Second Life - the way mainstream media never presented it

[lucagrabacr]

Took quite some time to make, but here it is guys :)

[Rolig Loon]

The machinima that you have posted here for the past week or more are fantastic!  They are well-scripted and show a degree of artistic flair and technical ability that I don't often see in SL.  Thank you so much for sharing them.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Luca, I'd never have seen this if Rolig hadn't replied. Thank you both!

I agree with Rolig, it's lovely work. It doesn't hurt that you've picked one of my lifelong favorite tunes, Satie's Gymnopédie No.1, for the soundtrack.

I love the typography. I imagine it was done with something like After Effects. I started a machinima years ago, but never got very far. I constructed scripts to animate me, objects, and the camera. My typography was all done in-world, using texture animation.

I see you've not escaped the omnipresent camera stutter that appears during camera pans. I minimized that in my test videos by selecting "Slow Motion Animations" from the Develop->Avatar menu, and slowing all my texture/object/camera animations to match. The result was distinctly better than real SL.

Keep up the good work!

:-).

[lucagrabacr]

Thank you so much for the compliments Rolig, Madelaine! I'm glad you guys liked the video

And ah, I'll definitely try that technique to avoid the camera stutters next time! Thanks for the great advice :matte-motes-big-grin: I used Sony Vegas for the typography, btw.

[Madelaine McMasters]

I didn't fully explain my stutter reducing method. Because I wasn't able to get very high frame rates, I slowed down all the motion and then sped up the resulting video output by the inverse ratio. This returned all motion to normal speed, and increased the apparent frame rate. The stutter was reduced because there was less motion to lose when it happened.

Now I'm having similar problems with video from my RL drone, so I have to fly my paths slowly and speed up the results. As with my SL experiments, those results are distinctly better.

Regarding typography, it wasn't until a few years ago, when I stumbled across some video typography class projects on YouTube, that I really started to comprehend the sophistication people bring to it. Here's my favorite example, though probably not so much for the typography as for the combustible lemons...

[Pamela Galli]

Very nice!