Today at RootsCamp in Machinima, specifically making politically aware Machinima in Second Life. One of the things that turned me on to the possibility of politically aware machinima was The French Democracy. I’ve often pointed others to this. Tonight, Hiro Quasimodo spoke and mentioned these movies: Jean-Charles de Menezes, An Unfair War
and An American Baby in Iraq

I’ve played a little bit SL based Machinima. My latest effort was filming a Tech Soup party in Second Life on July 18th. Before that, on July 7th, I had taken this clip in my first successful test of Second Life Machinima.

To produce this, I used Fraps. My first upload didn’t work, but when I converted it to MPEG-1 format, it worked nicely.

Since then, I joined the Machinima group on Second Life. I picked up the Machinima Starter Kit from Alt-Zoom, but never managed to get it to work. I read through the instructions and ran into several difficulties. First, I couldn’t find a place where I could rez a waypoint. It turns out that I can rez them at RootsCamp, so that has gotten around problem 1. The second is that the instructions said to make the description how long it takes to get to the waypoint, and not how long each waypoint lasts. In the example, they said to use |2.0|15.0|30.0| instead of |2.0|2.0|2.0|

Well, I couldn’t use a vertical bar in my descriptions, so that threw me off the track for a little while. This evening, moo money was there. She pointed us to this video talking about how use the alt zoom camera. In there I discovered what they were saying. Make several waypoints. The first way point should have a description of 2.0, the second should have a description of 15.0 and the third should have a description of 30.0

With that, and playing around a little bit, it finally started to make sense. Create a camera. That will be what you look from when you go into Mouse Mode and run the script. The camera will start wherever you put it initially, and then move over the first 2.0 seconds to the first way point. It will move to the second waypoint over the next 13 seconds and finally to the last way point over the final 15 seconds.

All that clicking on ‘film’ really does is put you in the seat of the camera. When you gesture action, all that really does is start moving the camera from one waypoint to the next. It is then up to you to use Fraps, or whatever else you want for screen capture, and to get your Machinima actors to act out the scene.

Now, it all makes sense, at least to me. So, I spent a bit of time trying to set up a camera and waypoints. I hit some weird glitches with Fraps not working, and then with the script not working. Finally, I got it to run, although my camera was cockeyed. Nonetheless, I have now shot my first Second Life Machinima using the Alt-Zoom toolkit that moo money mentioned.

It is late, so I will crash and try more of this some other time. Until then, check out this latest take on blip.tv

Click To Play