Uffa Burnstein

Another thread of this journey into the aesthetics of Machinima in Second Life was to do with the actual production. How is this happening ? Who’s involved?  What is it used for? but most of all who gave it such an ugly name ? I really hate it, it sounds stupid.

First thing i did was to immerse myself in the world of Machinima groups in SL. I started from the Machinima Wiki that gives a general list of resources.  To my surprise there was much more than I thought.

Some groups are proper large hubs of expertise like the Machinima Institute that counts hundreds of members and comes with SIM full of resources to help you through all the technicalities, from story boarding to post production and distribution. To be honest I found the groups quite lame, I tried to chat to people and all i got was them directing me to the SIM and uploading the technical material. I was told to sign up to be part of a production, however to date I haven’t been called for anything. It seems the the whole industry was very active in 2006, when the whole machinima exploded, but after that the number of  large institutional productions had dropped and remains low. 

These groups are very organized, some are set up on a project-specific basis, like for organizing the production of a film. Others are divided by type of roles. There are some groups for machinima actors, where you sign up and get called to perform in one of features, obviously you get paid an hourly rate. Some features place ads in groups and look for experienced SL life users for their movies. 

The interesting thing for me was that this very much mimics the production process of a real feature film. The fact that it is so much cheaper seems to excite a lot if film makers and actors to launch themselves in a machinima career. Another interesting thread to follow in this research is to analyze what type of acting skills are required in SL and how these are different than in first life.  I would love to see theathre productions in SL… I think this is its great potential compared to animation, the fact that “live” stuff can exist and is going to be weird, because of the mediation by the digitalization of it. So far I came across the Salt Satyagraha walk and I loved it.

Failing my ambition to make it in the Machinima Hollywood equivalent, I have decided to go through the route of the *independent film-making* and as every independent, I had to resize my ambitions and pull out the cash. 

I have story-boarded an hybrid film at the border with documentary. Because I cannot rely much on the actors (you know, they are vain and volatile), I have imagined to only have one avatar that had to be special to attract attention of other people so I could film them. I have commissioned my friend in Milan who by coincidence has some skin shops in Second life and makes avatars of celebrities, to build the avatar of Barack Obama. I got Kevin to accept to manouvre him and I’ve asked the guy who built the Obama SIM in SL where  I shot the elction night documentary, to provide the settings. 

To date I have yet not filmed the pieces, but everything is ready to go… I guess I just need time…