripped abs; I don’t think I saw a single portly or overweight avatar during my travels.  I did see a few “furries”, but they seemed in the minority.

What I did see was amazing environments, made possible by the unlimited control Linden gives you over your space.  Mountains and buildings floating in the sky, recreations of famous movie landmarks, waterfalls and rolling green hills, it seems anything you can imagine has been constructed somewhere inworld, and if it hasn’t then you are welcome to create it.  Such flexibility has become a great asset to filmmakers and videographers who are unable to afford traveling to New Zealand for rolling green hills, or large studios for fancy cable rigs or set constructions.  Simply construct your set inworld, and shoot the inhabitants there.

This new emerging form of video is called “Machinima”, a term which I’m sure many of you have heard before, and in SecondLife it’s big booming business.

What is Machinima?

The Wikipedia entry for Machinima describes it thusly:

Machinima (pronounced /məˈʃiːnɨmə/ or /məˈʃɪnɨmə/) is the use of real-time three-dimensional (3-D) graphics rendering engines to generate computer animation. The term also refers to works that incorporate this animation technique. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are fan laborers and often use graphics engines from video games, a practice that arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios’ 1992 video game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) video games, such as id Software’s Doom and Quake.

While an ample description of what it used to be, it fails to describe what it has become.  Modern machinima is far beyond “fan work”, and is now a paid business for many.  Entire businesses revolve around paid machinima work, with artists like Draxtor Despres often taking paid contract work for music videos and businesses.  Draxtor Despres is currently under contract by the Department of State for a series of videos, working with PBS for several segments, and taking additional work for others.

Also, entire businesses have arisen based around original content inside Second Life.  Pooky Amsterdam of PookyMedia was kind enough to speak to us at length about her endeavors at running a pair of inworld GameShows, The 1st Question and the Dating Casino, as well as a special arm for films. She recently completed a Machinima music video for Ming Bridges of her hit single ‘Plastic Dreams’, shown below.

How does it work?

A scene from a machinima shoot

During my time I had the privilege of working with both Pooky & Draxtor on various productions, getting a good behind-the-scenes look at how these productions are created.  On only my second day inworld, I attended a special production shoot of a ‘mobile device assembly factory’ that would be part of a larger video shown at a company board meeting for shareholders.  While the exact details of the final production are still under NDA until publicly released (don’t want to start impacting share prices or anything), I was allowed access to discuss this portion of the shoot.

Just like a real-life production, extras were hired to fill the scene and told to arrive 15 minutes prior to the beginning of the shoot.  Once arriving, they were given their ‘wardrobe’ for the scene.  In this case, it was a set of surgical scrubs minus the mask, to create the appearance of a ‘clean room’ for delicate device construction.  A set designer/architect had been hired to construct the room, the assembly tables, and various electronic components in several stages of assembly.  Unlike in real-life however, the various chairs and objects in the room came pre-loaded with a scripted set of animations.  This enabled the extras and avatars to simply sit down and automatically begin their faux assembly for the video.  Once everyone was in position, Draxtor used SecondLife’s camera controls (which can be decoupled from the avatar to allow zooming and flyarounds) to get the necessary shots.  Video was recorded with Fraps iShowU HD, a popular screen-recording package, and could then be post-processed in FinalCut like normal footage.

A few things that become immediately obvious upon watching (or reading) this:

  1. There are no limitations on equipment. Where in Real Life, you would have to hire a VFX company to add various exotic equipment or effects in post, such things can easily be constructed in-world and used during the shoot, making it much faster and more accurate.
  2. There is no training of actors or extras. No more need to “teach” your actors or extras whatever necessary skills are needed for the shot.  No longer do you need to teach them how to properly hold surgical instruments, fight kung-fu, or properly operate a parachute.  Simply pre-load the necessary animations, and let it run.
  3. There is no ‘magic equipment’. There is no need for fancy cable rigs or moving platforms to get the necessary camera shots, which then have to be removed in post.

All of this comes down to reducing the time to production and reducing the cost of production, making it an attractive offer to independent filmmakers and businesses alike.  The end result is videos like Draxtor’s award-winning coverage of ‘Virtual Guantanamo’, or his coverage of inworld businesses’.

Live InWorld Events

However, live inworld events require even further preparation and setup.  Pooky was so kind as to invite me to be a guest on the 79th episode of her quiz-show, “The 1st Question“.  The show has aired weekly for over a year, and before you think it’s a homegrown garage operation, let me fill you in on what really happens here. (Pictures of the event come courtesy of Dusty Artaud).

The Guests on "The 1st Question"

I had to appear 90 minutes early for debriefing, sound check, and setup.  Upon arrival, I was issued a “smile” to wear on-air and told where to sit.  Luckily I had managed to spruce myself up a bit, so that I didn’t appear completely out-of-place amongst the other SL-veteran guests.

Then, a pair of sound experts arrived to help out debug our microphone issues.  All 6 participants (4 guests and 2 hosts) went through several iterations of tweaking system settings, trying different mic placements, rebooting, reloging, etc, attempting to get the best performance.  Unlike a real-show, the sound issues are much trickier in an SL-live production because of the geographical disparity of the guests, leading to widely different internet capabilities, and differences in user architectures, leading to odd cross-talk or echo situations.

Once we got that all straightened out, we all moved to Skype.  This allowed us to keep voice-chat, but isolate us from everyone else in the studio and various sound effects.   We were then introduced to “The Network” that would be recording the event, Treet.TV.  A collection of cameramen were on-hand, as well as the pre-show entertainment “the tinies”, and all were coordinated by the stage manager.  The complexity of recording live-events is comparable, if not even more than, real productions.

However, there are additional complexities to worry about:

  • Griefers – Anywhere you have groups of people, you will have people using that group for their own means.  Protestors, activists, and even just plain mischievous souls looking to disrupt things.  To prevent this, “Security” was actually on hand to boot disruptive people.
  • Lag/Network Variance – As the show wanes on, you can’t expect the level of network throughput to remain constant.  Lag fluctuates based on environment and social factors and has to be accepted as part of the norm, requiring hosts that think quick on their feet and guests willing to work with it. This leads to the next particularly unique problem
  • Disconnects – definitely the most disruptive event, when one of the hosts or guests simply ‘vanishes’ mid-show due to system crash or network disconnect.

All of these scenarios can and inevitably will happen, and everyone has to be prepared for it.  With a great group of people, tho, it can be overcome and lead to some great events.  The result of my Appearance on The 1st Question is now online, and you can check it out here.

The Future of SL Machinima

The future of machinima in Second Life is limited only by how far out you’re willing to look.  Several of the larger machinima artists believe that eventually there will be a dedicated Machinima network.  Possibly first on something streaming like the upcoming Boxee Box, then moving to other more proprietary platforms.  Networks like Treet.TV are banking on it, building collections of shows and programming to keep such a network running 24/7.

Also, machinima is growing popular in several venues thanks to great shows like Red vs Blue, which takes place in the Halo universe.  Such shows have instant appeal to audiences because of their familiarity to the context and characters (Everyone’s played or at least seen Halo, right) but lack the creativity available in the truly open-ended world of Second Life.  Need a rabbit for a joke in Halo?  Tough.  In Second Life?  No problem.
Lastly, as graphics and computing power grows and grows, the graphic fidelity of sims like SecondLife will improve as well.  As studios show us what is capable in CG with films like Avatar and Toy Story, it’s not hard to imagine a point in the near future where the entire film could be shot in an environment like Second Life using virtual constructs.  The artists I spoke with that designed the sets for the productions mentioned above actually confessed to using Maya as a modeling tool in those designs, before moving inworld for final tweaking.  People currently designing scenes and characters for use with Maya and Renderman could find themselves using the same tools to design set pieces for SecondLife productions within the next decade.

Maybe it’s time to start brushing up on your SL Modeling Skills?

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Be sure to come back soon for the next installment in our Second Life Series.  We’ve still got  Science, Education, and much more to discuss!