Linden Lab has long granted licenses to Second Life residents for the taking of snapshots and machinima, reflecting how Second Life was established as a user created space that encouraged creativity and content reuse. In many other games, where they were created by teams of developers, the making of machinima was contested as a breach […]
Making the video Artistic ideas always have inspiration from somewhere, but sometimes the inspiration is more simple and direct than others. In this case, it was a visit to an exhibition put together by a friend, Indigo Claire. I arrived thinking I was too late for the opening, but I’d misread and I was a […]
‘Be yourself in VR’: but you’re never alone in the new Facebook Spaces Facebook clearly would not want you to be anything else, as their real name policy well demonstrates. A singular identity means they can easily track you and collect your data, and sell advertising on the back of it. I remember friends ranting […]
This post about Falling Between Worlds has been long in the making. I have been doing a full write-up of my thought processes and the connections and influences and it is about 6,500 words. Way too long for a blog post! It is a simple storyline on the surface, but it very definitely takes place […]
‘A good interpretation of anything – a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society – takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads instead leads us somewhere else – into an admiration of its own elegance, of its […]
When a prominent film director takes an interest in a minor film form, he’s going to be noticed. And so it was when Peter Greenaway said machinima is ‘the visual cultural phenomenon of the 21st century’ in 2010, and when he said ‘we must dump the idea of THE FRAME – the frame – like […]
I write a post about gender fairly regularly1 and as there’s some interesting new research around, I thought I’d return to the subject. But first a bit of background. When I first came into Second Life, gender crossing and deception was a hot issue. I remember reading the provocatively titled Is Your Second Life Woman […]
Insilico is closing. I’d long wanted to make a machinima there but I couldn’t get an idea that didn’t seem clichéd. I felt the need to do something to record the sense of place, and not simply to make a travel documentary. I wanted to extend the ideas and portrayal of dystopia within Insilico to […]
This time I thought I’d talk a bit about the process of putting together a machinima, using the example of my latest, Symphony for a Lost King. The program I use is Lightworks. It’s available on a two week renewable free licence. The limitations compared to the full price version is just in the output […]
As I mentioned in my last post, I had a machinima selected for showing at Supernova 2016. Our Music of the Spheres premiered on the LED screens in the Theatre District of Denver last night. It’s a film poem filmed at The Far Away in Second Life, with thanks to Ziki Questi. Melancholia is a […]
