Better than real life?

ENTER: SECOND LIFE

Now, anyone can make a movie inside Second Life

Raunak Roy (aka Snowcrash Seymour)

In another example of Second Life attracting the big names in business, last year Time Warner owned HBO acquired the rights to a new, short-form documentary shot entirely within Second Life. Called My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Molotov Alta, the show is about Molotov Alta who supposedly disappeared from his California home and began uploading video broadcasts from Second Life. HBO plans to create seven episodes, each dedicated to unique things in SL such as Furries, Cyberpunks, Neo-Luddites, Sex Slaves and the King of the Hobos. Molotov Alta is incidentally the SL avatar of filmmaker Douglas Gayeton who was supposedly paid a six figure sum by HBO for the rights to the movies.
But this story is not about that. It is about the rationale behind HBO paying six figures for a short movie made in a virtual world. What business sense does HBO see in this? Say hello to a Machinima: a new era in motion picture production.
Machinima, a join-up of machine and cinema, is the art of film making using virtual 3D worlds. It is mostly used along with 3D video game technologies such as the engines behind popular games like Quake, Doom or FarCry. In simple terms, it is the coming together of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is realworld filmmaking techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence.
But, what is so great about machinima? Well, for one it saves time and thus money when compared to traditional animation, where it can take a highly sophisticated array of computers hours, if not days, to render each frame for animation movies like Shrek or Finding Nemo. For example, some frames of Pixar’s Monsters Inc. took over 90 hours to process using over 400 parallel processing computers. With 24 frames per second of footage, you can imagine how long this process can get. Subsequently, Monsters, Inc. took four years to produce. Machinima eliminates the time intensive processes of software rendering. In addition, live-produced machinima can be created similar to producing a live action film—the camera records performance, action and events as they take place.
What this means is that now anyone who is more or less savvy with SL can create animation movies using SL. Get together a gang of friends, come up with a script, decide on actors and log in. Using freely available software to record inside SL, all you need to do is to say your lines. Scores of such movies are available for public viewing on Youtube along with tutorials, tips and expert advice on how to go about it. Check out the SL Machinima wiki at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Machinima.
In February 2007, CBS (one of the largest TV studios in the US) created a machinima ad for its comedy show ‘Two and a Half Men’, that featured footage shot within SL. What is more astounding is that the ad was aired before the SuperBowl (the most watched sporting event of the year), thus bringing virtual worlds to even more American households. Though still in its infancy, machinima can very well revolutionize modern movie making. And with the ever increasing popularity of things virtual, the day is not far that the big names of animation start using this technology.