While it's Halloween and we're embracing our fears, I'd like to chat about encoding video. When you look at all the setting choices that you have, it can be downright intimidating. I recently had the chance to speak with the wonderful Machinimist extraordinaire, Paul Marino, about this very topic and he set me straight.
There are a couple of programs that you can use to encode SL-friendly Machinima. The first being Quicktime Pro. It runs roughly 30 USD and gives you some quick and easy options. Since I'm running the Ed Wood Festival this year, I'm using it to re-encode every video in Quicktime MOV H.264 compression with AAC 48khz, Stereo, 160kbps audio.
Another handy program is something that Frank Dellario, ILLBixby Cerveau of the ILL Clan, recommend. It's called Super C, because it has the copyright symbol after Super. It's totally free, but can be daunting because of the sheer amount of options in it. It also has a hard to find download link, so keep your eye out for it.
Do you have a program you'd like to recommend, or specific settings that you like to use? Leave a comment!
Back when I was a wee newblet (the second time around), Secondcast was theSecond Lifepodcast to listen to. Since that time, almost two years ago, they've recorded 63 total episodes, of which only about 13 of them were in the last nine months. One fifth of the cast, Lordfly Digeridoo, recently pronounced Secondcast dead, after months of inactivity.
While I can't speak for them, I can speak as someone who has been on the show four or five times, with the latest being an episode that never aired in July. I heard the tone of the program change before me. What was once a fun project ended up taking a backseat to their own personal projects. Walker Spaight wrote a book, Johnny Ming and Torrid Midnight went to work for the Electric Sheep Company, Lordfly Digeridoo for Millions of Us, among others, and Cristiano Midnight busy as ever with SL Universe.
Instead of focusing on the fact that it's gone, though, I'd rather relate a happy memory I have from the show. After having been on a couple of times, Johnny asked me to make an episode into a Machinima. It turned into a total disaster. The rest of the cast was really bored and did not hide that fact. They goofed off when I needed screenshots, then got cranky before they were to watch all the Machinima.
This October marks the third year anniversary of the creation of Alt-Zoom Studios, BuhBuhCuh Fairchild's answer to the growing phenomenon of machinima. The Ed Wood Festival was set up to celebrate machinima that's so bad it's good, an homage to the famously awful movies of that director who gave us Plan 9 From Outer Space.
In that spirit, this weekend will see a couple of events that aspiring machinimists will want to check out. Friday night at 7 PM SLT, in Lukanida, Alt-Zoom Studios will present the Ed Wood Festival Highlights of Yesteryear, showcasing the 13 past entries into the contest. That will give people an idea of the kind of quality that wins dubious awards. Saturday the 27th this year's contest theme will be announced, giving creators 48 hours to film their movie and submit it to Moo Money before 11:59 PM, for inclusion in the contest.
Finally, at 7 PM on Halloween, contestants will gather to watch all submissions, and the winner will be announced shortly thereafter. For more information, contact Moo in-world, or go to the website. Filmmakers, don your angora for inspiration and prepare yourselves!
Hugh Hancock, coiner of the term "machinima", sent me this tidbit about his production company, Strange Company, premiering their feature film cut of their BloodSpell series. BloodSpell is a punk fantasy action-adventure movie filmed in NeverWinter Nights that has been written up by the BBC, the Guardian, Suicide Girls, Boing Boing, USA Today, and a slew of others. For those of you keeping tabs on machinima, there aren't many feature-length films produced in this medium.
That's why he's inviting everyone to be a part of the screening that will take place on Hathead Island on Sunday, October 21st, at 11am PDT, or 7pm GMT. There will be interviews, a special intro, and tons of awesome extras. After the screening, keep your eyes peeled for an interview here on Second Life Insider! Hope to see you there.
* I almost forgot to include a disclaimer about the violence that appears in this film. When I premiered the final episode of the series some time ago, many in the audience complained of the gore. Keep in mind that it's just pixels. If you have a strong stomach, come on over!
With the award ceremony taking place yesterday at around 10am PDT, you would think that the award winners would have been announced shortly thereafter. Instead, I've been pacing the floor and scouring the internet searching for a sign. I finally found the winners on a blog, called Free Pixel, and I must say, 3 out of 9 total nominations for SL aren't bad.
At last year's Machinima Festival, in New York, SLers received 7 nominations over 4 people, and only one person won. That was Eric Call, for his Linden Lab hype machinima, Silver Bells and Golden Spurs. I'm excited to see that our numbers have grown. For the complete list of winners, check out Free Pixel's blog. Congrats to the nominees and winners!
Here is a list of the Second Life winners:
Best Commercial - When the Postman Spits Twice - SL-Inworld Productions
Best Technical - Machinima Island - la.interactiva
I was going to tell you that the UK Machinima Festival is being streamed right now from 2:30am-9am PDT/SLT on both Saturday and Sunday. I was going to tell you that SLers account for a whopping 8 nominations! I was going to tell you that we're all gathered at Hathead II island to watch the stream. I was ALSO going to tell you that you could watch it online from Quicktime.
Then I found out that the actual awards ceremony won't be streamed. I discovered when I got here that it would be recorded and aired online on the 20th. This is extremely disappointing as us Americans were planning to stay up to watch the content all morning, and now we don't even get a payoff. If you are attending the awards ceremony, PLEASE email us and let us know if we won anything!
If you are still interested in watching, you can find the program here.
Lifeskool and Machinima.com are teaming up to host a Machinima contest inviting you to show them your "sickest trick". Lifeskool is a free on demand TV network online that covers a variety of topics. Machinima.com is a site where you can showcase your Machinima, chat in their forums, and participate in contests.
The contest began on October 1st and will be accepting entries through January 31st, 2008. According to the rules, the Machinima can be about anything you want, including music videos, comedies, and dramas. There is no entry fee, but you must be 18 years old to enter. Please note that they specify only one entry per person.
On February 5th, they'll begin the voting process, which ends on the 22nd. 10 finalists will be selected from the entries, and then the judges, which include Tommy Lee, will pick the Grand Prize Winner, while voters will pick the People's Choice Winner. They'll announce the winners on March 5th.
The Grand Prize Winner will be flown to New York to spend time with the creator of This Spartan Life, Chris Burke. They will put you up in a hotel for up to 12 days and give you $1000 USD spending money as well! The People's Choice Winner will receive the video game console of their choice, up to $1000 USD in retail value. For more rules and information about the contest, please see their FAQ
Since August of 2006, not everyone has had access to the official Second Life forums, which is where I found this job posting in the Machinima section. Cadence Juran, of MetaNetwork Media, is hiring a production crew for a news program that will debut in January of 2008. They are looking to produce a 30 minute weekly segment, which is a serious undertaking. I know from experience.
What are they asking the teams to do? You would be responsible for directing, editing, pre and post production of the segments, as well as producing the commercials for their clients. I'm assuming this means sponsors. You would have a news team at your disposal, though. Interested parties are instructed to send an in-world message to Cadence Juran, or email her, with a demo of your work and rate per segment.
Iridium Linden is one of the most amazing assets to Linden Lab. She plays a strong role in the community. I invited her to speak on my Machinima track at SLCC in August. At first, we weren't sure what she would talk about, but I knew it was important for her to be there on my track. She ended up using her time as an open forum for residents to sound off on what they would like to see implemented as far as Machinima goes.
She wrote down each and every request we had, and just a few days later, she made one of our requests happen! Educators and developers already had mailing lists, but Machinima was sorely lacking, so she activated one for us. Because she rocks so much, it didn't stop there! She gave us a spot on the Second Life wiki. Thanks, Iridium!
After many frustrations with existing machinima gadgets, CodeBastard Redgrave has created her own in order to shoot a small movie for her friends. The result is a simple HUD camera, perfectly suited for the point-and-shoot people or for those who do not want to spend time setting up complicated camera angles, which entail having build rights on the land of interest.
SecondLifeCasinos.com entrepreneur SL Loonie is launching a new way to screen your real life and SL movies into Second Life - by paying for them. In a world of cheap server space and free hosting options for Quicktime movies, such as blip.tv, I have to wonder how she plans to profit from this venture. Her prices range from 5 dollars all the way up to 80 dollars USD for 30 days of viewing. In addition, she has hosting and sponsorship options for parties. Maybe she didn't get the memo that residents have been doing this for free since the movie stream was introduced?
On the plus side, she's also hosting a contest where you can win L prizes and free screenings of your film. They are looking for the Tube2SLYouTube Film Producer of the Year 2007. What does this mean? They will take your work, which has already been compressed down to a low quality flash file and download it, then re-encode it to Quicktime format. I see Oscar potential. Or do I? The quality is pretty bad so I can't actually tell.
I'm all for showing off your hard work in Second Life, but I simply cannot endorse a pay model when there are so many other choices out there. If you're genuinely interested in earning the 25,000L price and seeing your movie highly pixelated on the big screen, you can get the rules and info here. The contest ends on September 14th, with the winners being announced on the 29th and 30th. Will you be participating?
Artist Vlad Bjornson opens new avenues for expression through his Sculpted Thoughts art piece. The morphing sculpture impresses the eye with a smart mashup of sculptie functionality and the Second Life media interface. The sculptie object is coded to take on a new shape as it cycles through the textures from a QuickTime movie stream.
SL limitations in this area were surpassed with some clever and custom scripts made by the artist. For example, Bjornson's sculptie is updated at a speed of almost 8 frames per second in order to maintain a smooth animation (see the machinima demo above). "If sculpties reacted to the video stream properly, [the motion] would be totally fluid [...] SL probably doesn't pick up the changes otherwise", explains scripter Candide LeMay.
There's an interesting post by Forseti Svarog over at SLOG regarding Linden Lab's habit of using resident IP for promotional purposes without attribution. Long story short, Linden Lab used Forseti's iVillage fashion show video, but not only did they fail to credit him, they literally edited the video to remove the existing credits!!
I actually had a conference call with Catherine Smith and former LL Marketing director David Fleck about this very issue about a year ago. At the time the problem was a series of Linden Lab press releases that not only failed to credit the residents responsible for the projects, but were easily misinterpreted as crediting Linden Lab for these projects!
There's always a lot of talk about education in SL, at least among the people I talk to (teachers tend to clump together after all). There are wonderful examples of many different types of things that are already in SL for just about every discipline you can imagine, but Perplexity Peccable (Lexi, not Perp!) has put together this short video of science in SL.
It's only 3 minutes, it included a couple of bits I'd not heard about before, as well as missing one or two I have seen and been hugely impressed by (the Virtual Hallucinations area for one). It's well worth a look, and thinking about including it in your bag of contents to show administrators who doubt the value of SL.
John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Go, and Charlie's Chocolate Factory, spent 30 minutes in Second Life on August 20th, answering questions about his upcoming film, The Nines. The movie plot explores the intersection between the real and the virtual, while the promotional methods are heavily using transmedia to engage fans into alternate reality games. August announced that he is hoping to release a version of the movie that would allow fans to re-edit it.
The premiere for the The Nines is set for August 31st in New York and Los Angeles, and September 28th in Austin, TX.
While it's Halloween and we're embracing our fears, I'd like to chat about encoding video. When you look at all the setting choices that you have, it can be downright intimidating. I recently had the chance to speak with the wonderful Machinimist extraordinaire, Paul Marino, about this very topic and he set me straight.
Back when I was a wee newblet (the second time around), 
I was going to tell you that the UK Machinima Festival is being streamed right now from 2:30am-9am PDT/SLT on both Saturday and Sunday. I was going to tell you that SLers account for a whopping 8 nominations! I was going to tell you that we're all gathered at 
Iridium Linden is one of the most amazing assets to Linden Lab. She plays a strong role in the community. I invited her to speak on my Machinima track at SLCC in August. At first, we weren't sure what she would talk about, but I knew it was important for her to be there on my track. She ended up using her time as an open forum for residents to sound off on what they would like to see implemented as far as Machinima goes.
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