trees are people too

This entry is a bit belated, as I wanted to attempt these ‘tests’ before our set was completed. Still, more ideas may be applicable, and it also gives a little background on the concept behind my set – how I saw it in my head.

The light was extremely bright, and I also ran out of batteries almost immediately (being the prepared media practitioner I am) so I haven’t captured possible angles yet, but this is a good idea of space and shape of my street, and also of how it might appear on small screen.

I am trying to explore the space, find a definition for it. Is it urban? Suburban? Industrial? It represents to me an interesting separation between nature and our modern lives. While the lane is composed of concrete and tar, and is mostly devoid of life, it also represents the intersection between our private lives and the common social space of the neighbourhood, as small elements of people’s lives spill out of the back of their homes onto the laneway.

This careful construction of closely aligned spaces was what inspired me to build an inner city laneway as my Second Life set. The construction of space as seen in cities represents an urban culture which, as Dalby points out in Environmental Geopolitics – Nature, Culture, Urbanity,

‘usually specifies itself as separate from wild, untamed nature…[and] is one that has a long colonial history of drawing boundaries and dividing nature into spaces which can be administered and altered to make them orderly.’

This urban culture, that inevitably shapes social and cultural spaces, has interesting ties to our real life identities and relationships with public and private spaces. Echoes of the construction of space is obvious in a space like Second Life – land is controlled, terraformed, built – but what this means for the identities of the inhabitants of a virtual space is much more complex. But as Dalby notes in his discussion of geopolitcs, the themes of space and power and the relationship between the two is recurring. Just as the cultural spaces are shaped and constructed in real life, they will provide an important understanding into social construction in virtual worlds.

And a short film, exploring this space yet again. (I needed practice please).

Framing Statement: Concept and topic, why and how our set will be used, characters and interpretation of the brief.

Our interpretation of the ABC My Street brief is a chronological narrative divided into four parts. It is a group of stories that span over four decades of our central characters life, discussing the different streets they have lived in during their lifetime. The story will begin when the central character, a female (40 years old) is 10 years old, and travel through four decades, each featuring a different street. This concept allows us to explore a range of different environments, focussing on the idea that your ‘street’, which is always ‘yours’, evolves over your life. Each street will have its own anecdote, which will reveal personality and emotional insight into both the character and the streets themselves.

We have divided our plot of land into four sections, each dedicated to a different streetscape from a different time, location and perspective. Our central character is able to wander through from one ‘neighbourhood’ to the next, as the narrative of her life unfolds. Each different street is quite small and simple, making them suitable for close shots and limited movement, but each ideally has its own ‘feel’ and story.

As the central character walks through the different streets, the different stories and nuances of each street will be told from the perspective of that particular time in their life. The tone is factual, intimate and personal, while staying relaxed and informal. This concept will hopefully resonate with a wide audience demographic, who can relate to the experience of living on a variety of different streets and the memories that those streets hold.

The premise is that: “Over time I have lived in many streets, but they have always been My Street”.

Style & Structure

The machinima will be shot in a first person, narrative, observational style. It will predominantly be a continuous shot, with occasional cuts and edits allowing for different camera angles. It will be accompanied by a VO explaining each street environment and the story behind it. The different environments will allow for different effects, lighting, contrast, which will keep the content dynamic and interesting for the mobile phone, while keeping it simple enough to translate to the medium. Our machinima should be ideal for small screen as the story features limited action, primarily from a close-range first person perspective, allowing for lots of slow or still shots. By keeping our sets bright and simple, and by implementing a smooth, continuous shooting style featuring lots of close ups and minimal action, our machinima should look suitable when playing on the mobile phone screen.

After watching Jenny’s instructional video on how we were going to record in a second life, I had a go at it at home, but instead of using the dv recorders, I used a video capture program called Fraps (it’s free!!).

I am not sure why we aren’t using software like fraps to record our movies, because it seems an easier way of doing it, but perhaps it has something to do with that irritating watermark that mysteriously appeared on my movie (It wasn’t there last night!! Foiled.) Still, I wanted to have a look at what we were working with in terms of size, movement etc. Unfortunately I didn’t record it in our actual set (as there isn’t really much there at the moment :cough:) so it is not a set test, more of a recording test.

It gave me an idea of just how small this movie is going to be. Teeny tiny. Simplistic sets will be best, and as has been reiterated, close ups will be essential.

But take a look. It’s kinda fun. If you watch carefully, I think you can see Darth Vadar pillaging something. I’ll be uploading more test recordings, from within the set, as they come to hand. Bring on the machinima!!

well, I said I wanted more pictures, so here you go.

I am documenting my sculptypaint creations as they have a nasty habit of going awol for no reason. I think my poor old confuser is having trouble handling the pressure. It really creaks through this. But this is me as builder.

pretty simplistic, i know, but they will hopefully add a bit of authenticity to the set. For my final trick I hope to make a (drumroll please) trash can, oscar the grouch style. I hope these will suffice as things I have built. The pain of sculptypaint better be worth it -_-*

To establish my blog criteria I have chosen to analyse the blog post making the set for ABC posted by Karin. I enjoyed this post because:

I also enjoyed it because it kinda kicked me into gear regarding considering some of these assignment requirements. I enjoyed seeing the blog used as a tool – both logistically and creatively. In respect of that, I would like to apply these principles to my own blog by:

I think these criteria are easily achievable and tbh are elements I strive for in my blog anyway. We’ll see how we go. (Baited breath. No, not really.)

So, we have started building our fabulous sets in second life. I had done quite a lot of building over the weekend, but had managed to build in the wrong place, so spent most of yesterday’s tute moving things around. Fortunately I am (finally) getting the hang of the controls to build/move/control objects, so it was not half as arduous as it could have been. With this I am very pleased – at least, although I am still building simple objects, I am able to maneuvered much more easily in my virtual space and understand what it is capable of.

Meanwhile, I am predicting a few issues in our project. While our idea I think could still works, because we have decided to divide the work into four sections, the consistency and flow throughout the four parts of the sets could be a problem. I am foreseeing the use of many clever camera angles to make it look like one fluid cinematic piece, but I am kind of looking forward to this challenge. What we haven’t really accounted for in our planning is the fact that the four of us will be approaching this quite differently – we all have different aesthetic needs and wants, build in different ways and probably have quite different concepts of what it will look like. We also are working on it at completely different times and will have different time restrictions, so working together is very hard to accomplish logistically. BUT, we are all building, the site is looking ok and I think we will get there in the next week and a half. I’ll keep you posted (hopefully some screen grabs of our evolving environment). It’s become evident also that our narrative and script will be shaped further around our environment, now we are becoming more aware of what we are capable of.

In the meantime, I am also on the hunt for an insightful and aspirational blog post from which I can draw criteria from on which to base my own. I haven’t had a lot of time to read student blogs this semester, but I will be checking some out over the weekend. I know Tenille always does excellent and insightful blog posts, and I will try and check out a few more…. I seem very strapped for time, what with these two lives and all.

My partner madcaow pointed me in the direction of this post on Kotaku which talks about the upcoming Machinima Festival held by the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

The festival feature panels of prominent machinima filmmakers discussing this new form of cinema, and there is a range of categories you can enter your machinima into, including (interestingly) a ‘Long Format’, which has been introduced in response to the increasing amount of feature length submissions. Feature length machinima, huh? I’ll be keen to check some of these out when the awards are announced.

Meanwhile, through this I also discovered Ignis Solus, an excellent short machinima using the game Team Fortress 2 as its platform. While the video is simple, it still manages to be pretty deep and highly entertaining. Its production quality and direction are impressive, and give a little more inspiration and meaning to what we are trying to do in second life. While I don’t think we will be able to get anywhere near this (shame) it shows how you can use the sets, props and characters to create meaningful stories… and all with an entire crew of about 6 people. I dig it.

Our first idea in second life was devised during brainstorming in the tute, and I think we are all pretty pleased.

Following on from the creative brief of ABC’s My Street (which is pretty broad, mind you) we have decided to do a piece based on the following concept:

Following a single central character, the narrative of the story will follow their life through the various streets they have lived in. Each street will represent an age, an emotion, an experience from their life as they grow and move over time. Starting at age 10 (childhood), then 20, 30 and finally forty, the four different street will (hopefully) encapsulate different stages of the characters life, moving from the innocence and nostalgia of childhood, to the more pacy life of your twenties and thirties, through to the more settled life of your forties, when the street you are living in will probably be the one you settle in. In this way, our My Street really become the road of life (cliche much lol) as traipsed by this central character.

After discussing the many different streets we had lived in during our lives, and also the different aspects we wanted to add to our machinima, this seemed like to perfect way to incorporate a number of experiences and scenarios within a limited amount of time and space, while still maintaining a fluid and continuous narrative. It’s also a story we can all relate too, as we all have memories of streets we have lived on in our lives, be they bad, good, fond or otherwise. I guess you could say we are are conceptualising that the story of my (our) street is also the story of my (our) life.

We have decided to divide our plot into 4 smaller streets, and the ‘camera’ (when we work out how to use it) will follow the character through the various streets chronologically, which also gives us all the opportunity to build our one complex prim/item/building to place in our section. The visuals will be accompanied by a narrative which gives a little further insight into each street and each period of life, even a little anecdote: When I was 20 we lived in an amazing skyhigh apartment, but all I did was party all the time so the place was a mess…. or something. You get our drift.

Of course, ‘complexity’ of objects/buildings is totally subjective (cough cough), and we are still discovering our limitations and abilities in SL. This should mean that we can capture a variety of scenes – perhaps implement a range of angles, themes, colours etc – which will keep the piece interesting, but will also not require too much camera movement, and so should translate well to machinima for mobile phone.

Teamsupersecondlife consists of:

Caroline (aka me) playing the part of Growler Xue
Danny as Dahnee Skytower
Ash as Adede Morpork and
Sofia as Jemima String.

So watch this space. It’s sure to be amazing. At the very least it will be a street or something.

Chanced upon the most timely of documentaries last night. Virtual adultery and Cyberspace Love is part of a documentary series called Wonderland created by BBC2, and this particular episode explores the real world relationships of people who meet, court, and even marry, in the virtual world of second life. The episode centres around two relationships – one successful, the other not so much, but both equally fascinating.

While the documentary provided only a superficial analysis of what are essentially incredibly complex and unprecedented relationships emerging from a new and unexplored social space, it was surprisingly heart wrenching to watch the story of Carolyn and Lee, an American couple whose lives and marriage is slowly torn apart by her addiction and ‘virtual affair’ in second life. The disturbing yet arresting story of Carolyn’s second life addiction slowly unfolds against the backdrop of her neglected home, where dishes pile in the sink, the windows are taped up to prevent light coming in and even the room has been completed painted except for the area around her computer – she clearly couldn’t spare the time from the game to relocate. In the next room play her four (presumably lonely) children, and her baffled and dismayed husband, as she quenches her 14-hours-a-day SL habit, which she explains to her kids as akin to ‘playing barbie’. See, in real life Carolyn is a pudgy, ordinary looking, depressed housewife. In SL she is a ravishing vixen brunette, with the body of a goddess and a virtual partner to match – cue Elliot, who lives in Britian, is small, also ordinary and caucasian, but in SL is a huge black man with numerous piercings, bulging pecs toting two uzi’s and a sword (why not after all).

The subplot of second life features Kiera and Dean, two relatively unattractive brits who also personify their wildest dreams through their SL avatars (as Kiera sadly says, in second life she looks like she ‘should have looked’ before her life took over, aka got really fat). These two get married in second life in front their family and friends (in realtime, of course, and there were real tears and it was real love) and spend the majority of their time together in the game. As Kiera puts it so succinctly, ‘In real life we life in a tiny house and it rains all the time. In second life we life in a huge mansion on the beach!!’ But their story is happy, having met up, married in real life and lived (virtually) ever after.

Carolyn and Elliot’s tale, on the other hand, is not so rosy. These two would often spend eight to ten hours a day together over their 10 month affair, and their complex relationship involved arguments, breakups, reconciliation, more arguments, secret rendezvous and cybersex, while real life, and her real family, continued on without her. But Carolyn is devastated when Elliot decides to end the relationship, deciding it will ‘go nowhere’ (I am not sure where he expected it to go??), and so flees her family for the UK in the hope that her and her virtual love could perhaps make it work in RL.

Needless to say, and to cut a rather tragic story short, it doesn’t, and Carolyn, is forced to confront reality again when she discovers that the virtual world doesn’t necessarily translate to RL communication and relationships. But oh! How fascinating it was to watch these people live out their complete fantasies, their utter hedonistic desires, without really understanding the ramifications to their real lives, nor, it would seem, the difference between the real and the imaginary.

The issues of SL were only lightly touched on but plentiful, with the primary being why people enter and become addicted to SL in the first place – to be someone they cannot be in RL. What was so interesting (and concerning) was the complete absorption into this virtual world, and their gradual inability to distinguish the two. While her real life decomposed around her, Carolyn could care only for herself in SL.

In an interview about WOW, a Professor studying the phenomena of virtual worlds argued that because the internet was real, so too were these virtual worlds. But if so, then this must be considered real cheating, not just some ‘game’, or virtual cheating. I know were it my partner, I would be devastated, and not just virtually, either. Regular (addicted??) players also argued that in the future, people would spend their entire lives in virtual spaces. And why not?? In a society obsessed by image, consumerism and egocentricity, SL is the answer to all your physical, financial and personal shortcomings. It’s just a shame you will have to make love to your keyboard.

Watch the doco on youtube here.

What on earth are we doing here? I always laugh at people watching shows on their ipods/mobile phones/pdas on the tram. I thought the idea was to go bigger, ever larger. Who has the biggest plasma screen of all? But of course I am missing the point – there are plenty of opportunities when I would have loved an episode of House to distract me form the smelly person sitting next to me/on top of me on the train. i just have to understand the context.

For mobile content to be successful, it is going to need to be seriously constrained, and that could be kind of cool. There’ll be no Lord of the Rings epic battle scenes viewed on a 8×8 mobile screen, thank you very much. At the same time the technology and display is becoming more sophisticated, so presumably in the future these constraints might shift, but for the moment lets examine what we are working with.

First is time. It’s got to be short. Short and sweet, not just so you don’t ruin your eyes, but also to contend with external distraction and our shrinking attention spans. So, no epic love/war/biographical stories for this medium. We have to keep it to about 90-180 seconds. This means this story is going to have to hit relatively fast and hard, and clarity and succinctness is vital.

Next is the actual filming. What should the pictures contain in terms of content and action. We’ll need to use tight shots, and panning, zooming and fast edits are probably best avoided, unless we want to give our viewer a stiff headache/epileptic seizure. Bold, strong colours are recommended, but this could also mean contrast could be very effective, so I am not averse to implementing dark colours also to increase dramatic effect. I wonder what the consensus is on black and white mobile movies? If done carefully, I don’t doubt they could be effective. But this again will only be successful by carefully using contrast, and this means effective lighting. In second life we can not only implement light, but can also dictate the lighting of the actual environment, so I am looking forward to playing god. At least god of lighting. hmm.

At this stage we are still brainstorming. Within our team I have not been nominated as an ‘ideas’ person, and yet :gasp: I have come up with an idea, and so might propose it should we be struggling to come up with a concept. It’s very simple and basic, but it just.might.work.

The story centers around one character and goes something like this (you will have to forgive its simplicity and use your imagination). Read the rest of this entry »