On Sunday — yes, it has taken me this long to be able to get a chance to write about it — RootsCampSL met online to talk about how machinima is and can be used to promote political activism. The hosts of the event were moo Money (SL avatar name) and Paul Marino.
“moo Money” was hired by Ben Linden (aka “BuhBuhCuh Fairchild”) to promote machinima within Second Life, traveling the grid educating virtual folk. Since moo’s hire, submissions of Alt-Zoom Studio’s Take5 Machinima Festival have grown from two to 20 every month. Paul Marino (“Hiro Quasimodo”) is author of The Art of Machinima and head of the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences in New York. The AMAS, a small non-profit organization promoting Machinima as a creative medium, sponsors an annual Machinima Festival in New York.
Machinima is filmmaking within a virtual environment, typically by appropriating a game that was never built for the purpose of movies. Each environment has its own strengths and weaknesses. For Second Life, the drawback is the need to have many cooperative real-life users manning avatars. You can use one avatar to be the camera, but that avatar can’t act or control others. However, the potential to landscape, cast, costume, and set the movie is essentially infinite.
Linden Labs — owners of the Second Life servers — do not have any plans to incorporate machinima tools in the desktop application. However, the Lindens (through moo) are obviously encouraging machinima. Ben and moo run a free group in SL (some groups charge membership fees) called Machinimatographers. “I did find an enterprising individual in the group trying to charge people for things,” moo told the RootsCamp crowd, “which led me to change the group charter.”
The virtual world is creating a culture of machinimakers. New Media Consortium has a school opening next year for synthespians with Northwestern, and there are avatar actors guilds forming in Second Life. Tools, like one moo demonstrated to allow smooth “dolly” shots, are being developed to help facilitate this art.
Politics and machinima are starting to mix. The most well known political machinima movie is probably French Democracy by Alex Chan a year ago. The movie, a response to the riots outside of Paris, was created by a video game, The Movies. Since then, a number of politically aware Machinima has been made. Campers also pointed to efforts done for cancer relay and the potential to make a nice piece from a Camp Darfur settlement over the hill from the gathering. Aldon Hynes () tried to get the Ned Lamont campaign to make use of machinima, but couldn’t find any good machinimators.
“There are so few professional machinimists in SL and I wear out their IM buttons,” agreed moo.
Access to a limited range of useful tools is part of the problem. Beginners can start with the built-in tools in the free SL desktop client, but control-shift-a is a bit unpredictable, especially since the September upgrade. Tutorials are available to help, but there are issues with frame rate and hard drive space. Moo spent the $30 for an upgrade to fraps (a Windows screen capture tool) shortly after getting started in machinima, a move justified recently when Ben disclosed at the Second Life Community Convention last August that the company wasn’t going to invest in creating machinima tools.
As a starting platform, either The Movies or Second Life are the best places to start. Massively multi-user games, like World of Warcraft, are the pioneer environments for the craft but are much more difficult to control shooting conditions. The Movies and SL require two very different approaches to moviemaking, though, with the biggest tradeoff being size of the crew vs. control of the environment.
Most of machinima is done in post-production anyway, with any number of video editing tools available on different platforms. Bad footage and choppy camera work can be edited away, and new tools — such a Crazytalk — can help overcome the shortcomings of the original medium. Crazytalk ($150-250) is a program by Reallusion that allows you to lip-synch the mouths of avatars to speech.
Another machinimator, “In Kenzo,” works with a nonprofit organization that is currently equipping and training an L.A. studio to do more machinima production here in LA. “We’re just starting to explore machinima and SL building with grassroots groups in africa, asia,” In explained. “We aim to build a creative community for kids and teens to create content for ManorMeta, long term.”
2 replies on “Political Machinima”
To address some of the things written, I’ve been using Fraps since a couple of weeks into my machinima career, back in May. I just noted that Ben stated during a discussion on machinima at SLCC that development of more tools was not a high priority on the list.
Also, I believe that was In Kenzo that was working with the studio in LA.
Thank you for the summary, though!
Thanks for the (very) prompt review. Sorry about the errors; that’s the problem when one cuts too long after pasting.
I made adjustments to the post in those two areas, hopefully for the better.