Virtual Cinema

11 August 2008

Screenings - External

This is the full text of the feature article that appeared in FTI News Volume 12, No.2

Skribe is a freelance filmmaker working in virtual worlds. He began studying and working in traditional filmmaking but has eventually moved into working in virtual environments like Second Life.

For those who have never been to a virtual world he describes them by by drawing an analogy with a computer game where instead of having to shoot people you can shop, meet people, have sex, do almost anything you can do in real life. The term machinima means machine animation.

“ I fell in love with film at the age 8. My old man had a Super 8 camera and I started with that. My father sold his film equipment and bought a crappy Beta camera that came with a huge handbag type recorder that you had to lug around. There was no editing suite and you ended up having to edit on camera which was a pain in the arse.

So around 1984, we went on holiday and I ran around Broome trying to get a good shot of what they call the Tata lizard. There was about an hour of that footage that I made the family sit through. We also did take offs of Indiana Jones and fight stuff, that no one else will see.

I did film and television at uni at a point where they had run out of money and everything was quite theoretical. I helped out, crewing on other people’s projects. I’d done some 3D animation stuff on an Amiga. I did stuff with CTV.

I found that filmmaking here doesn’t pay the bills, at least for me. So I’m still filmmaking but doing it in the virtual world using machinima rather than live action. It’s the same skillset. It’s video and you need the same editing skills. When you shoot it is quite different, but need to not cross the line, that kind of basic stuff. You can put the camera wherever you need it to be.

I do most of my stuff in virtual worlds like Second Life. You can create all the sets yourself and then you bring in avatars which are basically other people with a virtual presence. You can dress them up how you like them. Then you basically talk to the actor, tell them what it requires and you shoot them from multiple angles. You’ve got your raw footage, you put it together and sometimes you synch it with audio.

The last thing we did had 15 actors. It was for an New York company that had just got a virtual world presence in Second Life and they built this huge island and they plan rto do training there. They wanted a five minute ad to show what they do there and how they do it. We wanted them to look like they were using the resources on the Island. We told them what things we wanted them to do and then left them to their own devices.

My favourite job has been the CSI New York ad. They did a couple of episodes set in Second Life. To tie into that they did a game within Second Life. Every fortnight you had a new murder to solve and we did the commercial for the game which was shown on their website and apparently on television, too. And that was very, very cool.

I applied to one of the companies that does a lot of stuff on Second Life. The Electric Cheep company. I put my CV in and they contacted me. They built all the sets and they saw my show reel and they hired me.

We had a script which involved promoting their game. We shot the scenes in the script which involved people examining clues and dead bodies etc. We had a pool of actors we could draw upon. I did a nice morph from Gary Sinise into one of the avatars. The game was invented for new users. We had ten avatars or ‘costumes’.

We also did a five minute documentary for American Express who were trying to encourage small business into virtual worlds. There were three documentaries and ours was the third. We went over the benefits of virtual real estate. Some people made millions of actual dollars selling virtual real estate. American Express supplied the script. We shot 130 gig of footage which was 100 hours or so. Then we edited it down.

The benefits are I can do it all myself, but I don’t have to do it all myself. I don’t have to deal with a hundred people to get this vision on the screen and so it’s cheaper. The only down side is that it may not look real. It looks like a piece of animation. Animation isn’t good for everything. That will probably change in the near future as graphics engines get better. Just look at games now, some of them are almost photo-realistic now.

I remember when you would say to someone what’s your email address and they’d give you a blank look. Now everyone has an email address and if you don’t, then you give them the blank look. It’s completely changed. Technology changes and people adapt to it. ”